Pints With Aquinas - 224: Ghosts, Demon Babies & Werewolves w/ Jimmy Akin

Episode Date: September 22, 2020

Today, I'm joined around the bar table by my good friend and Catholic Answers' apologist Jimmy Akin to talk about what Aquinas had to say about the Occult. (Cue spooky music). Wow, Aquinas has a LOT to say about this topic. Here are just a few of the things you'll learn about during my conversation with Jimmy: - What Aquinas had to say about Psychic Powers - Werewolves - Crystal Healing - Astrology - Ghosts So, buckle up, turn on all the lights so you don't get scared, and let's talk about the Occult! Links Mentioned in the episode:  Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World: https://sqpn.com/category/podcasts/akin/ Aquinas & Occult (Part 1): https://tinyurl.com/yxkwddpy Aquinas & Occult (Part 2): https://tinyurl.com/yypp3l4p Werewolves: https://tinyurl.com/y4a7q7sm Wizard Clip (Early American Catholic Ghost Story): https://tinyurl.com/y3rh77ud Acupuncture: https://tinyurl.com/yynbhjwy Petrus Gonsalvus: https://tinyurl.com/y3aqulex Hypertrichosis: https://tinyurl.com/yxdlj658 Aquinas on Superstition: https://tinyurl.com/y24enwys Aquinas on Divination: https://tinyurl.com/y6kxrbfp Aquinas on Various Practices: https://tinyurl.com/y4flvfc6 Aquinas on the Evil Eye: https://tinyurl.com/y4ow6t27 Aquinas on the Influence of the Stars: https://tinyurl.com/y4faxzg9 Aquinas on Ghosts: https://tinyurl.com/y5oqm2pw Aquinas’s Letter on the Occult Workings of Nature: https://tinyurl.com/y84wnjwa SPONSORS EL Investments: https://www.elinvestments.net/pints  Exodus 90: https://exodus90.com/mattfradd/  Hallow: http://hallow.app/mattfradd  STRIVE: https://www.strive21.com/  GIVING Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mattfradd This show (and all the plans we have in store) wouldn't be possible without you. I can't thank those of you who support me enough. Seriously! Thanks for essentially being a co-producer coproducer of the show. LINKS Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/matt-fradd FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ SOCIAL  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattfradd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd MY BOOKS Does God Exist: https://www.amazon.com/Does-God-Exist-Socratic-Dialogue-ebook/dp/B081ZGYJW3/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586377974&sr=8-9 Marian Consecration With Aquinas: https://www.amazon.com/Marian-Consecration-Aquinas-Growing-Closer-ebook/dp/B083XRQMTF/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586379026&sr=8-4 The Porn Myth: https://www.ignatius.com/The-Porn-Myth-P1985.aspx CONTACT Book me to speak: https://www.mattfradd.com/speakerrequestform  

G'day and welcome to Pints with Aquinas. My name is Matt Fradd and today I am joined around the bar table by my good friend, Catholic Answers apologist, Jimmy Akin. And this was quite the show and it's right in time for Halloween coming, soon at least. Here's what we talked about. I've said this in the past, right? Aquinas addresses way more than you think he does. Aquinas addresses things like, you know, if I get drunk and then sin, is the sin bad? He addresses wet dreams and whether those are sinful. He addresses a whole range of things. Well, you probably didn't know that he addressed the things we speak about today. Aquinas addressed, and we speak about, and we speak about psychic powers, werewolves, demon babies, crystal healing, astrology, ghosts. So there you are. So these are the sorts of things that we speak about today. And I'm going to have links in the description to all of the articles so you can go and read these yourselves. Basically, we're talking about what Aquinas

had to say about things that we would consider today and which were considered in his day, though it had a different connotation, as the occult. So this was a very fantastic episode. And then also, we did a post-show wrap-up portion just for patrons. So patrons, as soon as you become a patron,

you get access to a whole bunch of stuff. One of those things is post-show wrap-up videos. Jimmy Akin and I just spoke for about 15 minutes on our favorite horror movies and the horror genre in general and where it goes too far and where it can be helpful and why people enjoy horror.

