Pints With Aquinas - 154: Atheism, God, and Heaven, W/ Fr. Gregory Pine

Episode Date: April 16, 2019

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G'day and welcome to Pints with Aquinas. My name is Matt Fradd. Today I am joined around the bar table by Father Gregory Pine to discuss Thomas Aquinas, atheism, the five ways, and who has the best religious habit. Okay, welcome back to Plants with Aquinas, the show where you and I pull up a barstool next to the angelic doctor

to discuss theology and philosophy. Hey, before I tell you about today's show, one cool thing I have for you patrons coming up. I'm always trying to make the Patreon experience really cool. So, I am about to release a 15-week audio course from a Dante scholar on the Divine Comedy written by Dante. So the Divine Comedy has often been called the Summa in Verse because of Dante's reflection of Aquinas' theological insights. This is a fascinating course. It's available online for like $130, but if you're a patron, you will get it for free. So I have permission from the author because he's a fan of the show and he is super jazzed that people are making

this show happen. So thank you. If you're making this happen by being a patron, those are going to start rolling out this week for 15 weeks. It's going to be great because if you've never read The Divine Comedy, you could listen to these lectures, read The Divine Comedy alongside it. I've read it. It's fantastic and no one should be allowed to die without having read it. So anyway, you could read it alongside of it and then we patrons can discuss each lecture in the comment section. So it'll be a really awesome learning experience. If you're not a patron and you've been wanting to be, feel free to join all of these awesome people

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So yeah, big thanks to everyone who's supporting it, and I'm really excited about this course. I mean, it is really insightful stuff, and it's just a, yeah, you're going to love it. Okay, so today's episode was taken from last week's The Matt Fradd Show. So I'm doing these long sit down discussions on YouTube, as you know, and Father Gregory Pine was my guest last week. And I don't usually, you know, I'm not going to be sharing these episodes on Pines with Aquinas anymore, except that the reason I'm sharing it today is it was very philosophical based around Thomas Aquinas anymore, except that the reason I'm sharing it today is it was very philosophical,

based around Thomas Aquinas and atheism and morality and will heaven get boring? There's a question we answer. The answer is no, but he has a beautiful way of describing it. We talk about what it means to be virtuous. It was a fascinating discussion. Father Gregory Pine is so interesting and intelligent, and so I just sort of sat back and drank it all in. And then at the end of the episode, we take questions from our patrons. So this is a fascinating episode. If you haven't heard it yet, buckle up. It's great. If you haven't subscribed to my YouTube channel, you want to do that because we're now releasing videos every Monday and Friday and you're missing out if you're not subscribing and clicking that bell thing. So you might want to go do that. And that's pretty much all I'm going to say. So I hope you're going to have a

lovely holy week. Next week, by the way, we have a great couple of weeks coming up. I want to tell you what's on the docket before we get into today's show. good evidence, good reason, based on the evidence, to think that Christ did in fact rise from the dead. And we go through all of the objections that you hear as to why Christ didn't rise from the dead, and Trent Horn just refutes them succinctly and brilliantly. The week after that, I'm going to be interviewing a priest called Father William Golden on supersessionism and whether or not we should be evangelizing the Jewish people. Yeah, we just have a lot coming up that's really exciting. So if you're not yet subscribed to Pints with Aquinas, you definitely want to do that. And thank you for listening. And that's enough from me. Here's the show. How are you doing? I'm doing well.

Nice to see you. It's a pleasure to see you too. What time did you have to get up at DC.C.? I got up at 3.30. That's ridiculous. Yeah, it's okay though. What time do you usually get up as a Dominican? It depends on the man. I ordinarily get up at 5.15. It's just a propitious hour.

Is that morning prayer? Morning prayer starts at 7 and then Mass is to follow. So yeah, but 5.15 you get time to kind of freshen up. Now, I'm sure a lot of people are interested in this. I am. What is it like walking through an airport dressed like you? What is it like walking like an airport dressed like me? You know, some people, you know, like would like to talk to you,

but plenty of people would not like to talk to you. Do you think some people have no idea what you are? I suspect as much. It's not like the Roman collar where it's unambiguous. Actually, I heard a man today, as I passed him, he said, well, he waved at me. And then as I passed, he goes, oh, that's ecclesiastical garb. Which made me think, like, what did he think I was initially, like a wizard or a Jedi? Both of which are good.

So he waved first. He waved first. And then realized. And then caught himself. Right? So if you think you're being greeted on account of your religious affiliation, that may not be the case. Not necessarily so. Yeah.

Was it awkward in the beginning and has it become less so um you know it i said hard to say i think in the like in the beginning i was more conscious of how people reacted to the fact of my wearing a habit um but like now it's just kind of it's kind of par for the course and it's one of those things where like in addition to being cool and evangelical because it starts conversations it's also you know it's penitential um so it's just kind of, it's kind of par for the course. And it's one of those things where like, in addition to being cool and evangelical, because it starts conversations, it's also, you know, it's penitential. So it's just, yeah, you're weird and that's okay. That's the kind of life you signed up for. All my eggs are in the, I'm weird for Jesus basket. So I hope it pans out. There must've been a sense of excitement to receive the habit. Oh yeah, undoubtedly.

And how long until you receive the habit when you go through formation? For Dominican friars, typically it's like two weeks. No. Our postulancy is like two weeks long. And then you get the habit? Oh, yeah. You better believe it. Are you exaggerating?

Two weeks? No, I would never exaggerate about that. No. So it's literally two weeks and then they put a habit on you. I entered on July 25th and I was given the habit on August 7th. It doesn't feel like you've earned it. No, certainly not. Because it's a grace.

Bingo. You set yourself up. Okay. No, certainly not. Because it's a grace. Bingo. You set yourself up. Okay, yeah, well done. Because sometimes you see these guys who join religious orders and they've got to wear the awkward slacks and big wooden cross. Yeah. Kind of earn your stripes before you get the cool thing. Right, yeah.

And then for women sometimes they wear kind of like blouse jumper skirt things. Yeah, that's the worst. That's what it is. But, yeah, God love them. But yeah, we just kind of show up and look silly and unshaved and unhygienic. And then they say, be better and shaved and hygienic. And we're like, okay.

And they're like, and here's the habits. Is it after the habit they want you to be more clean cut? Not necessarily. They just want us to be grown up. And a lot of guys coming from college and they're like, yeah, I shave like every fourth day. Yeah. Whatever.

Yeah, well, actually that's, and they say every day, hey uh that was like one of our novice masters thing was like yeah this is like there's there's not going to come a point in your life where like your boss is going to say you need to look this this way yeah there's no like business professional conversation coming down the line so it may as well be now not a lot of dominicans have big beards Do you reckon there's some people who started to think about the Dominicans, puberty kicked in and they went, nah, fries are the renewal. I think so in the Dominican legislation, it used to be the case that you had to be clean shaven. The only guys who would grow beards would be the men who were going on the missions for whatever reason. And then in the Franciscan tradition, yeah, it's always been big beards are bust. So I think the reasons they list in the Capuchin legislation is that it should be like austere and masculine and ugly.

I think it's like... Really? Yeah, I mean like part of it is... You have to look ugly. Yeah, I mean that's... Done. Uglify yourself. I think that's...

I could be misquoting. I haven't read their legislation. Don't speak on behalf of the Franciscans. But yeah, no, they own it for sure. I have some, you know, jealousy. Now, what do you think the best male religious habit is? Wow. Bold strategy.

The Dominican. Do you really? Yeah. I want to show you, in case you haven't seen it, the Franciscan friars. Let's look at them here. Friars of the Renewal. Because I actually discerned the friars for a while. Okay.

And a big part of it was their habit was just awesome. Yeah. I was just with some friars for a while. Okay. And a big part of it was their habit was just awesome. Yeah. I was just with some friars two weeks ago. The guys from New Mexico were in Nashville preaching a big old conference at the Grand Ole Opry. The joy that these blokes have is just beautiful. Yeah, they're the real deal. I went and lived with them. Well, I say lived with them.

I went and did a discernment thing with them in England. Okay. Actually, this looks like the same place I stayed in England. I might be wrong about that. Judging by the cabinetry? It's just cabinetry. I might be mistaken. But yeah, I love that. That's awesome. Yeah, it's simple. It's also in one piece, which for those who wear a Dominican habit, it's in like three or four pieces. What are you wearing now? Two pieces? So I'm wearing a tunic and I'm wearing a belt and a rosary and then I'm wearing a scapular and I'm wearing a capoose.

Holy moly. So in my father's house, there are many habit parts. I go to prepare a habit for him. Dominican habit. Now this is pretty cool. Do you know this guy? Uh no we haven't met. Do you think he's really a Dominican? I suspect as much. He looks like he's Spanish speaking and that looks like a pretty convent so I'd suspect that he's from like Spain. Oh really? Yeah, I know these blokes. Who, them? They're part of my province. That's where we do our novitiate. Yeah, some of these guys are in formation presently.

Now tell us about the black cape. Black cape, we call it a capa, because that's a fancy Latin word for, you guessed it, cape. But that's different from capuchin, which is capuche, right? Which has to do with the hood. Yeah, so it's all based off the same word.

So the word in Latin is caput, which means head. And so like a capuce is what covers your head. And the reason for which, you know, people have ways of explaining stuff. And usually it's fine. But usually the way that these things come about is just as a result of practicalities. So contemplative religious have capuces because they need to cover their heads because they're always praying in churches in Europe that are cold and drafty. So that's the whole thing.

Yeah. Yeah. So that's it. Cool. Headscarf. And in fact, this is where we get the word cappuccino. Bingo. Because the brown habit that the Italians wore.

Right. Yeah. The forerunner of said delicious drink. Yeah. Sometimes frothy, sometimes foamy. We're going to look at one more habit. You know, I think the sisters of life have a better habit than the Dominican sisters. There you go.

I just said it. Boom. Okay. I think, why isn't it? State your reasons. I will. And I'm about to do that. Because you like the color blue.

With a plum. Here we go. Okay, here's why the dominican sisters gosh they're all so beautiful i love sisters i've never met a sister i hadn't fallen in love with um because it's the dominican habit that they add she's australian i think is she yeah that's why she's the prettiest i just met her i just met her in toronto really yeah she's a cool lady oh she lives in toronto too i just met her recently sister katherine joy she's a cool lady. Oh, she lives in Toronto too. I just met her recently sister Catherine joy She's sister something Grayson. I forgot. Yeah, but no that is that's the argument it They've taken the Dominican habit and they've improved it with the dark blue. You just think blues better than white

Well, yeah, it adds some variation you think the very I mean we have a black belt I mean like check out this thing. This is like hugely variable. Well, let's look at the Dominican sisters Dom in you said this is the last one. I know you're a liar. Yeah, there's no at the Dominican sisters. Dom, in, ic, and... You said this was the last one. I know. You're a liar. Yeah, no one's going to watch this show. It's fine.

Now, yeah, they're all gorgeous. This is, I don't know. This is either the greatest habit or the second greatest habit. Okay. Yeah. You're waffling. Do you want me to convince you? I am waffling a little bit.

The Sisters of Life, I think, is better than this, but I haven't fully decided yet because this is glorious. Practical considerations. Make the argument. The reason that white was chosen was because it was the cheapest material. It's undyed wool. Is that right? Yeah. So it's like eminently practical.

It has no real like spiritual significance assigned to it except after the fact. Not purity, nothing like that. No, like you get that in like the subsequent tradition, but it's just like, yeah, this was cheap, which is like the same reason that Mother Teresa chose her habit. When she was about, she was like with the sisters of Loretto, and then she had this like profound experience that God was calling her to do something new. And right before she got on some, whatever, it was like a train or a plane or a blah, blah, blah,

she had to like get a habit for her congregation. And she just went in the marketplace and she found like two saris that she could sew together that were the cheapest thing she could find. Is that right? Thus it was born. Yeah. So oftentimes it's a matter of just what's ready at hand. Well, that's why I heard that about the, that's the argument for why the Franciscan habit was originally gray. Yeah. Not brown because I, but wouldn't that be dyed if it were gray?

I don't know how things work, but I imagine like dirty lambs, sheep, sheep lambs, they probably come out gray. I guess. So when my, my wife actually discerned with the sisters of life. Oh, nice. Okay. And so whenever I see them, it's like meeting the boyfriend that I beat. Not really. That's kind of weird, but I support you.

Thank you. How are you doing? I'm doing well, yeah. Good. How long have you been a priest for? I've been a priest for nearly three years. Yeah, eons. Ages and ages. And why did you want to be a priest? How did you join the ages. And why did you want to be a priest? How did you join the Dominicans? Why did I want to become a priest? So I wanted to become a priest

because I read about St. Thomas Aquinas. This is going to sound nerdy. No, I hope it does. Yeah, good. Okay, so I read about St. Thomas Aquinas and I found, like, I wanted to love the Lord the way that he loved the Lord. How was that? So, with wisdom, with devotion, with, like, magnanimity. So, like, I guess in, like, high school, I never really had the desire to become a priest in a really concrete way. But I had a desire to be, like, perfect, you know? I wanted to be like the saints I had read about. I had a desire to be charitable. I wanted to be generous, and I realized that I wasn't, because any time my mother asked me to do anything, I wouldn't.

And I wanted to be a man of deep prayer. I wanted to be wholly given to the Lord. I wanted to do great things that were great, that were worthy of a man's heart, because God calls us to such heights. And I just didn't see how those fit together. I had some vague sense that they were interrelated, but I didn't know how. And then my freshman year of college, I heard a lecture given by a professor from St. Louis University, Eleanor Stump, who's great. And she spoke on Aquinas on

the nature of love. And it just devastated me because she was describing, I mean, just describing the aspirations of the human heart in a way that I found especially beautiful and compelling. Because I'd had like some theology beforehand, but it was kind of eclectic. You know, I went to public school. I went to CCD, blah, blah, blah. So I knew that like this holy person said that and this smart person said that and that like Jesus said this. And it was like Catholicism. But all of a sudden, she's describing love in this very clear, articulate, eloquent way.

love in this very clear, articulate, eloquent way. And I found that it corresponded with what I had experienced, but it gave expression to what I had experienced far better than I could ever have. And I was like, dude, I need to drink from this font, namely St. Thomas Aquinas. So I started reading about him. And then I read this book called The Quiet Light, which truth be told, is like historical fiction and super charming and delightful. And then at the end of it, I was just like, yeah, I want to love the Lord like St. Thomas loved the Lord. So I hadn't met a Dominican friar apart from him. And I was just like, yeah, party on. So thankfully the Dominicans still existed. Yeah. Cool. And then you went and visited them in DC or? Yeah. Yep. So I had a friend with whom I was at school and he knew, you know, one of the guys

from back home had joined the Dominicans. He's like, oh yeah, I'm going to his diacon ordination. You should come with me. And I did. And then I just kept coming back. And then. I imagine like religious orders obviously living throughout the centuries, there must be ebbs and flows to their awesomeness. Like I'm sure they always go through interior reformations. And it feels to me like it's going through a beautiful reformation. All the Dominicans that I meet seem super solid, super committed, super in love with the Lord. Yeah. Would you say that's true? I mean, it's just like, we have a sense that God is giving us gifts and graces and men to form for a reason. We have a pretty profound sense of the responsibility that that entails,

because yeah, they just keep coming. And the Lord keeps using Dominicans as his shock troops. But if you ever, I mean, the trajectory of history is not one of constant increase. Like you say, it's like up and down and up and down. And lest you think that, you know, like, or lest I think that it's the Dominicans are awesome always and everywhere. You just have to read in history and see our many faults. And yeah, that kind of humbles you and keeps you close to the Lord. Now, is it true that the Dominicans were referred to as sheepdogs, protecting the sheep? So certainly dogs.

So like in Latin, Dominicanes, if you break it out, it's Domini of the Lord and Canes, dogs. Oh, I didn't realize that. And that's correlated with a vision that St. Dominic's mother had when he was in utero, in the womb, when he was cooking. She saw in her womb, not a child in this vision, she saw a dog with a torch in its mouth that would run around the world and set it ablaze. Yeah. And at first it's like, wow, strange vision. But then as it played out, he founded the Dominicans,

the dogs of the Lord, they're preachers, they illumine or otherwise enlighten the world by holy preaching, please God. So it's kind of played out that way. And you often see a St. Dominic picture with a little dog and a torch in his mouth. I had always heard that, and I've got this beautiful painting at home. I want to see if I can find it here.