And I shared some horror movies with him. He shared some with me that I'm really excited about watching. To get access to that,'m really excited about watching. To get access to that, become a patron at patreon.com slash mattfratton. We'll have that up today for you. But before we jump into today's show, I want to say thanks to Halo. Halo is a Catholic prayer app that will help you grow in your spiritual life. It has five-star ratings on the App Store. It's the most popular Catholic app in the United States and probably anywhere, let's be honest. It's fantastic, very sophisticated,

100% Catholic. There's something in it for everybody. So if you're just beginning to pray and want to be more consistent, go to hallow.com slash Matt Fradd, check it out. Or if you've been praying for a while, but you want to take your prayer life to the next level, hallow.com slash Matt Fradd. Seriously, check it out. It's amazing. It's free content all the time. You can also get access to everything on the app by going to hallow.com slash Matt Fradd. They even have sleep stories, people reading the Bible like Father Mike Schmitz and myself even, and Jonathan Rumi from The Chosen who plays Jesus. Check it out, hallow.com slash Matt Fradd. It's really good. It's really good. It's really good to see an app that is, you know, not only really Catholic,

but also really well produced. So be sure to go check that out. Here is my interview with Jimmy Akin. Jimmy Akin, thank you for being back on Pints with Aquinas. How are you? Doing fine. Glad to be back. How's life in California under the lockdown and fires? I don't know if they're affecting San Diego. Oh yeah, there's one to the east of here but fortunately it's up in California under the lockdown and fires? I don't know if they're affecting San Diego. Oh, yeah.

There's one to the east of here. But fortunately, it's up in the mountains. So it's not a particular danger at the moment. Very good. Well, thank you for being on. I think I was telling you that I'm a big fan of your podcast, The Mysterious World of Jimmy Akin. Did I get that right? I didn't, did I?

No, no, no. Real close. Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World. Jimmy Akin. Did I get that right? I didn't, did I? No, no, real close. Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World. Right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. You guys, do you put a lot of effort into that podcast? It feels like you script it. It doesn't feel like a word is wasted. Yeah, it is basically scripted these days. I do detailed outlines for it and I may vary a little bit from the outlines, but not that much. It's a good way of keeping things on track and keeping me from saying uh too many times. Yeah well it's very good. Tell the people who are listening a little bit about it if they want to go check it out.

Sure so it's a podcast that I started a little more than two years ago. I've always had an interest in mysteries. In fact I used to actually be a detective for money. That is amazing. We're going to talk about that. Continue. But, you know, I love mysteries. I love trying to figure things out. And so I started this podcast to look at different mysteries, both natural and supernatural.

So every Friday we release an episode on a mystery of some kind, and they can be everything from historical mysteries to mysterious. Hang on just a second. No, no problem at all. Alexa, stop. That was my alarm to wake me up to make sure I would be awake for this interview. See, the reason I can't do an Alexa is my kids would continually talk to her. Oh. And I would have to either kill them or throw out the Alexa. Well, fortunately, I don't have that problem.

But as I was saying, the mysteries can be historical ones like, say, an assassination. We've done the assassination of JFK, for example. They can be scientific. We've done the mystery of the missing universe, because according to scientists, we're not seeing as much matter as there is gravity out there. So there's this, you know, dark matter that's been proposed to explain that. They can be religious. We've done all kinds of stories about different aspects of the Christian faith that are mysterious, like, you know, angels and things. We've covered ghosts. We've covered Bigfoot, we've covered UFOs, we've covered psychic things. So all kinds of mysteries. And each episode, we look at them through both the perspectives of faith and reason. So we have a segment in the show where we say,

what does reason tell us about this? And then we also have a segment in the show where we say, what would the faith tell us about this? And so we like to integrate faith and reason, which John Paul II compared to the two wings, like of a bird, that help us rise to the truth. Wonderful. Well, today we want to talk about some mysterious things, what Thomas Aquinas has to say about the occult, about ghosts, astrology, and other things. But before we do, people used to pay you to be a detective? What? Yes. Tell me.

Well, when I was in grad school, I would need a summer job. And so one summer I worked as a private detective. And so I have arrested people. And that is always an intense experience. How can you do that without being an official police officer? Citizens arrest. Citizens arrest. Okay, so awkward experience when you arrest people.

Yeah, because you never know if they're going to fight back, and you never know if they're going to be armed when they fight back. And so there's a reason why all detectives smoke. It's just after you get done busting somebody, you need to unwind. Wow. Wow. Oh, that's fantastic. Actually, speaking of mysteries, I was reading a bit of Father Brown last night by J.K. Chesterton. I'm not sure if you enjoy those little stories or not. I'm familiar with them. I've seen some of the adaptations, but I haven't read the stories themselves yet, although I just did get the complete set. Oh, very good. Why do you think it is that people love to read mysteries? Well, I think it's for the same reason that we love fiction in general and why we love play

in general, and for that matter, why we have dreams. It's because we need to anticipate what it would be like being in a situation. And it's a kind of planning for the future. And so if you look at like kittens and puppies, they play with each other. You know, they wrestle and play fight. And that's because as adult dogs and cats, they're going to be in real situations where they may need to fight. And so they need to get practice for that ahead of time, but they need to do it safely so they don't really injure each other. And they need to do it in, it needs to be fun for them to motivate them to do it. And so God has so designed things that life forms like them will engage in this safe, fun form of danger simulation.

And he's designed that into human beings too. But because we're much more cognitively oriented, we have rational souls, we play in a different way. Now, kids will play cops and robbers and things like that, or soldiers or whatever, and they'll play fight. And little girls commonly historically have always played with dolls and things like that. But that's really the impulse behind fiction. Fiction is putting ourselves in imaginative situations. It needs to be safe, which fiction is. It needs to be fun, which good fiction is. And we may not ever actually encounter these situations, but we may need to be ready for them. And so that's why we put ourselves through fiction to imagine what it would be like being in a situation, even if it's a bizarre one that we may never actually encounter

like a zombie apocalypse or something. Yeah, I had never actually thought about that before. When you look at cats and dogs, they play fight. But because we're obviously intelligent beings who can think through things, our play and our fiction ends up being a lot more creative intellectually. And so I suppose this is why children like to dress up for things like Halloween. Just quickly, what's your response to those who just say, well, Halloween is wrong because you shouldn't dress up like something scary and you shouldn't try to scare somebody else. And maybe this is flirting with the demonic.

What's your response to those sorts of things? So I think we have to be, I think like Aquinas, we have to make some distinctions here. If you're wearing a, you know, a devil costume that, and you, and you want it to be all, you know, I don't know, glorifying the devil somehow. Well, obviously that's bad, but simply wanting to play a monster or something scary in a playful way, you're not really trying to scare anybody. That's just part of the play experience. In order to have drama, there has to be at least simulated danger, and that happens when we read the Bible. When we read the Bible and you're reading an account of a battle that, let's say, King David is in, there's danger there.

But it's simulated in your imagination. Or if you read Shakespeare, you know, there have to be stakes for the characters and what's happening to them to be interesting. And if you're watching a passion play, somebody has to play Judas. So there's nothing intrinsically wrong with playing a part that generates simulated drama. But in the process of that, you don't want to glorify evil. It's okay to play Judas, but you don't want to make Judas out to be the good guy. Would you say that there's, and I'm asking these questions because Halloween's coming up, so I know this is going to be a great breakaway clip, so thank you for letting me divert you here.

In fact, I'll send you a link to a video I did a few years ago about this very subject. Yeah. So do you think that's a thin line then? Because my sister and I like to write little horror stories, and I actually enjoy watching horror films. I actually enjoy watching horror films. And I wonder what it would mean to glorify the villain. Would that just simply mean he comes out on top? Does the good guy always have to win? Is that the – No. The good guys can lose because that's something that happens in life.

The good guys can lose. And so that needs to be part of our awareness too. And so that needs to be part of our awareness, too. What it means to glorify evil is somewhat harder to, you know, quantify other than saying portraying evil as good. I mean, that's really what that means. That's right. portray something horrific, like in horror fiction, if you portray something horrific as horrific, this was really bad, then it's not glorifying evil. And it's okay to experience, you know, we're attracted to simulated danger. I mean, this is why people ride roller coasters. I mean, in theory, roller coasters are safe, but they're also scary.

Terrifying. I just did this two weeks ago at Dollywood with my kids. And it's amazing what your mind does as you try to talk yourself into this being an acceptable thing. You know, like more people die in car accidents that do this hundreds of times a day. This is perfectly safe. Yeah. But again, it's simulated danger. And we're attracted to that because someday we will have to face real danger. And so it is okay to enjoy the experience of simulated danger as a way of learning how to process those feelings and how to control them and so forth. Yeah. Excellent stuff.

All right. Well, let's move on to the topic we want to discuss today, and that has to do with the occult. Now, my understanding is that people in Thomas Aquinas' day had a different sort of understanding of what the occult meant than we do today, so perhaps we could begin by just talking about the occult as we mean it today, and what the Church has to say about that. So, in contemporary English, occult tends to mean something that's shady and suspicious and paranormal. So magic would be considered part of the occult. Demons and ghosts would be considered part of the occult. Talking to the dead, you know, by like a medium or a Ouija board, that would be occult. And the Church condemns many of those individual practices.