Dominican sheepdog Thomas. Let's see if we can find something. Well, no, that's definitely not it at all. Thomas Aquinas Heretics. There's some paintings of him. Here, this one. See that? Oh, wow, yeah. I heard that the dominicans referred to as sheepdogs of the lord who were defending the sheep from the wolves who were proclaiming heresy right no i could we should go with that even yes that's not true that's a great

yes i like that isn't that awesome look at that that's you right there just laying in that dude's neck it looks like two ferrets at a pet store. Yeah. That's my favorite part about pet stores is when ferrets get locked in that death coil, when they're just like gnawing on each other's necks. Oh, I haven't seen that. Oh, it's awesome. I hate ferrets.

Ferrets are kind of dirty, but they're great to watch. Yeah. Yeah. Now, obviously, one of the things that attracted you to the Dominicans was Thomas Aquinas and his emphasis on the harmony of faith and reason. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about that. Are faith and reason actually compatible? Did you ever go through a period as a teenager or a young adult where you weren't so sure that they were compatible? I didn't go through a period like that. I never had like a

crisis of scientific faith because my parents were like, hey, this is Catholicism. And I was like, all right, perfect. And then I was like, all right, I guess this is Catholicism. And then from there I became a priest. So, but like subsequently, because it is something that's, you know, especially prized or treasured in the Dominican tradition, I have come across a lot of arguments and a lot of lectures and a lot of, you know, things to read on the subject. And I've become more and more convinced of it, kind of downstream of my formation. So it never really struck me as a problem because I went to Steubenville. So like 99.9% of students there

are Catholic and all of them are like basically pumped about praising the Lord. So I wasn't like, you know, yikes, caught in the middle. I just, yeah, it was always something that I just kind of imbibed. What do you think most people mean when they say that faith can't be reconciled with reason? They think that faith contradicts science. I mean, this is probably something that most people, many people think. Yeah. So I think it typically entails a caricature of faith and it entails a caricature of reason or science. So the caricature of faith is usually, it's associated with like fundamentalism. So oftentimes, you know, like you'll see folks who read the Bible, not literally, but literalistically. So they'll read

certain things. Make that distinction for those at home. With pleasure. So the Bible has a literal sense, which is to say that the words were intended by the author to mean something. When you read it literalistically, you take the meaning of those words and you make it as close to historical or kind of most base as imagined. So like, for instance, Genesis 1 through 11. Like you can read Scott Hahn and he talks about the language of Genesis 1 through 11 as kind of mythic. That's not to say myth in the sense of false, but myth in the sense of more true, like the way that Tolkien uses the word myth, right? So it's not to be read as strict history. And you have evidence in the fathers of the church, like in St. Augustine, of reading the creation story allegorically. Like St. Augustine says, all right, cheers, day and night, right?

So the first three days are measured by day and night, but the sun isn't created until the fourth day. Like what's the skinny? So he says, it's evident from this that we need to read this analogically. So this isn't like subsequent, you know, 24 hour days of creation. It's one act of creation, a kind of, you know, creation, separation and adornment, that um it can describe a process of years it can describe a process you know it's like it's supposed to communicate theological truth that god is transcendent that god is good that creation is good that evil is introduced by man right so like all of these things that would set genesis one and two and

three apart from like other near like ancient near Eastern myths where those things aren't the case. Like the gods are in the thick of it. And the way that creation comes about is through violence. And man is like just kind of caught in the middle of this, you know, cosmic strife. And it's all like very grim and terrible. So fundamentalism comes along in like the 19th century. And it's largely an American phenomenon and says like, this is to be read as strict, you know, 24 hour days. And so you have like young earth creationists, et cetera. And I'm not like lampooning anyone, but it's just to say that that's not a traditional Christian way of reading it. Right?

So this is often the notion of like reason that's, or excuse me, of faith that's propped up. It's like Christians turn off their brain and just accept what is quote unquote revealed to them. But truth be told, it's like an ongoing psychological delusion perpetrated by authority. It's like, yikes. And then the notion of science is also modern.

So science has always been, you know, practiced wherever there are men and women. But in the 16th and 17th century, there was a kind of reaction to medieval and even ancient modes of scientific inquiry. Whereas those would have been like geared towards wisdom and a certain kind of demonstration. Now science like kind of empties a lot of those considerations of their content. And what you're really concerned with is stuff and force. You've got matter and you've got efficient causes. And it's about mechanism. Whereas formerly you would take into account the forms of things in the kind of classic platonic sense.

Like what is this and what makes it to be what it is? And then the ends of things, like, to what are they progressing? For what are they? Like, why have a tree? Is it to produce fruit? Is it to be beautiful? Is it to provide me shade? You would ask, like, kind of wisdom-oriented questions

rather than, like, what is the chemical composition thereof? So now science has been kind of, you know, that's whatever, it's not to say that it's bad. It's just to say that it now only really takes into account, like, matter and force. And so it seems to be the case that you can explain everything in this world with matter and force. So you don't need any of those other occult causes. You don't need the God of the gaps. He's been forced off the scene. And so you have a false notion of faith, and you have a false notion of reason, and then you perceive a conflict between them.

When truth be told, I guess this isn't how you would convey conflict, but more like this, a synthesis conflict. So whereas if you can reclaim a more properly Christian sense of faith and a more properly humane sense of science, you can show that there isn't, yeah, there isn't conflict. Now, if there isn't a God, wouldn't it follow that we wouldn't? What are the two causes we've done away with in modern science? I guess it would be the formal and the final, and all we're left with is the material and the efficient. So the efficient cause is what brought it about. The material is what it's...

The stuff that makes it up. Yeah. Why is it inappropriate to just explain the world through those two things? It sounds like you're assuming that maybe it was a legitimate thing to explain things through the formal and final cause, but maybe you're wrong. Well, I think people are always taking into account final cause, but they don't acknowledge it. So what they do is they smuggle it in as a kind of preconception or a kind of ideological first principle. but by not

acknowledging it, they're actually being deceptive and they're being more intransigent because it's not on the table. So like, for instance, if you read a biology textbook, you can't get very far without reading the words in order to, right? So you're always taking account of finality, always taking account of teleology. But if you don't really bring it to the table as something worthy of discussion, then all of that stuff is going to remain only partially developed and, you know, in part false because it hasn't actually been introduced into your inquiry. And so too have like formal causes. When you, like you talk about like speciation, for instance, what makes a thing to be what it is? And then you could like talk about evolution as, a kind of progress of blind chance. That's, in a certain sense, it's to

fail to ask the questions that need be asked. And when you don't end up asking them, then you frustrate your study. So, like, is evolution proceeding towards something, right? Is it proceeding towards man? You know, there are a lot of these, like, Stephen Barr will talk about anthropic principles. There are certain things on evidence in the universe that seem to suggest that, like, it's perfectly tailored towards the supporting of organic life and specifically, like, the supporting of human life, which isn't to say anything of, like, intelligent design or blah, blah. So I'm not bringing that into account. But there seems to be a kind of tendency in nature towards the human person and that the human person is a kind of microcosm.

It takes into account all that's lower and brings it to perfection. That's not to say that, like, animals are just for eating. I mean, they are delicious. You know, Chick-fil-A. Oh, gosh. But it is to say that, like, we should be asking questions of finality because it actually orients our study. Like, you can do a ton of good things with force and with stuff.

Yeah. Right? But force and stuff doesn't ever answer the question why or to what end. And then force and stuff can kind of just become untethered. And as a result of which, your inquiry is just like a matter of what can be done, you know? It seems like we've done away with teleology in the realm of morality as well. as well. So when the Catholic argues that contraception is intrinsically evil because it frustrates one of the two ends of the sexual act, if you've done away with the teleology of the sexual act, that doesn't matter. It seems like we've done away with teleology and we're

all about autonomy. So people still use moral language, but when they say that's immoral, they mean you're hindering somebody's autonomy. And that's sort of it. So if two people wish to degrade each other, that's okay because they use their autonomy to make that decision. Yeah. No, like a lot of it is downstream. Well, you can talk about modern philosophers. It's kind of uninteresting in certain regards. But like this whole idea of the fact value distinction, just because something is what it is doesn't mean that you can say what it ought to do, therefore. Whereas the kind of classical pagan and Christian tradition is that what a thing is actually sets the terms for what it ought to do. Without being overbearing and paternalistic, it's just to say that your nature is a principle of unfolding.

So we are, as human beings, not made at the end. We're made on the way. And we actually have a kind of blueprint for our progress or for our unfolding that's written in to our very nature itself. So like, for instance, I don't know, like I have teeth and they have enamel on them. And I should probably take care of them because they keep my teeth from rotting out of my face. So which means that I should treat them in a certain way with like, I don't know, baking soda, arm and hammer, blah, blah, blah. And I shouldn't like brush with Drano, right? Because if I were to brush with Drano, I'd like die and I'd have like a half mouth like that one villain in one of those James Bond movies that wasn't that good. Skyfall. Yeah, it was like Javier Bardem and he like removed his

jaws like, whoa. So yeah, like because I am what I am, I ought to do certain things. And people can acknowledge that with respect to like your body, but we are embodied souls or we are in soul bodies. So there's another principle here. And it doesn't have to be like a spiritualist claim that there's like a ghost in you. And how can you confirm or deny the fact that there is a ghost in you? It's just like, what is a soul in the classic sense? A soul is just what makes a living thing to be alive, right? So it's just, it animates us. The Latin word for soul is anima, right? So because we are a living thing, there are further considerations to be taken into account. So if there was you and then 10 minutes later a dead you, what just changed was the thing we call the soul? Exactly. And because I am living

and not moldering in the grave, there are further considerations. So like, how do I, you know, kind of like, like cultivate happiness, just to speak about it in the most kind of basic sense. How can I be free? How can I be happy? How can I be fulfilled? How can I be, how can I, you know, suck the marrow out of life? And you find that like, there are certain things that actually promote your happiness and certain things that actually promote your happiness and certain things that derogate from it, that actually undermine it. And people will just deny this, deny very patent things, because it seems like it impinges on your autonomy or it impinges on your freedom. When truth be told, freedom comes to fullest expression when you're

able to choose what's best, what's good, which is awesome. We were talking about this earlier in the breakfast room, that's what we'll call it, about Ireland, and like actively voting for the killing of the unborn. Yeah. Like clearly choosing something that's detrimental to those being killed and to our society. Yeah. No, it's just like, I mean, it's staggering and sorrowful,

and I was just there, and just to see, like, the degree of anger and sadness that has gripped that nation culturally is just whoosh. It's so dispiriting. But like in a certain sense, while it's surprising because it was such a Catholic culture, it's also not surprising because the natural law can be blotted out of the heart of man, you know. And with a ton of money, you know, joining the European Union and with like a ton of political upheaval, it just apparently things that we thought were fixed and stable and permanent weren't. You know, they were transient. How can natural law be blotted out of the heart of man?

What does that mean? So like St. Thomas. What is natural law first? Great. So natural law is our participation, our share in the eternal law. So St. Thomas draws this beautiful picture where he says, like, God is a kind of artisan. And in creation, he speaks his wisdom or sings his wisdom into all things. And that those things have a kind of impress or a kind of, they receive that eternal law according to their own nature. So because we are rational animals, we receive the eternal law principally

through our intellects and will. So like at those highest powers where we kind of meet God in the image of God. And so we have a sense as to what is good and a sense as to what is evil. So the most kind of like basic statement of the natural law is to do good and avoid evil. Or we could say like do what accords with your nature

and flee what does not, right? But we can actually tease out the natural law. That is to say that we can not make, like, deductions from it, but prudentially, when we're ordering our lives, the lives of our family, the lives of the state, the lives of the church, whatever, that we can tease out the natural law into concrete expressions. So, like, for instance, thou shalt not kill. That's something that you go cross-culturally, and a lot of people have discovered that. They've come to that recognition. And the ones that haven't, you know, are on the way, please God. Or like thou shalt not steal. You can see where this is going. examples of the natural law. But that it gets into all the nitty gritty of your life. So you can like make human laws about which side of the road you should drive on, right? Whether it be right or left, I know not which is better. Being just in Ireland, I was like kind of like struck by the fact that rather than having like 10 inches of car next to me. Well, that's right. I had like four and a half feet of car next to me. And you just have this like wild appendage

that keeps hitting. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And people don't even stop when the windows hit each other. You just keep going. Yeah, it's just, yeah, just dust it off. So, yeah, so we can kind of like tease out the natural law into all of the concrete particulars of our lives. But, so like St. Thomas repeats, Aristotle says, as the man is, so he sees. So what we love actually shapes how we can like receive the natural law and how we apply the natural law in the world. So if we really, really like chocolate chip cookies, for instance, okay, just like the sight of a chocolate, like a Chick-fil-A chocolate chip cookie. Like I get there, they hand it to me. It's got like the little window pane, you know, and it's already, it's fogged because it's fresh baked. That's right. There's a bit of chocolate

sticking to the window. Yeah, like a little bit of chocolate smear. Yep. Right? So I could see that, right? And it could be well in hand. And then I could see a kid in the play place who's teetering on the edge of an eight-foot height, and he's wearing a sign that says, I have brittle bones and a rare genetic condition

that means if I fall from eight feet heights, I die instantaneously. And I know that if I reach for this chocolate chip cookie, that I'm going to let this kid die. But I could just as well go over there but because like I have corrupt morals because I've become the kind of person that prefers chocolate chip cookies to like kid saving you know like now I see this reality in a certain way so the natural law has been blotted out of my heart and I'm like complicit in his death because I just wanted that delicious cookie now when you say it's blotted out do you mean that in this scenario,

you recognize that saving the child is better, but you choose the cookie anyway? Or do you mean that you think the cookie is legitimately better? And this is what Aristotle means by the vicious man. So there's a difference between being vicious where, like, I actually prefer the cookie. Like, who gives a rip about that kid? That's really kind of the argument about abortion and infanticide. Yeah, so, like, you can get people to acknowledge to acknowledge that like abortion is taking an innocent human life. Right, but they don't care.

But they prefer something else. Yeah. And that's just terrifying. It's terrifying. And like the Caring Foundation did some studies in the 90s about like a lot of the language that was being used in pro-life kind of like commercials and promotion, etc. And what they found was like most women who make the choice to have an abortion, they recognize that they're killing their child, but they, they think it's basically a choice of killing their child, killing their future,

or just like killing themselves effectively. Cause like to, to have the child adopted means that child can always come back and ruin their lives. Or like they have to acknowledge the fact that they weren't able to provide for him or her as a good parent. And then it's like the death of their own self-identity. Or it's the death of their job prospects. Or it's the death of a normal future, an education, or whatever. Going to NYU and studying sociology and being $260,000 of debt at the end of four years and not knowing what you're going to do. Except knowing something about Emile Durkheim. But they prefer that.

They want that. Even though they acknowledge that there's this other thing, and it happens to be a human life. And people will find it interesting, too, that Aquinas talks about that no one chooses evil for its own sake. Whenever we choose something, even if it's evil, we choose it as a perceived good. And that's what's happening when the boyfriend and girlfriend of the husband and wife choose abortion, right? Yeah. Yeah, which is like, I mean, yeah, super dispiriting. But ultimately, I think the message the message, and you can feel this too when you go to like the pro-life march and you hear people saying, we love babies. Yes, we do. We love babies.

How about you? It's like, fine. I'm not taking like issue with them. But I think that in a certain sense, the mother and father have a kind of perverted love for their child. But if they love something else more, what they need to hear is that we love mother and child both. And we're willing to do whatever lies within our power to provide for a happy life. Like this child will not kill you. It will not kill your future.

It will not kill your identity. It will not kill your prospects of enjoying life. Is that how we help unblot the natural law? I think so. When someone prefers debt-free or getting to go to school or having promiscuous sex without consequences more than letting their child live, how do you reverse that? Because we're not computers. You don't just insert a syllogism and the person responds with the correct answer, right? No, I'm of the mind that, like, yeah, argument only gets you so far, which coming from a Dominican is a kind of humble admission, right? Yeah. No, I'm of the mind that like, yeah, argument only gets you so far, which coming from a Dominican is a kind of humble admission, right? Because if there's one thing on

which we pride ourselves, it's that an argument can kind of save the day. One of the, Father Thomas Joseph White, who runs the Thomistic Institute in Rome, he gave a talk on whether beauty can save the world. Yeah. And he said, yes, the beauty of a true argument. Very good. So like, yeah, I mean, we're nerds for sure. Yeah. But it's been my kind of experience that what is more likely or what is more effective at changing hearts and winning souls, not in like a conquest sense, but in a genuine sense of love, is friendship. You know? It's like genuine friendship.

Because think of like parallel example. You suffer a loss in your family. It's devastating. A lot of people share with you thoughts and prayers initially. Maybe some people come over. People condole with you. They grieve with you. They come to the wake.

They come to the funeral. Your friends are the people who keep coming, like the people who keep showing up, baking you like weird tater tot hot dishes or like strange, you know, like green bean casseroles, like for weeks on end. Because friendship is principally expressed through like showing up. because it's a communion in the good, right? And you need to like love the good for someone when they feel incapacitated to do so. And with like recovering people's hearts from having lost like their moorings in the natural law, it means that. It means accompanying them in the classic sense, you know, like loving them unto the good. Because without friends,

like who could live? And a lot of the sadness, like loving them unto the good. Because without friends, like who could live? And a lot of the sadness, like a lot of the anger is an expression of loneliness, I think. And that's not to like psychoanalyze these people. Everyone's got their own stuff. But a lot of it's loneliness. A lot of it's anxiety. A lot of it's just like crippling sadness, which is expressed in a very profound isolation and alienation. But if somebody can break through that and extend a hand and actually love a person unto the end, that speaks far greater volumes than any argument, though I would love to supply them.

I think Aquinas, when he talks about those four ways in which we can relieve sorrow, one of which is friendship, he talks about how sadness is like a weight that holds us down and that when I can express what I'm going through to you, and I see you like sorrowing in my sorrow, it shares that weight. It's so true. There's a sense in which like friends increase the capaciousness of your own soul. In the divine comedy, in the purgatorio, there's this one point at which a soul is loosed from a lower circle and it comes up to meet souls at a higher circle. And these souls, those on the higher circle observe, behold, one comes who will augment our love. Literally one comes who will grow our love. Because like with friends, you have a greater capacity to actually like enjoy the good. So C.S. Lewis in The Four Loves, he has this awesome

example about if you have three friends and say, God forbid, one of them dies. He says, you'd think that those two remaining friends would have more of each other to go around, but they don't. They have less because that third person was able to coax good things out of those other two that is only present when he's there. So it's like friends really tease the good out. Friends call us to the heights of our powers, our loves, our pursuits, our aspirations. There seems to be an attack on friendship, maybe not an intentional attack from anyone in particular. Maybe it's a sort of conspiracy from a number of different angles like technology and things. But do you see that? Do you see a diminishment in friendship and our ability to grow friendships? Yeah, I'm worried about our capacity,

younger generation's capacity to actually form friendships because a lot of, I don't know anything about social media, so I shouldn't spout off an old priest with an axe to grab. Everything bad you could say about social media has to be true. Yeah, that's true. Okay, so my fear is that social media superficializes connections. Absolutely. And as a result of which, leaves us um like sated like sense wise but it leaves us unsated spiritually so like it like you can watch you can see like a billion

pictures right and those are often like very delightful and they cause you all kinds of like dopamine and serotonin release i don't know like i don't know how the brain works either but whatever chemicals i guess yeah yeah um but then you actually haven't attended to like real goods. You actually haven't been shoulder to shoulder in pursuit of what's real. You've just been kind of like looking and ogling each other and being slightly jealous and sometimes like impatient with or otherwise frustrated with your friends. Voyeuristic in a sense. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of got that weird dimension to it. But as a result of which, my fear is that people don't actually know how to connect.

which my fear is that people don't actually know how to connect. They don't actually know how to find common goods that cause them both to transcend the limitations of their own personalities and bring them into pursuits which are arduous, but character fulfilling. Because if we're never tested, you never grow. I think about that often when I'm hiking and I'm hiking, hiking, hiking, and at a certain point, your haunches kind of get tired. You're like 15, 16 miles and you're like, wow, I want to die and drink whiskey. But those last few miles, provided they don't get to death march slog, those are often the most rich because you get the crispest vistas. You get all of these awesome things that people don't actually see because they're too far into the impenetrable wilderness. But you wouldn't have known unless you pushed on. You wouldn't actually have known

what your human spirit was capable of until there was a good before you that elicited it, that called it forth. And friendship is meant to do that. Like friendship is meant to like call forth what is most noble in man. But we never get to the hard stuff because we're just like completely satisfied with the dumb and passing. Now that's interesting. There's an analogy there I think with food. You notice that when you eat candy, you can never have enough. It doesn't actually satiate you. Kind of titillates, tantalizes, but it doesn't satiate. Whereas you

can't have like three steaks. You're like totally satisfied over one. So kind of what you're saying is social media is just like the candy. Like it gives us a rush, but it's not actually satisfying that human desire we have for intimacy. Yeah. Yeah, I think too, like, well, this is from maybe like his 40 gospel homilies. Gregory the Great says that there's this kind of paradoxical difference between material goods and spiritual goods. He says like with material goods, initially there's like a pretty good payoff, you know, so like they're easy, they're accessible, they're delightful, they're shiny, they're tasty, they're sexy, whatever. But he says they tend to depreciate. So our experience of them tends to be less and less rich. And people come up with sweet vocab words to describe this. Cloying is one of my favorite. Cloying? Cloying. Yeah, like a sweet thing that eventually kind of taxes you. How do

you spell that? C-L-O-Y-I-N-G. Cloying. I've never heard of that. I can use it in a sentence. I can give you the provenance. No, I won the provenance. Spelling bee time, baby. But then with spiritual goods, we find them initially forbidding. So if you were to say to somebody who hadn't prayed ever, do a holy hour. They'd be like, sweet Christmas.

I'm going to die. They'd be in there for one minute. They'd say all the prayers that they had memorized, and then they'd get out their iPhone instantaneously and like, let's burn this time. Because to do nothing or to be contemplative is most arduous. It is. But what he says is you find that these have richer and richer payoffs.

Yeah. Not to think about the contemplative life as a kind of like need satisfaction mechanism. Right. But like it becomes more and more rich. It becomes more and more fulfilling because these are the actual things in which our life consists. And this is why I meet Dominican sisters and Franciscan priests and Dominican priests who legitimately radiate a joy that I don't see in the world. And presumably many of these people that I'm seeing in the world aren't denying their appetite, aren't denying their sexual appetite.

Meanwhile, you have obedience, chastity, and poverty, and I see a joy in you that I don't see in the world, which is really counterintuitive to many people. Yeah. There's a sense too, like this freedom is another way to describe that movement, like a closer and closer adherence to the really good, to the good good. And oftentimes people think about freedom as a kind of like license or the capacity to choose between freedom from restraint. Exactly. Yeah. The capacity to choose among a variety of different options. So I could choose to be a Catholic priest. I could choose to be a father of a family. I could choose to be a business executive,

an actuary, a mathematician, to deal coke, to whatever, you can just go down the line. I probably shouldn't give further examples lest they scandalize. But I have all of these options. But does it actually represent freedom if I am poised kind of equally amongst all of them? No, because we say that those people are most free, who are able, who are capacitated, who are enabled to do what's best and most

beautiful. So like, LeBron James. LeBron James is one of my favorite examples of just like athletic prowess. Guy's incredible. You think about LeBron James growing up in Akron, Ohio. He had all kinds of options, right? He could have gone to school. He could have not gone to school. He could have done drugs. He could have not done drugs. He could have developed

his athletic abilities. He could have not, right? So like at the age of nine, he's got all kinds of options. But then at a certain point, he realized like, I'm really good at football and I'm really good at basketball.

Maybe I should like devote myself to these things, whatever, you know, like practice a little bit more or just like kind of go to sleep 30 minutes earlier. And now all of a sudden, he's got know, like practice a little bit more or just like kind of go to sleep 30 minutes earlier. And now all of a sudden he's got fewer options. Like he's not even tempted by the thought of drugs or tempted by the thought of not going to school because you got to go to school to keep eligibility.

You got to pass a drug test in order to like retain eligibility. So like all of a sudden his vision is narrowing. Right. So he's only really free to do those things which perfect his craft. But once he has perfected his craft, he is most free to do it excellently. And you look at LeBron James in like the NBA finals, whatever, like the Miami years or 2016 when Cleveland, I mean, 2015, he almost won the NBA championship like alone. It was incredible because like Kevin Love went down, Kyrie Irving went down, and his like support players were like a handful of

jelly beans, like a dirty sock, and like, I I don't even know, a Mon Shumpert. But he almost won the NBA championship because he is supremely free. It's awesome because freedom is to come to the greatest expression of the powers that define you. So to actually love and adhere to the good, to actually cling to the good with all your might is what makes us human. And having all of these options is, I mean, it's whatever. It's like, I suppose it's good that I can choose between a spicy chicken deluxe and just like a Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich, but like, I know what's best and it doesn't involve two pickles. Okay. So get them off my bottom bun. Sweet Lord. Yeah. You know?

No, this is the distinction that's been made before, but Fulton Sheen made it. Freedom from and freedom for. And when we hear freedom today, we often just think of freedom from. I'm free. But as he says, you don't ever say to a taxi driver, are you free? And he says, yes. And you say, hooray for freedom. You're free for something. And I think this is what prevents many people from making a decision to propose to that girl or to join that religious order.

We want to be free. We want to keep all of our options open. or to join that religious order. We want to be free. We want to keep all of our options open. But as you say, if we don't end up making a decision, well, what? We're not really free for anything. We're just useless.

Useless might be too strong a word, but what do you think? Yeah, we're just kind of paralyzed by options rather than empowered by the choice of one. Yeah. What do you say to people who are discerning religious life? Here's the vocation call right now. And yeah, I mean, there is some of that. I'm so glad. I think I'm too impulsive to remain discerning forever. That's why I was like, my wife's pretty. She likes me and no one has ever liked me. I need to get on this before she changes her mind. And so I proposed and got married at the age of 22,

I think, 23. But there's a lot of people out there who really are terrified of making a decision. What do you say to that? I would say, first, consult your loves. Because the God who made you is the God who saves you. And he made you a certain way with an eye towards your redemption, your vocation, your destiny. So as he made you, so he saves you. Creation is a kind of indication of redemption. So he's made you a certain way and he's made you with certain desires, with certain loves. And now mind you, some of those are kind of tinged, well, they're all tinged by sin. So we're, you know, we can be selfish, we can be overly

self-involved, we can be kind of distracted or otherwise alienated, blah, blah, blah. But, you know, if you're living like a kind of ordinary sacramental life, you're making use of the sacrament of confession often enough, you know, like maybe like once a month, you're receiving Holy Communion in a worthy state. You're praying every day, say for at least like 20 minutes. You've got good friends, okay? You have like a modicum of discipline in your life, like a little bit of mortification. Maybe you like don't eat between meals or maybe you give up caffeinated beverages, whatever. I don't know. it doesn't matter. You're doing something to introduce a kind of rigor and vigor to your Christian observance, right, as a response to

God's gift. Then you can actually presume and believe that God is working to rectify your appetites. He's purifying your desires. He's healing them. He's actually growing them in such a way that they are going to come to fuller and fuller expression. So if these things are in place and you're pursuing your passions, what it is that you love, whether it be like stamp collecting or like entomology, you're just like real into bugs, or whatever, you know, like you're actually going to be made more and more known to yourself because Christ in the revelation of the Father makes known man to man himself. And so once you have a sense of what it is that you love, you'll be spontaneously inclined to what you're made for. So I think it's a bad way to approach vocation like, there aren't enough religious.

I am a human body. I will be religious. Or like, this is an objectively higher state, which it is. Therefore, I want to be objectively higher holiness. Therefore, I will become religious. Those aren't good considerations because God has called you personally, individually, and he's giving you grace for whatever vocation that he has ordained for you historically, conditionally, personally, now. So it's by responding to those graces rather than the ones we wish he had given or the ones he ought to give in the future in our estimation that we find what it is that we're made for. And if you find that you have a desire for devotion, to be, like, wholly given in a kind of, you know, like, religious way, like a cultic way.

You know, you, like, want to make of your life a whole burnt offering. And if you want to do great things worthy of great honors, the way that, like, St. Therese said, like, I want to do small things with great love. There was still a kind of grandeur, even in her little way. And if you want, like, your relationship, if you would describe your relationship with Jesus in spousal terms, you know, and you find that you're kind of inclined in that way, that's good too. Because like, I mean, women have an easy time describing themselves as brides of Christ. But like, truth be told, like male religious, while this sounds kind of strange. No, it's not. Read John of the Cross, yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it's a similar dimension because like priests, I mean, people talk about priests being married to the church, but like, that's kind of weird and doesn't really work. You're like effectively you're married to the Lord and you should experience that in a kind of spousal, exclusive, intimate way. So if those like desires are kind of coming together as you pursue your passions, I think that it's worth checking out. Father Bob Bedard, who was the founder of the Companions of the Cross up in Canada, said, Since discernment has become fashionable, no one's made a decision since. And I think there's some truth to that too.

And so, yeah, I think it's important that you just step out and make a decision. Yeah. Yeah, and it can be hard too because sometimes you feel like you're getting out in front of the Lord. You know, because a lot of vocational discernment is patience, right? Because what is vocation about?

It's about being conformed to Christ. Who is Christ? He's the one who suffered, died, was buried, and rose from the dead. So it means like vocational discernment will always entail a little bit of his passion. Like you're going to taste his suffering. You're going to feel the wood of the cross. And sometimes that means waiting, you know, because you can't get ahead, like you can't get out in front of the decision if it's not actually the Lord prompting, if the grace hasn't been given, because if you do, it will crush, you know, it really will crush. But if it's in response, you know, if it's really receptive and it's really kind of determined by the Lord's initiation, yeah, then it will be fruitful. But like, you just got to be patient. To be patient is to suffer well, it's to suffer

with the Lord. I remember when I was discerning religious life and was thinking of the priesthood and was looking into different religious orders, as I said to you, I felt drawn to the Franciscans. But I remember feeling guilty because I was really attracted to the habit. And I thought, well, this is a very superficial thing to be attracted to. And I was embarrassed to sort of say it. But I remember a Franciscan who became a bishop who said to me not to be afraid of that. And I remember a Franciscan who became a bishop who said to me not to be afraid of that. And I'm saying that for those who are watching who might be experiencing the same thing. Because he said, the Lord can cool us through those seemingly superficial things. Because they are an expression of the charism of the order, but also we are attracted to

similarly superficial things when we're dating. You know, I like her eyes or I like her hair. Well, obviously, if that was your sole reason for marrying her, that wouldn't be good enough. But it's the beginning of an attraction. And don't be afraid to allow that to lead you deeper. Would you agree with that? I would agree with that.

Yeah. The Lord uses, I mean, like, yeah, there are a variety of things that you could say. But habits are beautiful in a sense, too, because we associate them with, like, public witness. We associate them with, like, gospel radicality. But we also associate them with, like, the cultic. You know, like, people wear strange garments because— People hear cultic and they think of a four-letter word now. That's all it's become.

What does cultic mean in the Catholic sense? So, like, cultus in the sense of, like, worship, like dedicated worship, something that you that you would associate with like a holy place, a shrine, some place that smells like sacrifice as C.S. Lewis describes it until we have faces. So like you see somebody in a habit and you realize that that person is set apart for holy things, for worship. That is the precise reason for which they have been called, for contemplation. Not to like in contemplation to like accumulate grace points so that they themselves can advance, you know. It's because God is worthy to be praised. And that's it. Full stop.

Contemplation is an end unto itself. It need not be instrumentalized. It ought not be instrumentalized. Yeah, exactly. It's got this, it's got a kind of playful freedom to it. And so like when you see somebody who is set apart for worship, that's why we speak about religious as, $10 word, eschatological signs, right? So eschatological meaning like end times or associated with the end, the second coming, because we see in the religious what we will all be doing in the end, which is worshiping the most

high God. Not in the sense that we associate it with like bad liturgies, with bad music and bad seating and like uncomfortable pews, but in the sense of like being wholly alive, firing on all cylinders in the presence, the loving vision of the one by whom you are created and for whom you are destined. Like that is what we are meant to see in a religious. Like this is one who is neither married nor given in marriage because in heaven we will all gaze upon the unveiled face of the incarnate Lord, you know. And that's enough. We don't need signs. We don't need sacraments.