Like, if you look in the Catechism, it's real clear, don't try to talk to the dead and pump them for information. You know, this is different than if God chooses to send a saint to you, or let the soul of a departed person manifest to you, but what you can't do is call them up and interview them, okay? Only do that with living people. But the Church doesn't have a blanket condemnation of everything you could call a cult, because the Church uses Latin, and Latin is not English. You may have noticed. And words have different meanings in different languages, and in Latin, the word occultus simply means hidden. And so anything that's hidden in Latin is a cult.

hidden in Latin is a cult. And since Aquinas spoke Latin, he would refer to anything that was hidden from human understanding as an occult thing. And Scripture does the same thing. If you look in St. Jerome's Vulgate, for example, it talks about God, you know, because God made everything, and many things in the world are hidden from man's knowledge, but God may reveal some of those, like, say, through the prophets. And so the book of 2 Maccabees refers to God as the revealer of occulta, of the hidden things. And so just because something's hidden from man's knowledge doesn't make it evil or bad or shady, it just means it's something we don't understand. Sometimes it will be evil or bad or shady. It just means it's something we don't understand. Sometimes it will be evil or bad or shady, but sometimes it's just something we don't understand or fully

understand. And so in Latin and for Aquinas, occult had a more neutral meaning that didn't automatically mean bad. And so what were some of the things that Aquinas addressed that we perhaps would still consider occult today? Well, he addressed astrology, crystal healing, swordlage, werewolves, demon babies, psychic powers. Okay. So lots of different things. That makes sense. Demon babies, I would never have guessed. What does he say about demon babies? Well, he says that angels and the fallen angels, demons, are capable of... Because you know they can affect matter. I mean, when God sends

them in the Bible, they do stuff. And so they can affect the material world. And one of the ways they can do that, and this is also shown in Scripture, is by appearing in human form. Now, there's a question about how does that happen? Is that just an illusion in our minds, or is it something physical? Well, Aquinas, like other people in his day, would say—and the Church doesn't have a teaching on this, so you're free to accept or reject this—but Aquinas would say that angels, including demons, can assume what they called aerial bodies. And these were physical bodies, but they weren't as physical as ours. They were, like, composed out of the air by temporarily bringing together

some matter to make a human form. And according to him, these aerial bodies could do certain things, but they also had limitations because they weren't fully human bodies. And then, you know, when they're done appearing as a human, the body just evaporates back into the air. And then, you know, when they're done appearing as a human, the body just evaporates back into the air. So one of the things Aquinas said that demonic aerial bodies could not do is father a child or give birth to a child, that they're not that physical, biological. But he said there are ways that you ways that they could accomplish similar effects. So you've probably heard of incubi and succubi, right? You have heard of it, yep.

Yeah. So an incubus is a demon appearing in male form to seduce a woman, and a succubus is a demon appearing in female form to seduce a man. Well, if you have such seductions going on, the demons could acquire the needed cells to produce a baby. And so Aquinas says in the Summa Theologiae that—I believe it's Summa Theologiae—he says that if sometimes a person is born as a result of a demon, and so is a demon baby, it's not really a child of the demon. It's really a child of a human being that the demon has scammed out of some cells and so if you have a demon baby the thing to do is the thing to do is not worry that it's literally half demon it's really all human okay you I know telekinetically got these cells and then used them. You just know that people are going to be listening to this being like, there is no way. So here's what you have to do. After our conversation, you have to send me the direct links to these articles in the Summa so I can put them in the description below because...

Oh, sure. That sounds wild. So the idea is a demon can take on, say, a male form, impregnate a woman with right well first what he'd do is he would appear as a succubus as a woman and get the male cells and then he'd turn into an incubus and seduce a woman and deposit the male cells cool sweet and and so aquinas says this is this is possible. It's possible. Possible, but not likely. Well, he doesn't really address whether it actually happens, at least in what I've seen, but this is how he says it could happen. Okay. Werewolves.

Okay. So this is another limitation. Now, there are reports down through history of people turning into wolves or other animals. And actually, on Mysterious World, we did a whole episode on werewolves and the various historical bases on these. And there are some. One of them is rabies, the disease rabies, because it makes you become aggressive and you're foaming at the mouth and it also makes it hard to talk. So you're making this kind of barking sound and you lose your mind and get aggressive. And rabies is something that has been the basis of some werewolf accounts. So has, there's another condition, and I'm blanking on the name of it right now, but people will grow hair all over their bodies, including their faces, up to their eyes.

And there was actually a famous gentleman in Europe. I think his name was Peter Gonzalez. But he even married a noble woman. He was kind of an unusual guy in a European court, but he had this condition. And you look at photos of people today with this condition, and it's like, wow, that really looks like Lon Chaney out of The Wolfman. I've got to look this up so I can show people.

So what would I type in to find that? Try typing Petrus Gonzalez werewolfismwolfism wow or lycanthropy okay werewolfism is not i'm really hoping that the it corrects what i just wrote because it didn't look good oh wow all right so we're going to get images. Mm-hmm. And a lot of these just seem like kind of mythical renditions of that. But, okay. But you're saying that you can have this condition today. I think I have a friend called Andrew Putish who has this thing. Not really.

He's just super hairy. Okay. Yeah, no, this one is like hair all the way up to the eyes. Wow. What about like on your hands? Yeah, yeah, yeah. At least on all the way up to the eyes. Wow. What about like on your hands? Yeah, yeah, yeah. At least on the backs of your hands. Okay, cool.

So where was it? So what did Aquinas say? So Aquinas would say, and there have been discussions by various people down through history, including church fathers like Aquinas and Augustine talks about a place in Italy where there was a reputation that these women who worked at a tavern could turn you into a beast and then get you to do labor for them. And he thought— Augustine. Augustine, yeah. He thought that's not really what's happening. You're not really becoming a beast.

You may feel like a beast and think you're a beast, but you're actually not. And that's kind of like what Aquinas said. Aquinas said that demons, because God's not going to be turning you into a beast, at least under normal circumstances, so if anyone's turning you into a beast, it's probably demons. Well, Aquinas would say they can't literally do that. They don't have the ability to manipulate matter to that extent that they could change what species you are. But he says they could trick the human senses into thinking that someone has turned into a beast. And so Aquinas would say some werewolf accounts or other beast transformations, because there's also like werebears and things like that, that they're caused by illusions that demons would create, but they're not real physical transformations. So does he use the term werewolf or the equivalent in Latin? He doesn't use the term term but he does talk about the principle awesome okay well we've

done demon babies and werewolves i'd love to talk about ghosts okay by ghosts well ghost is so english as a language has this has this weird history with a that gives it a double vocabulary because originally english was a germanic language that came from like Scandinavia and northern Europe. But then in 1066, the French conquered it, and they brought in this Romance language that's based on Latin. And of course, you know, the Church was also evangelizing, and so you got Latin and English that way. But English has this dual vocabulary that we frequently have at least two words for the same thing, one Germanic and one Latinate. Well, in Latin, the word for spirit is spiritus. And so we talk about spirits, including the spirits of departed human beings.

Well, in German, the word for spirit is Geist, which we bring into English as ghost. So a ghost is just a spirit. That's why we talk about the Holy Spirit also as the Holy Ghost. And so, well, departed human spirits exist, and that means departed human ghosts exist. The question is, do they ever appear to people? And Aquinas says, yes. Now, they can appear in different, or different types of ghosts or human spirits can appear to people. Obviously, he, like, you know, other Catholics, believes that the spirits of the saints, like the Virgin Mary,

can appear to people if God's giving someone a private apparition or something, private revelation. But he would say, in addition to that, that the souls of ghosts of people in purgatory can also appear, such as to ask for prayers, you know, or hint in one way or another that they need prayers. or hint in one way or another that they need prayers. And also he would say the ghosts of the damned can appear to people by the providence of God, he says. And as a purpose for this, for why God would allow this, he speculates that God may allow the damned to appear in some circumstances to scare the living. So if you're not living the way you should, Jacob Marley may show up one day and rattle his chains and say, don't end up like me, or just scare you in some other way

to get you living back on the straight and narrow. I think another thing he says that the damned might appear to us is in order to intimidate us. Yes. Yeah, basically the same thing. Oh, okay. But the fundamental purpose is to get us back to God either by showing us the consequences of not being with God or by making us aware that there really is evil out there and we need God and his protection.

Yeah, that's really interesting. I had thought before, because I think when most people think of ghosts, they think, okay, that was some natural phenomena that the person mistook to be supernatural, or they might think it's demonic. But it's interesting that Aquinas says that both the blessed can appear to us, which I suppose we understand to be true if we take private revelation seriously, but then also those in purgatory who would beseech our prayers. It's very, very interesting. Recently, I ran across, I researched a case that happened here in America back in the 1790s.