We don't need mediation. We will only need signs. We don't need sacraments. We don't need mediation. We will only need Him. So yeah, you have a kind of faint sense of that in the habit. Even if you can only express it in the sense of that's different or that's pretty or cool. So yeah. I would like to talk about God because you believe in Him. And in particular, I want to talk about Aquinas' five ways. Great. What are they? Rattle them off. Perfect. There are five of them. They're enumerated. And Prima Fara's question two, article three. Thank you.

That's right. And it's easy to remember. One, two, three for those at home. One, two, three. Exactly. Yeah, that's a helpful mnemonic. So the first one is from motion. The second one is from efficient causality. The third is from contingency. The fourth is from gradation. Oh, yeah. Yeah, well done. And then the fifth is from teleology or final causality.

Oh, my gosh. I was hoping for a cheers. Well done. Now, many people, because we've just been through this new atheism phase, which really seems to be dying out now. It does. And the Jordan Peterson thing seems to be filling its void. Right. It's so interesting to me.

I think that. No one's interested in listening to Dawkins anymore. Harris seems like a really interesting guy. Yeah. He still has some popularity. really interesting guy. He still has some popularity, but Peterson, with his respect of religion, even if he hasn't affirmed necessarily that he believes in God, though he says he lives like he does, that seems to have taken its place, which I think is an interesting phenomenon of its own. But anyway, yeah. I think the new atheism kind of overplayed its hand. I think they leaned too heavily into the vitriol.

They became so convinced of their arguments that they, I don't know, they gave them with too much gusto, and I think it actually turned off their audience. There wasn't enough nuance. Well, I think in a certain sense, I think a lot of millennials are conflict-averse, right? So a lot of millennials may not necessarily have any affinity for religion. You know, a lot of them identify as

nuns. But they don't like intolerance or something that smacks of violence because that's perceived as, like, a cultural evil. And the new atheism, I think, overplayed its hand in, like, it just made such a caricature of religion or, like, lampooned theology in such a way that they kind of, it just begs credulity. And it's also angry. So it's very hard to follow somebody who's philosophically unfair and also very, very mean. Well, it definitely, I think, appealed to teenage men and young adult men. Right? I think for a time.

There's a sense in which it appears masculine at first because it's very abrasive. Like Christopher Hitchens was a wordsmith. He was brilliant. He was charming. No, he was a good writer. And he also seemed to like state his opinion and I'm not going to worry about your feelings.

I'm just going to speak the facts. I think there's something kind of that appeals to the masculine in that. Yeah. What did I read? I read a book recently called Seven Types of Atheism by a guy named John Gray. And he kind of does, he's basically, he's reacting against the new atheism, which he thinks is basically, it's religious in the sense that it's indebted to certain religious beliefs. So it espouses this notion about monotheism or it at least grants the terms of religion. It lets religion set the terms of debate. Whereas he advocates in the book for other more tolerant types of atheism.

Is he an atheist? I think so, yeah. He said he's most inclined towards the atheism of a George Santayana or a Joseph Conrad, something along those lines, where there's a kind of nobility of the human spirit before the inky blackness of the void of meaning. Interesting.

You know, it's like man's nobility is basically to stand before the absurd and to press on. Yeah. Yeah. Which, you know, like you can see evidence of that in like Camus and The Plague or The Stranger and stuff. But, I mean, I think that like what millennials want now is authenticity, sincerity, a kind of coherent form of life. And they see the hatred or violence or, you know, the caricatured nature of some new atheist

arguments and they find that unappealing. But I think these other types of atheism, I think, are going to have better purchase. A lot of them are philosophical, so they're always going to be the particular province of few. But yeah, those are my thoughts. There are obviously some scary smart atheists. I know you're not saying this, but they're obviously not just the kind of philosophically inept types. Like Dawkins is evidently philosophically inept. When you look at his summary of the five ways, he literally misunderstands every one of them in a pretty obvious, glaring way. So what's your, what, what do you think that there's one particular way of Aquinas' that you find the most convincing, or do you think they make a good cumulative case that when you put them all together, they're the most convincing?

Both. I know that's not an answer. No, that's all right. Which it is. It was a false dilemma and you swept the horns. Which, which is your, the most convincing? Both. I know that's not an answer. That's all right, which it is. It was a false dilemma and you split the horns. Which is the most compelling? For me, it's the third way. Yeah. A lot of people say that. Yeah. I don't know why. The way I think about it is that... I want you to explain it to us as well, because those at home have no idea what this is. Convince me that God exists the third way. With pleasure. I'm going to do a little pre-looting. Go for it. And then inter-looting, and then post-looting. There's going to be a lot of looting. All right. Loot away. So yeah, cheers. So with the five ways, first thing with which

you need to approach is kind of like the right disposition. So the five ways are not going to blow you out of your seat. They're not going to make your socks go up and down. They're not going to like burn off one eyebrow, you know, whatever. What they are going to do though, if you continue to return to them, is exercise a kind of like conceptual therapy. So here's the thing. I said that what we're accustomed to, or the lines along which we're accustomed to think are these like materialist, reductionist, naturalist lines. From a young age, you know, you see the periodic table of elements and somebody just tells you, these are the building blocks of all material things. And you're like, okay. And then you think atomistically, like everyone basically thinks atomistically. Instead of saying, hey, these are like energy slash electrical things that go to

constitute what is most basic in your understanding, like your cat, for instance. So instead of starting with like substances, we start with building blocks. So we're always reducing. We're always thinking materialistically. We're always thinking in this kind of new paradigm of science. When you read the five ways, though, it's kind of introducing you into a new or better or older way of thinking, which is to say like a metaphysical understanding of reality. So instead of approaching reality from like what's at the bottom of it? Or like, how do I clear away things that are distracting me? You're asking the question of what is and why. So how did this thing come to be? How does it sustain its existence? And how do we

account for that philosophically? So there's this like kind of conceptual therapy that has to go on. One of my conferees, Father Raymond Snyder, he likens this to, apparently there's a Monty Python sketch about the most hilarious joke ever. Oh, this is where, you never see what it is. They're just showing each other and bursting out laughing. And then dying, yeah. Yeah. Well, like the guy who writes it finds it so hilarious and then dies.

And his wife comes in the room, she reads it, and then she dies. And then there's like a bunch of police investigators. They all die. They figure it out. Eventually they like have it translated into German and then project it one word at a time across the lines and kill all the soldiers. But people look at the proofs, or they hear that there are proofs for the existence of God, and they expect them to be the funniest joke in the world. It's going to absolutely devastate them.

Done. And they cannot not question. Yeah. But people will look at them and they'll say, well, that is expressed in a philosophical paradigm that I've never encountered before. Fascinating, but whatever. And then they'll be like, and I didn't believe in God before I encountered it, and I still don't believe in God. So what does that mean? Does that mean that the proofs for the existence of God don't work? Not necessarily.

If they don't compel us. Yeah, no, because it's not like their efficacy is proved by suasion. It's not like in order for me to carry my point, I need to convince everyone in the room of it. Now, true things are just true because they correspond to reality, okay? So it's either true or it's not. As to whether or not we can access that, different thing. So when you approach the five ways, you're doing conceptual therapy. You're inhabiting a metaphysical world.

You're looking at the world the way that St. Thomas looked at the world. In a certain sense, you're seeing it under the aspect of being. And reality becomes transparent to your gaze, and you see it as so many things issuing from an unmoved mover, or a first cause, or the necessary being, or what is utmostly good and beautiful, or what is the final cause of all. So, yeah, with all of the different arguments, basically, you start with some observation of what is in reality. So, like, in the first way, St. Thomas says, this is the most evident way. This is the argument from motion. And he says that there are things, and they are moving. And he says, cheers, let's go from there. Which is significant, because in modern philosophy,

you can't even get people to acknowledge that. Rene Descartes is like, okay, I kind of distrust my sense or like my sense knowledge as a result of which I need to build everything up by a new method. And in that new method, I need to prove everything from kind of pure postulates of reason. So that's just like, well, whatever. Can we just say how fun that would have been to be with Descartes in his dressing gown? Oh yeah, and his nightcap. Oh my gosh, just smoking a doobie. What can't we doubt? Those are the best parts of the Methodon discourse. They are absolutely the best. When he describes his raiment. Yeah, his pale raiment's hem. Oh my gosh. So yeah, so like we're looking at the reality and we are admitting it as such. So we're not doubting our sense experience because St. Thomas wouldn't even like,

he would think that was insane. He just says motion is evident to the senses. And by motion, he doesn't just mean locomotion. No. Right. So there's locomotion and then there's change or alteration. So like somebody goes from being, or something goes from being like white to black. And then there's what he calls, you know, growth or diminution. somebody goes from being, or something goes from being like white to black. And then there's what he calls, you know, growth or diminution. Something goes from being big to small, small to big. Or this shaped to that shaped.

Something gains weight, kind of like loses its physical fitness. Yeah. And then like the final sense of change is substantial change. But he says that's not like motion in the strict sense.

So we'll leave that aside. So basically we're talking about like changing in place, changing in quality, and then changing in size. And so he just says like, okay, things are changing. How do we account for that? And then this is the big thing that he introduces in all of the five ways is the distinction between act and potency. And at first you're like, duh're like weird words but they need not be weird or intimidating because potency as you might expect from you know how we use in english is what a thing can be right so like act is what a thing is it's the current traits or the current qualities or

whatever that it's giving expression to as we encounter it so you're actually sitting i'm actually sitting you're potentially standing i'm actually wearing a wristwatch. I'm actually, you know, like a Caucasian male. I am actually, et cetera, you know, like, um, how tall am I? Six, four. And I weigh like however many pounds I weighed. I don't actually remember. Um, different sense of actually, uh, right. But I am potentially a number of things. So I am potentially standing. I am potentially not wearing a wristwatch. I am potentially shorter. You're not potentially Native American. Here's the thing, though.

Like Elizabeth Warren. Right. No. So actually, I am, though. I'm 116th Native American. Are you? My great-great-grandmother. Is that more than Elizabeth Warren?

I don't know. I don't adjudicate these decisions. Continue. I don't follow. But I've never done the swab thing, so like, like a lot of people, am probably claiming more. So you're actually part Native American. Yeah. All right, we're getting off.

But I'm not actually, or I'm not potentially Chinese. Right. Okay, let's settle the terms. Settle the terms. Done. So what you are, actually, is the qualities that you're currently giving expression to. What you are, potentially, are those things you could give expression to, you know, but you're not presently, right? And those terms are set by the kind of thing that you are, right? So like you said, I'm potentially standing,

but I am not potentially flying, right, by my own steam because of the thing that I am. So he says, whenever you have a change, you're moving something from potency to act. So whether it's a change in place, it's potentially over there, and then it's actually over there. Or if it's a change in quality, it's potentially red, and then it's actually red. Or if it's a change in size, it's potentially five feet three, and then it's actually five feet three. And then he says, in order to get from being potentially so to actually so, you need something to bring it there. Actualize it. Something to, yeah, to actualize it. Something to make it to be such. Okay. And then he says

that that thing has to already be actually so. Now, it doesn't actually have to be like, for instance, standing or in this location or five feet two, but it has to have the power to bring that about either like virtually or yeah, we can go into that, but it's not actually worth the long description. Ed Fazer has a great description of it. It is an Aquinas book. He's very good. Cheers, Ed Fazer. But then he says, let's go back to that thing that has it actually. What made it to be such? And then you see where this is going. Long series of causes.

But he says, you can't go all the way back to some first thing. Or all the way up. Or all the way up infinitely. Because then nothing would actually cause the next thing to be in motion if there weren't some first thing causing all of this to obtain. Now I've gone ahead and just described the entire first way. Whoops. Now what happens at this point is almost everybody thinks you're talking about linear causality

and they think this is essentially like the Kalam argument that has to do with beginnings. Right. Like you flick the first, there had to be someone to flick the first domino yeah that isn't what he means that's not what he means what he's talking about is um so like existential dependence what we're talking about is what causes these things to be now the third boy gets to this like best i think in most illustratively but the idea is basically like what we're talking about is not just like A pushes B, B pushes C, C pushes D ad infinitum. What we are talking about is sometimes called an essentially subordinated series of causes. That is to say that like you have a lamp, all right, and the lamp is suspended by a link and that link by another link and that link by

another link, et cetera. So what causes the lamp to hang? Link number one. What causes link number one to hang? Link number two. What causes link number one to hang? Link number two. And then you go back, and eventually you get to the ceiling. And then eventually, what causes the ceiling to stand? The walls. What causes the walls to stand? The foundation.

What causes the foundation to stand? And you can just keep going. But eventually you get to a certain thing beyond which you cannot progress. Okay? You have to get to the point of what causes these things to be and to be causes. And that's ultimately where all of these arguments end up or how they all eventuate. Because, all right, now I'm going to talk about the third wave. Yeah.

If you want. Just do it. All right, cool. And pretend we're on an airplane. Yes. And you've got a limited amount of time. Because I think that's why we talked about the new atheism earlier. Are you familiar with the work of William Lane Craig at all? He's an evangelical philosopher.

I've heard his name. And I think what's so appealing about the Kalam argument is that it's so easy. Yeah. And this is something, of course, Aquinas disagreed with. Bonaventure thought it was good. I still like it. I mean, obviously, Thomas knew nothing about the Big Bang cosmology. Sure. So he was just thinking of the philosophical way. But essentially, the Kalam argument is everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist.

Therefore, the universe has a cause. Yeah. I think for a lot of people, if they accept those two premises or if they think that they're more plausible than false, it is very appealing. Yeah. It's like, oh, okay, yeah. And what is the universe? Maybe it's time, matter, space, energy. So whatever the cause is must have to be beyond those things. Like that just feels like an elevator argument and a lot more kind of compelling initially than Aquinas' ways, which take a lot of explanation when it comes to Aristotelian philosophy and things.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think that rhetorically the Kalam argument might be a good strategy because science may get to the point where it proves that the universe has a beginning. Okay. It might, but what do we know? Basically, like 13.8 billion years ago there was a Big Bang, and before then you have a variety of accounts as to how that could have come about.

Right. As to whether it's like the bounce theory or if it's cyclical and before then you have a variety of accounts as to how that could have come about right you know like as to whether it's like you know like the bounce theory or if it's cyclical or if it's like the kind of bubble theory you know where it's like yeah blah blah blah but basically i think a lot of people just do the observation based on the second law of thermodynamics like entropy like yeah this system is hemorrhaging order so you you have to go back to like a primal source, an ur-source of order. And that seems to posit that there was a beginning. But science hasn't yet proven that. But St. Thomas wants to make a distinction between the beginning of something and the creation of something. So in a sense, Aquinas' ways are impervious to whether or not the Big

Bang Theory holds out. Yeah. So St. Thomas thought that all of his arguments obtain even if the world is eternal. Because a lot of pagan philosophers thought that it was, like Aristotle. So St. Thomas thought that all of his arguments obtain even if the world is eternal. Because a lot of pagan philosophers thought that it was, like Aristotle. So St. Thomas says what we're proving here is the fact of creation, or that's the kind of vehicle that we're using to get back to a creator. And what that is is a kind of relation of dependence of the created thing on the creator. So there's a beginning, right? So the beginning is the time at which created things come to be, right? Or the time before which there was not time. But the creation is just this relation of dependence. And that's what he's using in all of his arguments. He's showing that like these things that we observe

in material reality, we can't give for them a causal explanation unless there is something that is its existence, unless there is some unmoved mover, unless there is some first cause that is not actualized by anything previous that makes all of this to be coherent and intelligible. So he's operating on that relationship, less so, he's not relying upon a beginning of time. So you might say that while the Kalamagian argument is more initially satisfying, it isn't necessarily, as we say, impervious to some of those scientific questions about the origins of the universe.

So what about the third way then? Let's see how succinctly, this would be a good test here, how succinctly you can put it across convincingly. I'm going to give you the Heideggerian summary. Why is there something rather than nothing? You want me to answer that? You could.

I don't know. Nice. Well, at the same time, it seems to think that we have to account for that. Now, people differ as to whether or not that's a good representation of the third way, but I think it's pretty good for elevator speech. Yeah. Why is there something? Who said that this is the greatest philosophical question that can ever be asked? I forgot.