This is a story called The Wizard Clip. And I actually did a Mysterious World episode on this, but this is an early American Catholic ghost story. At the time, it was in Virginia. Now it's a town in West Virginia. But there was a family who were not Catholic, and they took in an Irish traveler. And while the traveler was staying with them, and while the traveler was staying with them, he got sick, and he said, I'm Catholic, can you please get me a priest to give me the last rites? Well, at the time, there were almost no Catholics in America, and it was very hard to get a priest, and they didn't even have a Catholic church in the area. They would have these roaming, you know, itinerant priests who

would, like, come around and say Mass in somebody's house. Well, since this family wasn't Catholic, and there was a lot of anti-Catholic prejudice, and it was really hard to get a priest, they didn't. So the guy dies without the last rites, and the night he dies, bizarre things start happening. And they keep happening, and they start getting more bizarre. And eventually they brought in—and some of them were destructive, but others weren't. And the family eventually brought in priests to deal with the situation, who, like, said mass in the house and did an exorcism. And the destructive stuff stopped, but the non-destructive stuff kept going, and there would be this voice that would exhort them to pray for the souls in purgatory, and the whole

family became Catholic. And this story, by the way, is called the wizard clip because they would hear, as part of the phenomena, they would hear this weird clipping sound, like scissors or shears being clipped. And today, the town is actually often called wizard clip, and the natives are called clippers. And they have little plaques all over the town commemorating the event. But it was investigated by American churchmen at the time who thought this was quite real, including the Archbishop of Baltimore at the time, Archbishop O'Connor, the first bishop in America. So it's an example of how these kind of ghostly phenomena can happen and can be pretty well documented. That is really interesting because whenever I hear of accounts, alleged accounts of ghosts, it does tend to fit that description. They don't appear, at least from these people retelling it to me, that they're demonic,

that there's something horrible and that, I don't know, would just lead you to think it was demonic, nor is it like a saint revealing something to them or jesus christ or our blessed mother it tends to be like these bizarre things yeah um they say well that was my grandpa or that was my uncle and this this sort of thing yeah and sometimes i mean we always have to be careful in these situations that we're not confusing a natural phenomenon for a paranormal one, because, I mean, there can be things like bubbles in the water pipes that go bang in the middle of the night as they move around your house's heating system. So we're not talking about that. This is like way beyond that and is quite well documented in the accounts of the time. I mean, we have firsthand accounts from the people

who were involved, including a priest named Father Glitzen, who is currently up for sainthood, who investigated this. The wizard clip. Where would I learn more about that if I wanted to? Well, Google it. Google it. Also, check out my episode on it because I. Oh, you did a whole episode. Sorry, I missed that.

Okay. Yeah, because I dug into the primary sources from back in the early 1800s and the 1790s to document just how early is the information we can get on this. Interesting. All right. What about astrology? What do we mean by astrology today? Does the Church permit the use of astrology? And then what did Aquinas mean by it? So, in the history of science, originally we didn't even have the concept of science. What we now call natural science was called natural philosophy, and it was all just one big field. So, like, you have Aristotle, you know, in the 300s BC, writing about natural philosophy, and he's covering basically every field of modern science in one way or another. Over the course of time, as we learned more about different disciplines, they, as the amount of knowledge accumulated, we got specialties in different fields. But it took a while for them to be distinguished from

each other. So originally, there was no distinction between astronomy and astrology, just like there was no distinction between chemistry and alchemy. Chemistry and alchemy used to be the same thing. Astronomy and astrology used to be the same thing. Astronomy and astrology used to be the same thing. And it was obvious to ancient people that the sun and the moon and the stars have influence here on Earth. I mean, the sun makes it light. It gives us warmth. The moon affects the tides.

You can use them to measure, okay, when is the right time to plant your crops? When is the right time to harvest your crops? The question was just how much influence do they have? And in the past, it was assumed they've got a lot. And this was the case in Aquinas' day. In Aquinas' day, astrology, which was the same thing as astronomy, was considered a respectable science. And you had all kinds of people—I mean, this was the norm in educated society, was to use astrology for various purposes. And you have saints like Albert the Great, Albertus Magnus. I mean, he wrote a whole book on astronomy slash astrology. So this was not the modern understanding of astrology where we view it as, oh, that's this superstitious thing. The stars don't really have that influence. And they don't, but they didn't know that at the time,

because it was obvious that there is influence on Earth from things like the Sun and the Moon, and they thought the same thing was true of the stars. In fact, they thought that the stars had, from our perspective, really strange forms of influence. For example, one of the things that, and this is a great example of something that Aquinas would consider a cult that was still totally fine, magnets. Magnets have the ability to attract iron because of this invisible hidden force they've got and that people back then didn't know how to explain. Now, today we can explain it with quantum mechanics, but back then then didn't know how to explain. Now today we can explain it with quantum mechanics, but back then they didn't know how to explain it. And so Aquinas would say a magnet is an example of something that has an occult force that is beyond the knowledge that man can assign its cause to. So magnets were occult. Well, the reason, according to Aquinas, magnets—the reason anything has the

abilities it does is because of its substantial form, to use a term from his metaphysics. The substantial form of a thing determines what it is and what abilities it has, and so if something has the substantial form of a magnet, it has the ability to attract iron. Well, he thought that God communicated things, substantial forms to them, by the power of the stars. So he would say the reason a magnet can attract iron is because its substantial form comes from the stars, and so it's the influence of the stars working through the magnet that lets it attract iron. And so he would—this is an example of just how much influence he thought the stars had. And this was normal in the science of his day. Now, today we don't buy that, but

that's what people at the time thought. So they took astrology very seriously, So they took astrology very seriously, and it was not the stupid, jokey, hokey astrology that you find in a newspaper today. They were very serious about it. They wrote these books, very extensive and learned books of how they thought astrology would affect things and how you could make accurate predictions. And Aquinas knew that when astrologers talk about something, they're sometimes right and they're sometimes wrong. And with some of the things they're right about, they can be, you know, always right about. Like, if they predict an eclipse, this is an example he gives, when astrologers predict eclipses, you know, they can do that with certainty. But then there's a class of things, he would say, that they can't predict

with certainty, but can for the most part. And this would include things like storms, things like storms or famines or things like that. And then there's a class of things they really can't predict. And the things they can't predict, at least with reliability, are free will decisions. Because humans have been given free will by God, and so we can make our own choices. But even though we have freedom, Aquinas would say, that doesn't mean the stars don't influence us. So just like the stars influence magnets to give them their abilities, the stars, Aquinas said, can influence our human nature by, for example, making a given man passionate or angry or something like that. So they could affect our feelings. Then we have the free will choice of do we go with our feelings or do we resist them? And so he would say that since most men just go with their feelings and don't choose to do the nobler harder thing astrologers could predict that oh boy there's going to be a bunch of people in

this country who are going to be really mad and they're likely to go to war and so astrologers could predict things like wars in a probabilistic way. They can't say for sure it's going to happen, but they could say the stars are going to make a lot of people angry, and that's going to make a war very likely, even if we can't say for sure that it's going to happen, because the king may, by his free will, say, sorry, no, that's a stupid idea, we're not going to war. Interesting. Okay, well, along these lines, where did the idea come from that when there's a full moon, people act kind of more erratically or something to that effect? That is something that goes back. Now, I don't know of a passage where Aquinas discusses this, but it's something that goes back into classical history, and it was connected.

Now, I think one of the reasons for this legend is because people are more active during a full moon because of the extra light. Makes sense, yeah. If you're going to go out at night and do stuff, like maybe burgle somebody, it's easier to do that with a full moon than a new moon. Interesting. So I think that just the physical light the moon gives is partly responsible for why certain things tend to happen in a full moon. But the ancients believed that the moon had this influence over all kinds of phenomena that it really doesn't. One of them was epilepsy. Epilepsy in the ancient world was sometimes attributed to the moon.

And if someone was having an epileptic seizure, they were said to be moonstruck. That's where moonstruck comes from. And so it's like the moon would cause a person or an animal to have an epileptic seizure. And so that's one of the ways the moon was thought to manifest and have an effect on Earth and potentially cause bad things to happen in a full moon. Okay. Well, thanks. Psychic powers. What did Aquinas have to say on this?

So they didn't have the term psychic powers at the time. That's actually a very recent term. That was invented in the 19th century. But Aquinas, so you think about spirits, Aquinas knows we've got spirits, and he knows spirits can influence things because God can influence things and angels and demons can influence things. So would human spirits have the ability to influence things like matter the same way God and angels and demons can influence matter? Well, he would say yes. Now, it's obvious our spirits can directly influence our own bodies. If in your spirit you say, I'm going to raise my hand, well, then you can raise your hand. The question is, what influence might our spirits have beyond our bodies? Well, according to Aristotelian physics, which was the best physics