I don't know. I don't know. Herbert McCabe, who is a Dominican who lived in England for a while, well, he's since passed, but he liked to come back to this question with regards to the third way. He just thought that it was just like, I was just going to say, it's a good introduction to metaphysical thinking. It really is. Because most people don't think in those terms. In fact, people have just heard you say that right now on YouTube and don't even see, don't even understand why you would even ask that. They haven't understood the gravity of it.

And maybe we never could understand it to the full gravity of it. But yeah, why is that an important question? Well, it's because there could be nothing, presumably, or there couldn't if God exists. No, like because when you look at contingent things, which is everything that we experience except for God. Right. When you look at all of them, you have to know or you have to see, perceive at some level that it could have been otherwise. This could have been read. Or it could have been not.

Right? Yeah. And that doesn't have to take into account like, well, we're not talking like in terms of moral tragedy. Like you could have been hit by a bus on your way here. It's like, okay, that's true enough. But like you could have just not been. And that's true of everything. So then why is there

something if everything is a great may not have been yeah exactly if everything is might not have been why is it why why is it and you eventually have to get back to a has to have been or simply is oh beautiful say it again Let's do it again. Let's circle the wagons again here. Okay. So when you look at everything created, you have to recognize that it might not have been. This stuff. Exactly.

Doesn't have to be. That doesn't have to be. I could literally pick that up and smash that right now, except that I'd have to clean it up, and my mother would be disappointed in my barbarity. Or I guess barbarism. Yeah. You'd know more than me. I don't know. Okay. So yeah, everything might not have been. And we see that. We can perceive that. Yeah. This TV, I don't mean to keep doing this at a snail's pace, especially because I asked you to prove it so succinctly, but I mean, this TV didn't have to exist. This cup didn't have to exist. My

parents could have never have met. This book didn't have to exist. The stars in the sky as we see them didn't have to exist. No. Yeah. Because nothing has a sufficient explanation for its own being. Nothing like all of these things, when we see them, they don't say like, I am this and it is necessary that I be this and that I exist. Because like, you know, we have some notions as to things that have existed and no longer exist or things that never exist. Like we know that there were dodo birds, right? I associate them with Australia, but maybe that's a false association. Yeah, I don't know. I don't think so. Cheers. We also know that like unicorns capture the imaginations of seven-year-old girls the world over. Yeah. But that they have never been unless you count narwhals. Yeah. Yeah. Or

unless they're unicorns on another planet. I guess that's possible, right? Alternate reality unicorns? Yeah. Unicorn aliens. Or robot unicorns. Okay. So that these things don't exist, right? But when we look at these things, they do.

And there's no intrinsic reason as to why that's the case. Like this is like a unicorn in the sense that it's something conceivable. Yeah. A Chemex pot, I think it's called, right? Yeah, if this never existed, you could have conceived it. And someone did conceive it and then made it. Before they made it, exactly, yeah. But it need not have.

So when you look at this world populated by might not have beens, you have to account for the fact that they are, because they themselves do not supply the answer. They are incompetent to supply the answer. And when you follow it back, you get to a has to have been or simply is. And the sense is that because God, and you get this kind of like down the line in the first part of the Summa, God exhausts all that there is of being, right? God is. And that's to say like, yeah, so like when we talk about God being eternal, right? That's not just to say that like God has infinite duration, like thinking about him in terms of time. When Boethius describes eternity, he says that it is the whole and simultaneous possession of endless life.

The whole and simultaneous possession of endless life. So God holds all being in his embrace of himself. He exhausts everything that can truly be said of being. And so all being is a participation in his being without getting into like pantheism, blah, blah, blah. You get it. So when we look at all of these things, we recognize that they lack, they don't have being in that way. They only have it as a kind of product of happenstance. Well, not to say that everything is a chance encounter, but that they only share in or participate being, but they lack it in its entirety. So you have to get back to someone. That has a good nature. Yeah, that just is, whose very essence is to be. And so Dawkins

here says, well, even if I grant that, that's a far, far cry from saying that this being is someone that answers my prayers, cares about the ways in which I have sex and with whom. And so you haven't even begun to make your case, which of course is rubbish because you have begun to make your case. And the Sumer, of course, is more than two pages. I wish that Dawkins had have turned the page. You may have seen how Aquinas began to explain the attributes of God. If you can make the jump from atheism to theism, the jump from theism to Christian theism is a heck of a lot smaller, shorter. I think so. A lot of your work's done. Do you ever have doubts about God's existence? No, but I don't know that I permit

myself extended periods of time of like nihilistic doubt um do you ever wonder that God doesn't exist and you've just you know you could be partying and having sex and making money and now that's right if God didn't exist I would like worship the sun and just like stay unhygienically you know like bearded on top of mountains and like the western United States but he does as a result of which I'm here um no and not to say that not to say that... I don't mean to character atheism as if to say, if you're an atheist, you'll be an immoral person. That's not what I'm saying. But I mean, it's a fair question.

And I imagine some priests think of it like, gosh, and even married people could think of it. Maybe God doesn't exist. And I'm just sort of wasting my life when I'd rather just be kind of hooking up with this woman instead. And gee, I mean, if God doesn't exist, maybe monogamy is not natural after all.

And that's why I'm, you know, you can see how people begin to spiral. Yeah, Dostoevsky said something like, well, I think it's in the Bogeyman. Like, if God doesn't exist, then all things are permissible. Yeah, yeah. Ivan, I think, referenced something like that. And it's true, isn't it? I think it is true.

If God doesn't exist, then all things are permissible in the realm of morality. Why think that they wouldn't be? Well, I think that, like, so the vision that St. Thomas paints, well, the vision that, you know, like Christ reveals is that human flourishing, integral human flourishing. Is connected with. Is connected with our nature. So like we have a nature on which grace builds

and it doesn't like scrap nature, right? Actually, there's a sweet translation of the Summa by these friars from the English province, sometimes referred to as the Gilby Summa. And it says this, quote, grace does not consign nature to the rubbish heap. Does it say that? Oh, yeah. I love the English.

Oh, my gosh. To the rubbish bin. Exactly. Yeah. So we have the kind of nature that is perfected by these kind of things. And it's not like grace radically changes what we are. It actually heals, it purifies, it elevates, it emboldens, and it brings us to our term where we ordinarily would not have been able to get there. So in a certain sense, I don't think it is true that if God doesn't exist, all things are permissible because we are still the type of beings that we are, right? Yeah, but we can, we are, but when I say permissible,

I suppose we mean like morally acceptable. Yeah. Like I can still, I mean, we all choose to do things that we perceive to be good that end up being harmful. But when we do them, we say they're immoral and you ought not to have done that. But if God doesn't exist, can't I engage in behaviors that are self-destructive? Certainly, you can. I mean, in the sense of like you're free to when we speak of freedom as like license and a variety of options yeah right because then when and then the best people can do is just say yeah it's not good for you I'm like I don't give a crap what's good for me well it's not good for society I don't

care well they'll hate you well I hate them yeah it's like well this is like the like what utilitarian struggled with and this is like what Kant is reacting against he's like wow that's just like selfishness it's naturalistic selfishness like. And then he wanted a system of rules that would bind in such a way as to perfect the human creature. And he felt like he needed God as an enforcer or a lawgiver in a certain sense is like the buck stops here with respect to reward or vindication. So I don't like, okay, when we say that like if God doesn't exist, all things are permissible. On the one hand, that's true because if your life is not goal-oriented, then you can wend your way wherever you darn well please. So I leave my driveway and

I have no place in mind. I can make all turns. And in a certain sense, for me, it's just about the driving. The journey, not the destination. So I'll be here all the time. Yeah. Time foolery and guffaw. But if I want to actually get somewhere and I recognize the fact that my happiness is bound up in a destination, then I am constrained in a certain sense as to which turns I can take. Because if I turn right and I take the Bilt Wash Parkway, while it will be charming to see that little brick wall in the middle of the highway, I know that there are going to be innumerable nonsensical slowdowns, and that's going to wither my desire for life.

But that's how I get to Philadelphia. That's how I get where I'm going. So I'm able to take that in stride. But if I'm not going to Philadelphia, if I'm just driving, I'm going to avoid the Bilt Wash Parkway like the plague. I'm just going to find open streets for cruising so I can listen to podcasts because I'm a nerd. So yeah. So yes. Full thought. Well, why don't we talk about the difference between Kant's view of morality and Thomas's, because it seems like a lot of us have adopted Kant's way of thinking of morality in regards to just your duty as opposed to that which allows me to flourish.

Sure. All right, start with big words. So Kant's is sometimes described as deontological in the sense that it's rule-based and our perfection is bound up with following the rules or adhering to the rules, irrespective of enjoyment or happiness. He thinks those are kind of selfish considerations. Whereas St. Thomas' vision, it's to be distinguished from utilitarianism, right? I'm not just seeking the maximization of pleasure and the avoidance of pain for the greatest number, but what I am seeking is the good and that the good is addressed to me as a perfection, which is to say, I've got this kind of nature and there are certain kinds of things out there that build me up, right? To start at the basic level, like air, oxygen, good, right?

Like propagation of the species, good in general, not for me, good for you, not for me. And then you got like Chick-fil-A, right? right which is undoubtedly good except when you purchase it on the app and you look and it like it counts the calories for you like i don't want to see that why would they do that it's so silly because you're like yes spicy chicken deluxe medium fried two chick-fil-a sauces small shake and a cookie and then it's like you my friend are about to eat 2 300 calories and you're like don't tell me this. Yeah. But what if I have three meals of this today? I have to be like Michael Phelps to burn it off. Swear word, you know? Good thing you've got a habit to cover it up. Exactly. Yeah. It's very sensitive.

So yeah. So like then you got Chick-fil-A and then you've got like kind of like higher animal pursuits. Like you got like foodies and like wine connoisseurs and you've got like people who are into adventuring and people who are whatever. And then you've got those highest pursuits, you know, so, like, to know what's true and to love what's good. And what we are as people are just, like, a big open wound of desire ordered towards these things, because these things leap out of the otherwise, like, neutral fabric of existence, and they come addressed to us as things for us. And so, like, we are actually built up by those things, not just in, like, consuming them, like like rapacious marauders, but like in dialoguing with them. When you talk about the truth, it's not so much that like, you know, like we don't like devour the truth, rather we're like

called up into it, right? So like St. Thomas's vision is all good oriented. There are certain things that we as human beings are made for. And some of those things we don't even know until the grace of God enlightens us as to their existence, as to their attainability. Like before you're baptized, like you wouldn't know that worship necessarily is an integral good. Like St. Thomas says that we have a kind of natural desire for virtue or for religion, but that after the fall, it's, it's, it takes, I mean, like it's obscured. So we need grace to heal our minds with respect to some of the goods that we're called to.

And so for him, it's all about being in dialogue with what is real because we are built up by what is real. And that we can recognize that as our happiness and it registers as such. Maybe not necessarily as like the kind of joy that like people feel while pumping their fists at a Coldplay concert. But it is the kind of happiness where like you sit down with your family at your dinner table and and you hold hands to say a prayer and you're like, I was made for this. This is why I have come. That's the kind of feeling I have when I'm with my mate in my rocking chair on my porch, smoking a pipe and having a drink. Dog at my feet. Yeah.

You can pet. Kids playing on the grass below. Yeah, it's kind of like a... Breeze through the trees like, this is it. This is it. It's as good as it gets. This is the reason for which I've come. Because we're made for contemplation. We're made for the enjoyment of friendship and delightful things that bring us there.

I love how you put that. Yeah, these goods appeal to us, almost like propose to us or invite us to be a part of us. propose to us or invite us to be a part of us. And this is what, the concupiscible appetite, the desiring part of our appetite that moves the will? The whole thing, yeah. So like the lower appetites, kind of like the simple desires of like love and desire and joy and hatred and aversion and sorrow, but also the higher ones too.

Like this is what elicits hope. This is what elicits daring. And then fear and despair and anger, etc. But also, we can speak about desire with respect to intellect and will. This? Yeah. You don't have to edit that out. Leave it. It was cool. It was country. Nice. Who's filming us right now? Hey, camera two. Nice. Camera one, camera two. Camera one, camera two. What's that from? I don't know.

Wayne's World. Keep going. It's a little before my time. I think it was the second Wayne's World. It doesn't matter. Continue. Okay. So yeah, this whole, we've got all of these powers, the powers of our soul, and all of

them are addressed to goods, and they work. Hopefully, please God, when we grow in virtue, they work together. Yeah. So that was like the original way in which we were made is for all of those things to work harmoniously. And then we fell, and now they're all ordered to their independent ends, and we find it very difficult to adjudicate those claims. Because it's like, you know, your lower appetites

are like, Chick-fil-A, Chick-fil-A. And then your higher appetites are like, save the fallen kid, save the fallen kid. And you're like, ah! I am torn to something. Do you want to go get Chick-fil-A after this? I'm serious. I would like to do that. Let's get everything we shouldn't get. No, let's just get it like moderately and in the right proportions. No. Okay. So yeah, but like as grace like heals you and reconstitutes you and, you know,

conformity to Christ, you find that you actually desire in orderly fashion. So it becomes easy and prompt and joyful to do what is good and to pursue those things that are for you, addressed to you. Yeah. It's awesome. And do you think that this, because this idea that God is the killjoy, this comes from the kind of Kantian view, wouldn't you say? In a certain sense, yeah, because like, well, I don't really know the genealogy of it because I don't know modern philosophy because I stink.

But we can certainly, yeah. Well, and I think it was even, was it Occam who talked, you know, because Aquinas, Aristotle before him says that there is like a natural desire for the good, like a natural leaning towards the good. Whereas I think Occam said that wasn't the case, that evil and good, and it's just the commands of God. Yeah. That make them known. Right. Yeah. Because I think his fear was like this kind of selfishness or that eudaimonism, which is like the big word, which means like happiness-oriented discourse or morality, was somehow, yeah, it was just kind of like baptizing a pagan system, which was effectively selfish and utilitarian. So, yeah, well, he doesn't even think that things have natures. So if they don't have natures, then they don't have a principle of their unfolding.

Which is this, is this the beginning of the end of modernity? Nominalism? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I don't really a principle of their unfolding. Which is this, is this the, is this the? The beginning of the end of modernity. Nominalism? Is this the beginning of nominalism? Yeah. So I don't really know it that well. I'm probably caricaturing it, but that won't stop me from still sounding up. Good. Party on.

So yeah, if things don't have natures, so I see like this dog, it's whatever, like a Great Dane, and then this dog, it's like a Chihuahua, and I'm like, meh. You know? If I'm anomalous, I don't actually know what unites them, common dog nature. Meh. You know, if I'm anomalous, I don't actually know what unites them. Common dog nature. If I'm an Aristotelian Thomist, I say like, hey, weird looking dog, other weird looking dog, both dogs. I can like use that concept to engage with reality. Yeah. For nominalism, you can't. So if things don't have natures that you have access to, then how can we say that they unfold according to a certain pattern? We can't. So then how do we know what's good and what's bad for

them? God makes it known. Okay. But then William of Ockham will say things like, God can command you to hate him and it would be meritorious. And it would be moral, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Because it's not rooted in the created world in the strict sense. It's all just God manifesting his will. Yeah, so according to Ockham, the euthyphro dilemma would actually work, right? Like the euthyphro dilemma being like, is something good because God commands it? Right, yeah. Is it pious because it's pleasing to the gods or is it pleasing to the gods because

it's pious? God is the good. Yeah, yeah. And his commandments are a reflection of his nature maybe. Yeah. So for, yeah, for Ockham with respect to that, it is pious because God so commands. Commands it. And for Thomas, it's not so much that like God is, so I think the fear is if you say things are, or God commands them because they're good, the fear is that there's something before God that kind of sets the terms. Yeah, God has to wake up and look at his ten commandments. Exactly, and like be recollected in what's good and then, you know, like to punish accordingly. But rather, because God is the good, St. Thomas refers to him as the common good of the whole universe,

that for him, this isn't like, it's not a divided act. as the common good of the whole universe. That for him, this isn't like, it's not a divided act. It's in knowing himself and in loving himself, all of this goodness issues as so many manifestations of his glory. And so when we like choose the good as the good, it's under the aspect ultimately of this last end. And so like St. Thomas will do this awesome thing

in the beginning of the first part of the second part where he entertains all of these options for what can be the last end of man. And he's like, is it wealth? He's like, no dice. Like artificial wealth? He's like, money? You get money for buying Chick-fil-A. No way is it money. He's like, Chick-fil-A? You get Chick-fil-A for building up your bodily life. He's like, that's not that. Yeah, it can't be that. And then he's like, fame. He's like, fame is passing. Glory, it actually, glory is more, properly speaking, in the other person who gives it. You know, it's not really in you.

And it like testifies to something in you, which is ultimately like more important, like virtue. Yes, what is that thing, yeah. Or like power. Power is poised for doing things, but it itself is not at the end, you know. It's instrumental. And he goes all the way down with like sensate pleasures, which I suppose most people think is the end of life. And then ultimately he gets to God and he says like, this is the only thing that answers to our desire for what is truly true and what is goodly good, because it's the only thing that is universally so. Because our minds are made for what is

universally true, not just like one truth. Like I can know like, this is a T-Rex. And you can rest in that for a moment, but then your intellect pushes out to know more. But I need to know, like, I want to find where the Dilophosaurus is, you know, or the Indoraptor, if I've seen the most recent Jurassic Park movie. What does it say, Ecclesiastes, is it? Where it talks about how like we can't see enough to be satisfied or hear enough to be satisfied. We're always pressing out to want to know more and more. So our minds have a kind of rapacious appetite. Rapacious. Ah, what's up, baby? So like we want to know what is like universally true and we want to love in turn

because knowledge and love go together. Here's something that I really don't understand. I don't understand how one of the greatest pleasures in life is having a desire, knowing that desire will be fulfilled, and then having that desire fulfilled. If I was to remain entirely fulfilled in every respect, it seems like there would be a lack there. I mean, I think Augustine says something like this in the Confessions where he talks about, you know, we eat something salty and then you drink something and it's like you're continually building up a desire in order to satisfy it. But in heaven, apparently, we won't have any desires. We won't have any unrealized desires.

In the sense that they'll all be realized immediately. Doesn't that seem like a lack? Like I want to, I don't mean to, I want it to be a hot day and I want a cold beer. But in heaven, there will be no desire unmet. So I can't do that. And that sounds kind of boring. So if we take... Do you see the point I'm making? I do. Okay. Like the sense is that in order to be truly satisfied, you need to have the experience of desire.

You need to have like... Well, that's a tremendous pleasure in life. There's a tremendous pleasure in satisfying something that was previously unfulfilled. Well done. You summed it up in three words, five words. I said 20 sentences. No, it's good. So I think that like basically heaven will be like that for the entirety of your life.

So the entirety of your life is one big desire. And heaven is the realization of that desire that never grows old. So like think about this. In heaven, please God, you know when we get back our bodies in the resurrection, there will still be marks of your earthly existence. It's like why we portray the martyrs with the, you know, the engines of their martyrdom. And it's why Christ came bearing his wounds. Because the resurrection is not a denial of what has gone before. It's a transfiguration of what has gone before.

So in heaven, when we have the loving vision of God, please Lord, right? It will be as the fruit of a life's worth of longing, right? And that longing will be brought to bear on the object of our heart's love. So like C.S. Lewis says, when you look back at your, so when you die and you look back at your days, you will recognize them. For those who have ended up in hell, you will recognize them as hell on earth. For those who end in heaven, you will recognize them as heaven on earth. So truth be told, we are already living heaven now. We are already living heaven now because grace gives way to glory. There's nothing like specifically different between grace and glory, except that in glory, you can't lose it, right? You can't, it can't diminish, right? There's no fear of instability. So what we are experiencing

now is already a foretaste of heaven. And incidentally, tangentially, that's like the whole point of religious life is to orient the Christian gaze towards heaven, right? Where we will neither be married nor given in marriage, but we will all be wed to the Lord. So I think that the satisfaction of heaven will retain the dynamism and the history of your going there. So like, for the same reason that Jesus is recognized not so much by his face after his resurrection as by his wounds, so too we will be recognized by our desires. Like what impelled us to the vision, what actually drew us there. So like in that same book that I mentioned, The Quiet Light, which describes the life of

St. Thomas Aquinas, one of his sisters asks him, St. Thomas, how do I become holy? How do I become a saint? To which he has said to have respond, desire it. Because desire is the antecedent to the consequent of enjoyment, but it's still present. Desire is just love in motion, and rest, enjoyment, is just love realized. But they both give expression to the same phenomenon, which is the recognition of something as addressed to me, as for me, as perfect for me, but that calls me up and into it. So in heaven, there won't be this kind of selfish assimilation of the beatific vision where I parcel it off and keep it for myself and keep it away from all the other saints for fear of it diminishing. It's the kind of good that we don't so much possess

as are possessed by it. And it's a common good, which means that it doesn't diminish when it's shared by many. It actually grows. So we're called up into it. And you can think about C.S. Lewis' description in The Last Battle.

Further up and further in, it is a house that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. So there are constantly new vistas. Not in the sense that we'll be growing in charity, but that we'll be discovering more and more of God. So I think it will retain that dynamism. That's beautiful, beautifully put. That's what I was going to ask you because how we love on earth will result in our ability to enjoy God forever and all eternity. And I think it was Teresa of Avila who said, all will be sufficiently

full, but some will be kind of a larger Teresa of Avila who said, all will be sufficiently full, but some will be kind of a larger vessel than others. So the blessed mother will be an ocean, mother Teresa, a swimming pool, I'll be a thimble if that, and yet we'll all be full. But is this and also, is this a way to look at it where our vessel, will our vessel be continually growing throughout all eternity so as to receive more or no? I don't think so. In the sense that the degree of charity that you merited in life is the principle of your enjoyment of the beatific vision, and you cease meriting at the moment of death. So when the body and soul separate, you cease to merit. So that's also what gives such dramatic import to this life. Because there's like,

there's a kind of timelessness, both to purgatory and to heaven. We participate the eternity of God in a far more awesome and peculiar way. So right now we are living this life of time. You know, it's proper to us as humans to be time bound. And so everything is filled with purpose, filled with drama, because we are proceeding on the way towards the vision of God, and everything tells for or against that glorious strength. So, no, we won't continue to increase. Interesting. Yeah, but there will still be a dynamism. But how? Dynamism, what does that mean then? There's like still, there's a kind of movement in the sense that like, so St. Thomas says that the perfection of charity is present, you know, so when you grow in the habit of charity, the virtue.

But he says it's most perfectly present in the actual act. So when you are loving, that's where you are most charitable. That's what's most particularly excellent about the human creature. So we are going to be loving in a fully actualized way. We won't just be capable of knowing God and of loving God. We won't just have developed virtues for knowing and loving God. We will actually be knowing and loving God to the fullest extent which we ourselves are capable of at that juncture. So we'll be firing on all cylinders.

We will be, yeah. In a certain sense, too, I love to think about it in terms of our history. You know, we'll be singing the song of how Christ has saved us. Because it's, you know, St. Paul talks often about how we, you know, we fill up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ or that we kind of like bring to birth, you know, in labor pains, you know, the grace of God at work within us. So there's a sense in which the redemption is incomplete until it's complete in you or in me. And that's what our earthly lives are for, is for Christ to tell his story in us in a unique and beautiful way. There are certain things about God that only we can tell by our vocations, right? There are certain notes in the heavenly choirs that only our voice can supply. And so we will sing of God's glory

in a way that only we can, or only I can, or you can. And we'll go on telling the story of how the grace of God was at work in our life. And that's awesome. And people will be able to see it because our flesh will give expression to it in perfect fashion. Like when St. John Paul II talks about the nuptial meaning of the body, Our bodies, our resurrected bodies, will give perfect expression to the love, the desire, the enjoyment of our souls in a way that is concretely you. So in that, I think there's still dynamism because it's actualized. It's like, hmm, yeah.

That's literally the most beautiful explanation of heaven I've ever heard. Dang. Thank you. Dude, Jesus is Lord. Let's talk about the intellectual life. Let's do it. There's a great book written by a great Dominican about that very topic. There is indeed. That's excellent. I'm with you. Let's talk about the intellectual life. Let's do it. There's a great book written by a great Dominican about that very topic.

There is indeed. That's excellent. I'm with you. Let's talk about it. What does that even mean and why should we be bothered? We're intellectual beings. Nailed it. So I think when people hear intellectual life, at first it sounds almost un-American,

which for you wouldn't be that big of a deal, but for me it would. Really? Un-American? Well, because like't be that big of a deal, but for me it would. Really? Un-American? Well, because like, here, hear me out. All right. So when we hear intellectual, I think sometimes we think like hoity-toity or elitist or snooty. Yeah, it's like the kind of people that wear... Cold bag coffee?

Yeah, send me. It's the kind of people that wear sweater vests and ascots. Circular glasses. Yes, yes. Glasses like this, maybe. And pocket protectors and, like, a little whatever. I'm not going to, you know, challenge people's sense of style. Sure.

But we associate it with people who are, like, locked up in an ivory tower. They don't think about what's real in life. They don't actually have to deal with kids and changing diapers and, like, carpooling and picking up ladders for, like, rodent infestations in their catics. Right? So, like, they're the kind of people that just get to like think about things and then they write weird stuff that actually doesn't correspond to reality and then we call them what intellectuals, what a blessing. So I think that we want to get away from that sense of intellectual. What we're talking about here is like a kind of democratic sense of intellectual, a truly American kind of sense of intellectual. Like you can drive

a Ford F-150, you can have like a bald eagle patch on your leather jacket. Don't tread on the flag hanging out the back. Exactly. Yeah. You can like look on like YouTube for like videos of F-35 joint strike fighters and still be this kind of intellectual. Okay. It's like waving wheat, purple mountain majesty type of intellectual. So what do we mean? Well, it just means that you think about things, right? So at first, that sounds kind of, well, uninteresting, but most people don't necessarily think about things because we're really busy or we're really distracted or we find it very difficult and then we fall asleep. So what does it mean to think about things? Well, just to think about what's most important. Let's build it up. Let's build it up. So what kind of creatures are we? Well, we're animals, but we're a particular kind of animal, a rational animal,

or as Aristotle called us once, non-feathered bipeds. What's up, bro? So we're non-feathered bipeds. So we share things with the beasts, our desires, our appetites, our sense, knowledge, et cetera. But then we have these two powers that are distinctive. You know, like, we are the only kind of material creation that have minds with which to know and hearts with which to love. So if that's the case, then you would think that what we are as human beings is going to be bound up with those powers because they're really, like, decisive, really determinative. And so, like, when you search the Christian tradition, when you talk about being made to the image of God, that's principally associated with knowledge and love, with intellect and with will. And will

just means like the kind of desire that's born of understanding in a spiritual sense. So we are like the kind of the drama of our life is to develop those powers, to grow them, because we are going to be only as satisfied as we are capacious of being satisfied. And the whole, like, pursuit of knowledge and of love is a, you know, it's a story of growing our capacity for God. So, yeah, so like Aristotle, for instance, thinks that human perfection is bound up with contemplation. And sometimes when you hear contemplation, you think like a kind of whatever thing that only monks do. I don't know exactly how to describe it. But like you think contemplation and you, like the first thought is like St. Pio of Pietrelcina.

Actually, when I was on the plane this morning, I got into my seat and I was just like in seat B, which is that deadly spot between A and C. Sweet Christmas. And not the pointy end either. You were back in coach and you are very tall. Yeah, 27B, man. That was my jam.

And you're looking at the seat that's 26 inches in front of you and then you can already feel your butt. And your knees are in your ears. Yeah, your butt's already starting to fall asleep. And I look over at the lady next to me and she's listening to an Opus Dei reflection. No, that's wonderful. Yeah, I was like, what's up, baby? Did you say hi? Did you call her baby? No, I didn't call her baby. Good. She had a little image of St. Pius of Pietralcina. I was like, boom. Did you say hi? I did, yeah. We had a long combo. That's wonderful. And she showed me a lot of sweet pictures from her most recent pilgrimage to Rome and

to San Giovanni Rotundo. Okay, so when we think about, okay, back on track, my bad. When we think about blah, blah, blah, mysticism, we associate with St. Pio or St. John of the Cross or St. Joseph Cupertino who's flying around with a bunch of angels. What is happening? Right. Right. So we're not, that can be unhelpful if we associate contemplation just with great saints.

Okay, like these 16th century Baroque saints who are always like being like, whatever. That's actually a really good impersonation. Thank you. I actually learned recently that that mystical encounter that St. Teresa of Abila had is called the transverberation. Oh, really? That's such an awesome word. Yeah. She got transverberated. What does that mean? I have no idea. I think it's something to be through, verberated. Changing, wording. Yeah. Yep. But yeah, so that's actually portrayed in the Brzezini. I think that's what the flash does when he walks through the world.

Anyway. I shouldn't joke about holy things, but she was transverberated. And that's portrayed in Bernini's statue, which is right outside of the Parthenon there. Yeah, it's beautiful. So we're like, contemplation, transverberation, crazy, I'll just change the diaper. Okay, no. What do we mean by contemplation? We mean thinking about things that are most truly true and most, you know, really real. It means thinking about those things wherein our life comes to completion or where our life is really bound up. Because if you were to ask somebody, like, what are you, like, about? You know, they're like, well, you know, like, I like NASCAR and I'm into, like, botany. You know, I'm, like, a member of my local Humboldt chapter. And I'm casually interested in primates, you know, beekeeping. Yeah, sure, I'm an amateur

primatologist, you know, very interested in bonobos. But if you're like, yeah, like what do you like really? Like, what do you, what are you about? You know? And then you kind of get to those things like family, you know, and then lamentably, some people are just completely bound up with work, you know, but like they recognize if they're just working to work more, you know, if they're taking their recreation just to be fresh for work so that they can work harder and more efficient, like there's something blah, you know, and that's why like a lot of millennials have problems with cubicles. So, but you get to this question of like, where do you hang your hat? Where do you rest? Where do you play? Where do you enjoy life? And eventually you're going to have to get to like

contemplation. And some people do it with like nature, you know, like, you know, like Yosemite National Park is my cathedral. It's like, fine, you know, for sure. If you ever think that, just consider the fact that it could have been a reservoir because there's a huge valley right next to Yosemite called Hetchy Hetch. And the government had a choice. They're like, we need to back up a lot of water so that people south of here can drink. And they backed up Hetchy Hetch, but they could have backed up Yosemite. So you're like, wow, dude, Alex Honnold, free soloing this sweet El Cap thing. You're like, yeah, that could be underwater. What's up? Okay. So yeah, but like people have some sense that it's contemplative. It's about thinking and loving and that we really, yeah, being really, and it's not

bound up with what you do. And then if it is, it's always going to be a rat race so that we should cultivate a sense of thinking about the right things and loving the right things because that's where we are most properly human. That's where we are fully alive. So I think that everyone is called to that kind of intellectual life. And it means a little bit of reading, but more principally it means praying. I think it was Chesterton who said something like, cows are satisfied in the meadows, men smoke discontentedly in the bars.

But that does go to your point that since we're rational beings, we actually won't be satisfied living like a beast because we've been made for more. And this is kind of where the intellectual life comes in to satisfy those natural potencies we have and desires. And it involves a little bit of restlessness.

Definitely. Because we have that expression, he's as happy as a pig in a poke. It's like... Different in Australia? Right, yeah. Much more offensive in Australia. Right, cheers. But the idea is like, if you're completely like satisfied, something's gone wrong, right? We think about it as almost smug or like overly self-involved, but like we should be like starved to our crazy bones, but with eyes wildly alive. I'm going to quote some poetry. I only know three poems.

All right, here it comes. I love it. George Herbert. You ever heard of George Herbert? He's one of these Anglican divines. He has this poem called The Pulley. And he describes the scene where God is creating man. And in the first lines, he's just lavishing on man all of these gifts. So beauty flowed, then wisdom, honor, pleasure.

And then there's this kind of creative pause. And he says, gifts instead of me and rest in nature, not the God of nature. So both should losers be. So let him keep the rest, but keep them with repining restlessness. Let him be rich and weary that at least if goodness lead him not, yet weariness may toss into my breast. Glory. He was like, ah. So like the contemplative life is like living out of that restlessness. It's the recognition that I am not yet wholly made. And there is only one person who can make me through and through. And I have to spend my days in repining restlessness, but like trying to recover that Godward gaze.

Right. Because that is what I am made for. And I will never be content with anything less. Because like when you go to hang your heart, you know, there's only one thing that can support the weight. And if you try to hang it on something that can't, that's sin. We're getting dangerously close to the argument from desire. But it's a good argument. I think the happiest I have ever been in my entire life was with my wife, Cameron. We weren't having sex, although those are good occasions too. I was with my friend Elisa and her husband, Chester. We were in San Diego and

we went to this little farmer's market. You know, it's cool people in San Diego are warm to do. Drinking kale, shakes and things. Warby Parker glasses. That's right. And then we drove our car down to the beach as the sun was setting and we were body surfing. Sunset cliffs, La Jolla? It wasn't in La Jolla. I forget where it was. But the sun, as it was coming down, made the sky this lovely mango colour.

And I just remember thinking, I have never been this happy ever. And yet I am very dissatisfied. But I think a lot of uninteresting people would want to preach at me at that point and say, well, why? And I'm like, you don't get it. It's like when I've been the happiest, it's always felt like a foretaste of something more, be that in marital love or on the porch with that cool breeze and my children playing. It's not enough. There is this yearning for John of the Cross, I know not what. Isn't it? Yeah. That's what I love. Do you like John of the Cross? It's poetry. So I haven't read much John of the Cross. I've been told not to read them until I'm 40, until I've had sufficient

experience in life. Well, I've made a mistake then, but here's a quote since you quoted poetry at me. I made a mistake then, but here's a quote, since you quoted poetry at me. Here's part of his poem. He says, like a fevered man who loathes any food he sees and desires, I know not what which is so gladly found. Isn't that lovely? As someone who's just had surgery and has been fevered, I want, but I don't know what I want. Because I don't want any of this. I don't want coffee.

I don't want chocolate. I don't want to run or anything. I don't know what I want. And that's his name for God. I know not what. Yeah. No, I mean, it's just like, there's a long tradition of people searching and ruling things out and not yet coming to, you know, like the name or the term or not yet giving whatever, like, you know, clear expression to their desire. But even that searching, and I think you alluded to the fact of Jordan Peterson having such a kind of appeal now. People have a sense that he's doing it sincerely, and that people find attractive. You know, like, could he probably benefit from traditional Christian teaching? You know, like, would it help him with discoveries that he himself has not yet made?

Probably. Christian teaching, you know, like, would it help him with discoveries that he himself has not yet made? Probably, you know, but like, his mode of proceeding has just a very, very potent evangelical effect without saying, like, it's introducing people to the gospel per se, but like, it's showing people how to desire, you know, and to be unsatisfied with half measures or half truths, you know, and if that means for him, like, building it up from the foundation, you know, so be it. I mean, it serves a purpose of reorienting, you know, just like reorienting people's loves. Can we become satisfied with things we ought not to be satisfied in? I mean, we talked a bit about blotting out the natural law in the heart of man, how we can come to love

certain things that we ought not to love that aren't good for our nature. Can we actually, I guess we can get to a point where we shut our heart down. And this reminds me of C.S. Lewis. The problem isn't that you desire too much, but that you desire too little. So I suppose we can, right? Yeah. And why is that? Is it because we, like you said a moment ago or three hours ago,

when it comes to Twitter and real friendships, we allow the superficial to kind of placate us. Yeah. And I think our loves can kind of just atrophy if they're not exercised. We're the type of beast that needs exercise, not just bodily, but spiritually. And if we cease, you know, if we cease to run, if we cease to pursue things worthy of our heart's loves, then we'll kind of forget how to do that. How do we know if we're not in that situation right now? How do we know if we're... Like, how do I know? I mean, maybe I've forgotten how to love wildly and to pursue, and people who are watching now are like, maybe I'm like that, and to some degree, we're all like that. Yeah. So one thing I would say is that oftentimes, it's hard to know in the

moment whether you're loving more recklessly now or less so. But sometimes we have these kind of graced moments of clarity where it's shown to us how the Lord is at work in our life. So like an example that I find very compelling and one that I've experienced on a few occasions is when you go back someplace where you haven't been in a while and you smell something and then like in that kind of deja smelt moment, you're returned bodily to a former time. And not only are you returned to that time and place, but you're also like returned to your sensibilities. Like you have a memory, like a refreshed memory of what you were thinking and what you were feeling. Your emotional state. Exactly. Yeah. And it's weird. It can be like really powerful. Very much so. And oftentimes

in those moments, you recognize like how you compare to your former self. Like, are you more at peace? Are you more content? Or like, are you more anxious? former self. Like, are you more at peace? Are you more content? Or, like, are you more anxious? Are you more sad? Are you more lonely? I don't know. But, like, oftentimes you'll recognize the trajectory of your life only as a subsequent thing. Because you can't really tell where the line is headed from a point. But when you have a segment, you know, you can extrapolate. So I think that, like, you know, like, you can kind of take your own spiritual temperature, but our own psychological states can sometimes be deceptive. What we want is something more real. We want like a sense of fit of like resonance. Like, am I living? Am I actually engaging in life? And to gauge that,

I mean, it takes, it takes a kind of manifestation, a kind of revelation. But yeah, I mean, it's like we shouldn't be able to, we shouldn't expect to love to the utmost like from the outset. You know, that too is something that we grow in. So like St. Thomas talks about how the Blessed Mother continues to increase in grace throughout the course of her life. And there's this 20th century Dominican, Reginald Gary Goulet Grange, who talks about he likens her to like a comet and whatever, blah, blah, blah, terminal velocity. But like she is a comet hurtling towards earth that continues to increase in velocity with every passing moment. So like, it's not that like, okay, weird math stuff. I studied math, you know, like you got logarithmic

curves that go up. No idea. Yeah, whatever. And then they kind of flatline and you got like more exponential curves that go like this. So we shouldn't like content ourselves with like an initial burst of increasing grace and then expect to like plateau for the rest of our days. We want to just be hurtling into the heart of God, right? So we should increase like daily in desire. We're not going to be able to gauge that psychologically, but we will come to find like down the road that I enjoy praying more. I find it easier to spend an uninterrupted 20 minutes in the presence of the blessed sacrament. I no longer find, I'm no longer as scandalized by bad preaching. I can derive spiritual fruit from it even against the preacher's best intentions. Whatever. You find that God is blessing you and there's no other way to account for it except

that his grace is operative in your life. So yeah, desire itself is given to us from on high. Give us that desire, Lord. Yeah. You know, what's interesting is you read some of the Eastern Church fathers and sometimes it sounds like they speak about desire as if it were a disease that was contracted after the fall. And, of course, Thomas wouldn't say that. And I don't even know if necessarily some of these Eastern fathers mean that.

Maybe they just mean inordinate desire because, of course, we ought to desire God, and that can't be a disease. But, yeah. St. Catherine of Siena says, God asks of you not a perfect work, but infinite desire. And this is what, I love what Aquinas has to say on prayer in the Summa, you know, can we pray at all times? And he says, in one sense, he's very practical. No, of course you can't.

You know, you've got to pick up people from school and you've got to go to the shops and you've got to pray Holy Mass. But in another sense, you can. And he says it's through desire. Increasingly desiring. That's why I love the Jesus prayer because it's like just this continual saying of my heart's longing. I love Ralph Martin's, the title of his book, The Fulfillment of All Desire.

Yeah. All right, let's take some questions from some of our amazing patrons. Now, you haven't seen these questions. I haven't. Look at them. Well, there's not that many. Hoss Hammond says, ask and you shall receive. That's because I said give me some questions.

Could you ask, Father, why is it that God loves some people more than others? And in what way does he love them? For his love is equal, for we all exist. But it would seem he gives more grace to say like our blessed mother than someone else. And that is indeed true. Thomas says, Aquinas, you know, you read that in the Summa, whether God loves people more than others,

and you expect him to be like a good American and say, he loves them all. He loves you equally. Exactly. But Aquinas is like, totes. So why, what does it mean to say that God loves some more than others? That seems unfair. So for listeners at home, if you want to read this, I love this article. It's in the first part of the Summa, question 20, article three, devastation station. Okay. So just prepare to have your mind blown or your face melted or whatever

like rock analogy you want to employ. First part. First part, question 20, I think article three, I could be wrong, but I think that's it. So what does St. Thomas say? Well, he says in God, so God's simple, right? So God isn't making like different discreet acts with respect to us. God is loving himself and we are so many expressions of God's love. Okay. So in that sense, God loves all the same because we are all so many expressions of God's love. Look at you. You got it right. Yeah, what's up? But he says, God wills some greater graces than others. That is what he says. Boom. So we have to say why? To what end? For what purpose? So here, St. Thomas brings it back to the fact of creation. What is creation for? It's not so that we will all be equal under the law in the sight of God.

It's for the manifestation of the glory of God, right? God didn't need to create. He didn't, right? He didn't like need man. We don't serve a purpose in the triune life that the other persons don't supply for, right? So we are a kind of overflow of God's love. We are God telling the secret of his love in time and space. And so it stands to reason then that our end, our goal is to return to God and to give glory to him in a way that only we can, or each kind of unique thing can.

So it would stand to reason too, that variety is part of God's designs because God is simple, we said. So you can't, God can't speak his divine life in one created word. There's no one word that sums him up. He is inexhaustible. So he speaks many different words so that by all of these wending ways, we could come to know more and more of his overabounding divine life. And so he makes some to be mothers and fathers, some to be consecrated religious, some to be priests, et cetera, So that you can see in these different dimensions, in the multifaceted ecclesial body, what it means to be the body of Christ, what it means to be God's own. And so to some, he gives greater grace because it shows his glory in a way unique to that creature. So like for instance, start from the top. Jesus

Christ is incarnate. So he took to himself a human nature. That grace we call the hypostatic union, not important to remember at this juncture, but just know that it's a grace, greatest grace imaginable. St. Thomas says an infinite grace, a quasi-infinite grace. So there's no greater grace than that. And that's not something that we get jealous over. Like, well, why didn't he become incarnate? No, that's just an insane question. So no one begrudges that to the only begotten Son of God. Ratchet it down. Blessed Virgin Mary, right? She's the mother of God. So her life is most closely associated with that of her son. So to be the mother of God is a graced thing. Not only does it require grace for her mission,

but it's a kind of icon of grace. So we should see what it looks like to draw close to the incarnate Lord. And we see that in the Virgin Mary. So she is given next greatest degree of grace, and that's why we afford her a veneration higher than all the saints, sometimes referred to as hyperdulia. What's up? Next, St. Joseph, think about this, all right? Universal protector of Holy Church, most chaste spouse of the Virgin, foster father of the incarnate Lord. Terror of demons. My favorite. Yeah, you better believe it. I was just praying that novena in anticipation of the feast. Cool. Terror of demons. My favorite. Yeah, you better believe it. I was just praying that novena in anticipation of the feast. Cool. Fist bump. So St. Joseph, also given an incredible degree of grace to equip him for his ministry, but also to show what it means to be in God's family in a concrete way so as to kindle our desires for those things.

So yeah, and then you just go down the line. Think about the different saints. So yeah, and then you just go down the line. Think about the different saints. So like the good news is that God is giving you grace. He is giving you as much grace as he wants in a certain sense. So how does this change our thinking about the life of sanctification? Well, if you don't become the Blessed Mother, it's not because you're a failure. It's because God hasn't given you the grace to be the Blessed Mother.

He's giving you the grace to be Saint you, whatever Saint Matt Fred, or Saint Father Gregory Pine, whatever. But we are responsible for consenting to and cooperating with the graces that are actually given. Not like laboring under some nostalgia for the graces that could have been given, or like lusting after future graces that might not be given. We are to respond to the graces that are actually given. Because in so doing, we say something of God that only we can. We show his variety. We show all of his divine attributes in a way particular to this vocation, to this time and place, to this setting in life. So yeah, God does it because it makes his glory known. And because the purpose of this life isn't to be equal, all to be the blessed mother,

a kind of monochromatic grace portraiture. It's to be saints. Could we read his respondio here in light of what you've just said, and then maybe you might want to comment on it. So Aquinas says, Since to love a thing is to will it good, in afold way. Anything may be loved more or less. In one way on the part of the act of the will itself, which is more or less intense in this way,

God does not love some things more than others because he loves all things by an act of the will that is one simple and always the same. That's an important distinction because I think the reason maybe that, you know, sounds weird in people's ears is they think, you God loves you but he whatever about me that kind of thing no yeah so that's that's an important distinction yeah in another way on the part of the good itself that a person wills for the beloved in this way we are said to love that one more than another for whom we will a greater good though our will is not more intense.

In this way, we must need say that God loves some things more than others, for since God's love is the cause of goodness in things, it's been said, no one thing would be better than another. Very good. But things are better than another. Clearly, the Blessed Mother versus me. If God did not will greater goods for one than another. Yeah, that's great. It is great.

Well done, Thomas. Hey, cheers. Guys are real, real, well, whatever else I'm talking about. Good question. Joshua says, what is a succinct way of saying the Dominican view of the relation between free will and divine providence? Nice. Simple way. Simple. Good luck with that. Free will and divine providence. Nice. Simple way. Simple. Good luck with that. Free will and divine providence.

God acts innermostly, okay? He is more interior to me than I am to myself. That's our first principle. Second, the will is a spiritual power, so it cannot be coerced or it cannot be forced by outside things, right? And it's free in as much as it gives expression to this kind of spiritual spontaneity. So we would say that in acting, man and God cooperate or man cooperates with God. So God creates the will, he sustains it in being. He gives rise to our agency and he moves our will towards the good. And that we, in consenting to and cooperating with that, act in a way that's personal and wholly ours. So that action is holy gods and holy mans.

So oftentimes Dominicans would argue against this other position called Molinism. And the idea there is that like whatever God does takes away from what I do. So God and man are like similar types of causes and they're in a kind of competition. So he says that they're like men pulling at oars. So whatever God does takes away from the labor that I need do. And whatever I do, it's in a certain sense, like takes away from what God need do. But the way that St. Thomas describes it is that God is at work in and through the person, giving rise to that faculty, to that spiritual disposition, inclining it towards the good, actualizing it by his help, and that man is fully engaged in that act. So it's something that's interior, so non-violent, non-coerced. It's something that's wholly human, something that we ourselves do, but it's also something, you know, given by God. And that does not entail a

contradiction. So we often think the contradiction is either we have free will or we are being acted upon from without. And you're saying there's a third option and that is? Yeah, that God can move us sweetly and strongly because he's the very giver of the faculty, and he moves it, inclines it, and actually kind of conducts it towards its end. And God wills that necessary things happen necessarily, and contingent things, that is to say free things, happen freely. So sometimes people say, well, if God knows the end game, aren't we just bound to do what it is that we're to do?

No, because God has afforded us a share in his providence. It's like it wasn't sufficient for him to make us passive recipients. He also wants us to be agents, secondary causes, like instruments of the unfolding of his divine plan. And so he affords us this capacity and operates in and through us as we develop it so that it's wholly ours, wholly free, and yet holy gods. Excellent. Great answer. Thanks. Katie Kutcher says, Does he, that would be further blind, have any advice on how a young mother can teach her children how to think properly to use these tools of faith and reason?

First of all, I didn't handpick these questions. This is just how awesome my patrons are. That's sweet, man. They're just really intelligent and in-tune people. Yeah. It's a good question. So yeah, I have sisters and they have children. And I think about this when I visit them.

Best thing is, so a lot of the stuff that your children are going to be given, depending on their schooling, is materialistic or reductionistic or scientific or naturalistic. So they're going to imbibe those things unless you anticipate it, get out ahead of it. they're going to imbibe those things unless you anticipate it, get out ahead of it. So I know that, for instance, there's a kind of project in the works right now to write textbooks for science classes. It's this like, there's a John Templeton grant for this thing called Thomistic Evolution, and then they've got this kind of side project. And I don't actually know how it's developing at this stage, but that there are plans to kind of get out ahead of this. But, you know, your children will be almost automatically influenced by the modernity in which they live. We're all products of our time to a certain extent.

But by anticipating that and equipping your kids for it, you can help them to process their experience more fruitfully. That is to say, they get their first introduction in the home, and those introductions mean something, and they stick, and they're super formative. So that way your kid can go into school and they'll hear something and they'll recognize it by the kind of sense of the faith that they've imbibed at the hearth. And they'll have the equipment to say, that doesn't sound right. I'm going to go and consult my parents, right? So yeah, I mean, concrete advice. I stink at concrete things. I stink at practical things. How to properly use the tools of faith and reason. I think just like emphasizing the fact that

we need never fear the truth. That's one thing you can impart to your kids at a young age is that wherever the truth is found, it's addressed to us for our knowing. So it's not that like faith is against reason or reason is against faith, but rather that we have access to reality. Some of which we have access to naturally, some of which we have access to supernaturally. And that in both of those dimensions, we're really being faithful to, you know, our call to know and to love. So if something comes from science and it sounds like it's in conflict with faith, we needn't fear. Because we believe that God speaks truly, else there's nothing true. So either we don't understand the faith well, or this is an untested hypothesis, but we need to do the work of finding out how they're symphonic because that work can

be done. Now, with other faith traditions, that's not necessarily the case. You can't have that kind of confidence, but you can teach your kids that they have nothing to fear. There's like no knowledge that they need shun, unless it's like idle curiositas. You know, it's just like, if it's just like knowledge thrill-seeking, maybe it's not worth our time. But whenever these things come up, we can find a way through and we can actually have our minds conform to what is, because they're made for that. How important is the reading of good literature in the home to help our children learn to love the good and think well? I think it's very important. So especially like before the age of whatever, 20, I don't think there's much sense

in like reading philosophy or like theology, not because those things aren't good, but because, you know, just when you're young, you don't have the capacity to appreciate them. And I say this to myself, like I was introduced to some things just too early and I developed a distaste for them because I wasn't equipped to actually, yeah, to like handle it. So I would say, yeah, to introduce age-appropriate literature is the best introduction to philosophy and theology, because what does literature do? It spins out the human condition, it gives you access to a wider human experience, and then it like represents your humanity to you. So, you know, prudence is something that's, you know, it hinges on having a memory of the past,

it hinges on being docile to the good counsel of your forebears. But it means you need to have experienced life in order to be prudent, in order to find a way through all of these different clamorous goods. And so if you grew up in a suburb north of Atlanta, you might not have a wide experience of Yankees, for instance. But you can read those kind of things in literature and have a broader understanding of what it means to be a human being which deepens your appreciation of the real and sets you up for a more fruitful engagement later on in life. So like when I read like Russian literature for instance, on the one hand I'm like this is awesome, on the other hand I'm like do I share the same humanity with these people? You know because it's like these people are like raving at like 11pm

and then their favorite russian novel because i love i just read to genya's fathers and sons nice crime and punishment's my favorite crime and punishment i think that's the one that makes most sense to me in the sense of like the redemption narrative is the least ambiguous it's so beautiful it is what's crazy speaking about this faith and reason you notice with ross kolnikov that he he does awful things when he thinks. You notice this? Yeah. So he acts spontaneously from the good of his heart,

like that girl who he could tell was about to be ravaged or he leaves money for the husband who'd been run over by the horse. And then he walks down the stairs and thinks, why the bloody hell did I do that? Yeah. Yeah. There's a kind of spontaneous inclination. Yeah.

Which is what the name Raskolnikov means, actually. It's a split, like a schism. That's where the word comes from. Wow. Anyway, I love that. Yeah. Yeah. There's a kind of spontaneous inclination. Yeah. Which is what the name Raskolnikov means, actually. It's a split, like a schism. That's where the word comes from. Wow. Anyway. I love that. What's your favorite book? So, The Gospel of John. That's not just an un- I meant Russian literature, but that's okay. Oh, yeah, my bad. Crime and Punishment. Yeah. Crime and Punishment. I haven't read many. I've read That and The Idiot and The Brothers K. I'm just getting into The Idiot. Nice. My understanding is that it was written after Crime and Punishment and it was meant to be kind of like a mirror image of Raskolnikov. So if Raskolnikov is the deep, dark, brooding, awful one,

the idiot is the most like Christ that a man could be. Which is heartbreaking because he seems like the most naive. Yeah. But his innocence is a kind of like foil for everyone else's corruption. That's true also of Alyosha, I think, in The Brothers K. Yeah. Why don't you like The Brothers K more than Crime and Punishment? Just because I didn't understand it.

Oh. Yeah. You must have read it a long time ago. I read it not that long ago. I read it like eight years ago. The reason I like Crime and Punishment more than The Brothers K, sorry to go off on this. No, let's do it.

But I don't care because I love the Russian authors, is because I love The Brothers Karamazov. It is absolutely glorious and led me to tears many times. But there's so many side stories and things that you feel like this could have been removed from the novel, and the novel would have been poorer, but it would have been no less sort of... Narratively compelling.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't have a good theory or philosophy as to how best to weave a narrative. And then what about Tolstoy? You read much Tolstoy? None.

I have, but I love him. He's brilliant. He's got a really great little book called The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which is all about the life of a civil servant

who wasted his life kind of running after honors and money and then he dies. And it's a slow death and his family just think he's a pain in the ass. He's complaining about his pain, and they're like, just shut the hell up. And so he's just slowly dying, and no one seems to care except one of his servants who shows love to him.

And at the last moment, he realizes there's still time to live a good life, and he chooses to love. It is a beautiful meditation on death. You could read it in a couple of hours. Death of Ivan Ilyich. Go and read it. Boom. You have compelled me. I'm drunk. Chekhov? I'm sorry. I'm going to stop this, but Chekhov's great. What does he write there? Dead Souls. I read some of Dead Souls and then some short stories.

Yeah. The one about the fiddle. What's that one? I don't know. My retention for this is... But we should read literature to our kids. Yeah. Absolutely. I'm reading Lord of the Rings. But we should read literature to our kids. Yeah. Absolutely. I'm reading Lord of the Rings to my kids right now. They love it. I just listened to a lecture on Tolkien.

Did you? On the TI podcast. Tell them. Yeah, there's a podcast for the Thomistic Institute. Red light, go. There's a podcast. It's for the Thomistic Institute. I work for the Thomistic Institute.

And we have these lectures on different college campuses. And then we record them and then just put them on a podcast. So the target audience is an undergraduate and the idea is to engage with like philosophy, theology,

literature, art, music, like all these kinds of things in a way that's, yeah, awesome. I should say the audience

is intelligent undergraduate. Can we say that? Because often I'm listening and being like, yeah, I totally get this. This is super simple. Yeah. I mean, some people pitch it higher, some people pitch it lower. And then sometimes we have conferences, which are like four academic types. And you're listening

to like sweet talk about Tolkien, sweet talk about, I don't know, like some visual artist and theology. And then you hear like five straight lectures about faith and science that are pitched at a pretty high level. You're like, wow, this is intense. So yeah, different registers. Now, I just want to get this. I want people to be able to check this out. Yeah, Rothschild's Fiddle. That's a story you could read in an hour, and it is glorious. Anyway, by Chekhov. All right, let's go to another question here. Trey Weaver says, I'm a youth minister. We recently had a Dominican visit our parish. I reached out to my youth group to see if there were any questions. All right, and here are the questions.

Friar mentioned that, I don't know who Friar is. Friar mentioned that in the day of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Dominicans were sent to prestigious universities to study. Is that still the case today? And if so, how do they counteract the secular anti-religious nature of many of these current universities? So that is true. St. Dominic founded the order in 1216, and in August of 1217,

he sent the men on the Feast of the Assumption in this kind of act of abandonment to divine providence because he knew that there was going to be a kind of gravity or a temptation to stay in the monastery and live what is effectively a monastic life, but he wanted them in the city center. So he sent men to Spain, he sent men to Paris, eventually they end up in like Bologna and Naples and Oxford, the big university centers of the day. And the idea was that you would take the monastic life and you would bring it as close to city center as possible without losing your soul. So the idea was that he recognized in the monastic

life this particular genius, namely the genius of contemplation, that there was something noble and beautiful and worthy to contemplate. But he said, well, St. Thomas says that it's better to illumine than merely to shine. And so the kind of Dominican genius is that you bring these monasteries close to city center so that they can be sources of wisdom, so that they can be sources of a holy preaching, which is how the Dominican's convents were first called in the early days. And so that people would be attracted by that and kind of called into communion with, yeah, with the Lord. So like a thing that's often quoted from St.

Thomas Aquinas as like a motto of the Dominican order is to contemplate and to share with others things contemplated or God contemplated. So the Dominican was meant to be just really engrossed in this contemplation of the Lord. And then when he preached, you should see like a man transfigured. You should look and hear and think, I can love God because it's evident that God is loving in this man. And so the idea was to go where the people are so that they could see that as a witness to hope and that it was possible to enjoy communion with the Most High. So yes, the Dominicans are still sent to major universities. That's kind of our principal apostolate is to preach and to teach at the heart of, you know, the contemporary culture. And it's still possible to lose your soul, you know.

There's a kind of temptation to the active life because there's so much need. You're compassed about on every side by just, you know, the church suffering, and you want to attend to all of that. But ultimately, if you don't have the rooting or anchoring in a contemplative life, then you cease to be distinctively Dominican. And then just like in academia, you know, it's its own kind of culture, which is counter to the culture of the gospel in many instances. And when you live in a certain environment, it's going to affect you unless you have a really, really strong backbone or like a really, really good community. So yeah, it's risky, but I mean, it's perilous, but life is often defined by taking perilous risks.

Garen Gray says, I'm a convert discerning becoming a Dominican brother. You're welcome. What advice or words do you have to say to those who are trying to figure out if they're called to Dominican life? What's your daily life like? I'll answer two, then one. Daily life. You wake up, get ready for the day, and then you...

5.30? Yeah. So I get up at 5.15, shower, shave, et cetera, eat breakfast, and then usually pray for about an hour before morning prayer, and then mass. And then about eight o'clock, it depends on where you are and what you do. You start either prepping your homilies, doing work for your kind of like faith formation in the evenings. Maybe you have some time dedicated to study. So most Dominicans set aside at least 30 minutes a day, even after ordination, to read theology. That's in addition to like the stuff that you have to read for making preparation for marriages or baptism or blah, blah, blah.

So you have a period of study. And then midday, you'd have like rosary and midday prayer. You'd eat lunch with the brothers. Then the afternoon, you have another period of work. And then office of readings and vespers and dinner. The day ends with Compline. My schedule is largely determined by my travels. So Dominicans classically are itinerants.

So they travel around, they preach and they teach. And so you're trying to interiorize this monastic dimension so that wherever you are, you know, in whatever city you're visiting, whatever convent or rectory or priory you're staying in, you have the form of life is impressed upon you in such a way that you bring the monastic dimension with you to the extent it's possible. So yeah, there's this commitment to contemplative prayer, to a common life with the brothers, you know, expressed in recreation, in common prayer, et cetera, of study, of preaching, and devout life. And all of those come together in this monastic context where there's habit and cloister and penance and silence, all of which defend or like kind of delimit your consecration. So that way you have a place in which to encounter God

consistently. And then, yeah, that's like the daily life is like you wake up, you pray, you work, you pray, you work, you pray. Sometimes you recreate, enjoy, blah, blah, blah. And then you pray and then you like deposit your corpse into your bed and hope that you'd be resurrected again the next day. I know what a lot of people appreciate when they're discerning priesthood about religious life is that they want to live with a community of brothers. They don't want to live an isolated life in a rectory away from other priests. Is that something that appealed to you? Hugely. Yeah. And I suppose it's something that I'm just constantly impressed by. There's a tradition in religious life of fraternal correction. So a way that you express your charity

for the brothers is to call them on to holiness, to say like, you're doing this. I imagine it's for this reason, but it seems like it's not good for you for this to say like, you're doing this. I imagine it's for this reason, but it seems like it's not good for you for this reason. So, you know, take that into consideration. You try to do it gently and honestly. But the thing that I'm most chastened by, the thing that I'm most rebuked by, or even just like encouraged by, is the witness of the brothers. So when I see like Father Thomas Joseph White's generosity, you know, and his diligence, I find that really impressive. When I see like Father Dominic Legge's like priestly care, you know, he's a priest's priest. He's an excellent man. I am encouraged by that and called on by that. When I see like

Father Aquinas' leadership, you know, when I see Father Michael's, you know, like talent in music, and like especially with like my closest friends, when I see the fact of their consecration and how that actually plays out in the concrete. And you can see it in all of these different settings. And what is most impressive is that here's a man for the Lord. Here's a man in love. And that makes me want to love the Lord more. So the community is such an incredible witness. And you really witness to each other before even witnessing to anyone else. And it's awesome. Yeah, I am the way I am because of my friends and my brothers. You know, I imagine that almost answers the first question that he had, whether he's called

to the Dominicans, just hearing about the life of a Dominican. Yeah. It's probably pretty inspiring. Yeah. And I think too, like part of where you end up is just, some of it's just like, where were you born? Like what parish do you come from? Or like, who did you meet first? In a certain sense, it's like, how did you make your best friend? Like, I don't know. Yeah. You just kind of fell in with them. Yeah. Yeah. So like, I wouldn't say, you know, you don't have to like look at every website of every religious congregation in the United States and then make a spreadsheet with like a macro that like computes optimal holiness factors. It's just like a matter of like, who do you love? And what have you found? Sometimes a good question is like, what do you want to do?

Yeah. I remember when I was discerning marriage with my wife, I almost played the voice of God asking me, well, do you want to marry her or not? I'm like, yeah. And God's like, well, buddy, hell go and do it. But sometimes it's as simple as that. Yeah, he is. I had no idea. That's crazy. That'd be really disappointing if we get to heaven. He's like, well, I'm a good and faithful servant. Get stuffed. If God doesn't send like Morgan Freeman, I'll be disappointed. But that's really important. Okay, so how, let's say there's someone out there right now, and they have been doing this for a while,

and they want to know, how do I contact the Dominicans? And how does that work? Can I come and visit them or what? Yeah, absolutely. You're most welcome to visit. I'm a son of the province of St. Joseph, which is based in the northeastern United States. So we have convents and priories throughout, you know, from like Kentucky to Maine, but the big places are New York and Washington,

and that's where our vocation director is. So if you just pull up the website, opeast.org, you'll find the information of the vocation director, and he's super generous with his time, and he'll talk to you on the phone and kind of let you know. O-P-E-A-S-T. O-P, as in order of preachers, east.org. All right. Yep. And then there are other provinces throughout the United States. So we're like the eastern province. And then there's a central and south and west. Sometimes people go by geographical. Do you have to?

No. Yeah, because each kind of has its own character. Paul Binner says, since this is the final question, we have an assistant priest who occasionally expresses doubt about the real presence in his homilies, no less. Regardless, I've heard the priest has to have the intention of confecting the Eucharist for it to be effective. Is it possible it's not occurring? How can we be sure? So that's a really sad question.

And I'm sorry that Paul has experienced that in his, yeah, in his experience of the church. So what is sufficient for validity is that the priest intends what the church intends, and that entails right faith, a kind of baseline right faith concerning the sacraments, and the real presence is an essential feature of our belief in the sacrament of the Eucharist. So the answer is I can't say. I don't know. I don't know how you can be sure because, yeah, it's a spiritual reality. So what would you recommend Paul do? Should he go tell the priest maybe you need to kind of take some time out or talk to his bishop? This is a very serious thing.

Yeah, so there is hierarchical recourse. You know, you can go to, if it's an assistant pastor, you would express that to the pastor first. If you don't feel comfortable talking to the assistant pastor himself, say, you know, for the good of the church, for the good of the worshiping congregation. And then if it's not addressed at that level, then you would just kind of go up with hopes that it'd be addressed in due course. So I'm sorry. Yeah. Okay, a bit of a bummer. So we're going to finish on a high note, Father. How do we do that? We could talk about anything else.

Chick-fil-A. Chick-fil-A. Do you really want to get Chick-fil-A? I do really want to get Chick-fil-A. We're here at the epicenter of Chick-fil-A love. Are you staying tonight in Atlanta? No, I'm leaving this afternoon. Oh, okay. Well, we better do that.

All right. Thanks for being on. Cheers. Thanks for having me. Oh, my goodness. Two hours and 25 minutes and you're still listening. You must be one of those people who people call amazing. And if they don't, it's only because they're jealous.

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Who's gonna survive? Who's gonna survive? Who's gonna survive? And I would give my whole life you you you