they had at the time, in order for one thing to affect another, there must be a physical medium connecting them. It's like in order to hear someone speaking, there has to be air or something speaking, there has to be air or something between you and the speaker so that the vibrations of their voice can get to you. You know, they don't travel across a vacuum. And so any remote influencing ability the human spirit might have beyond its own body would have to be through some physical medium to connect you as the cause of the effect to whatever is being affected. Well, Aquinas said that can happen. At the time, and this is very broad in the Greco-Roman world, it's all over the place in Jewish and Christian and pagan societies, There is a belief in what's called the evil eye. Now, the evil eye can take different forms, but it's understood

different ways. But one of the most common ways it was understood is that a person, maybe an old, and this was often attributed to old people people and especially old women, but old people could, if they're mad at you, they could look at you in a way that causes bad things to happen to you. And that's what the evil eye is. And it was thought children were especially vulnerable to the evil eye. So you really don't want an old woman giving a poisonous look to a young child, because the young child might be hurt by the evil eye. And so, I don't know, maybe the lesson is respect your elders. But Aquinas said, okay, well, human spirits can have influence on things, and if there's a physical medium connecting one human to another, that influence could be

transmitted along that medium. And so, he said, when the spirit is vehemently moved to malice, you know, so you're really mad at somebody, that could get out through your eyes and infect the air, and the air could transmit the harm to another person. And since children are small and frail compared to adults, they would be especially vulnerable to the evil eye. And so this was Aquinas' explanation for the evil eye. Now, like I said, they didn't have the name psychic power in their day, but that's what he's talking about. He's talking because a psychic power is supposed to be a natural human ability to detect or influence things remotely. And that's what he's talking about. He's talking about a natural human ability, something built into human nature.

This is not a miracle God is doing. It's the demon is not doing this, you are doing this, but you are remotely influencing another person. And so today, in parapsychology studies, this would be called remote influence or telekinesis. And so Aquinas thought that humans have a weak, obviously not very powerful if it's there at all, because we can't do it easily, but he thought humans have a weak natural telekinetic ability. And that's not the only psychic power he thought people have. He also thought that we have a weak natural ability to know the future. So he, and as you would expect, he thought this was because of the stars, but, you know,

the stars, he thought, influence all kinds of things like, you know, the weather and whether there's going to be a war or not. And so he thought that the influence they have on ordinary events could also have an influence on our imaginations, on our imaginative faculty. And this could then manifest in dreams. So he would say sometimes when you have a, you can have a precognitive dream, a dream that tells the future. Now, this could be due to a number of reasons. It could be because God's given you the dream. So it could be not because of the stars, but because of God. And we obviously see examples of that in the Bible. He, you know, where God like gives Joseph a dream or something. He also said, okay, demons could mislead you by giving you a

dream about the future. And we see, like in Acts, a girl, Paul meets, who has a spirit that is used to predict the future. So this is something that they could do. Now, they don't do it perfectly, Aquinas says. Lesser spirits than God can't directly perceive the future because they're not outside of time, but they can make calculations about what's likely to happen. And so spirits could also cause this. So can random chance, Aquinas says. You could just randomly dream something, and most dreams are random, he would acknowledge. You could randomly dream something. By coincidence, it could happen to come true. Or it could be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you dream something and think it's going to come true, you might act as if it's going to come true, and that could lead to it coming true. But he would also say there can be natural causes out there in the world that impress, including the stars, that impress themselves on our consciousness, such as when we're dreaming, and we could have this, what he called, natural prophecy, distinct from supernatural prophecy, where God gives it to you. So Aquinas talks about natural prophecy. He says, unlike supernatural prophecy, it's not always accurate, because it's not coming from God. It's based on other stuff, and other things could

interfere with it. But he says it is not the sin of divination to use dreams to know the future if it's either coming from God or it's coming from some, the knowledge of the future is coming from some natural source. Well, back then, they didn't have the words for, the word psychic powers, but what he's talking about, if there were a natural human ability to detect the future or know certain things about the future apart from just calculating it, that would be what today we would call precognition. And so Aquinas thought that this was another weak natural human ability. Yeah, fascinating. Before we get into crystal healing, I just want to kind of throw out something that people might be thinking. They might be thinking, look, Aquinas, this all just seems so fantastic. And Aquinas seems to have been wrong on a number of these things. So why take him seriously at all when he talks about metaphysical realities. So we have to distinguish between, as Aquinas likes to do, we have to distinguish between a few things. When Aquinas is dealing with scientific matters,

he has to be judged against the state of science in his day. And he was, and this was all, even though this stuff sounds fantastic to us, this would have been totally normal to people in the 1200s. This is, we're not in controversy area here. This is, all these things, I mean, one, I mean, this was just the science of their day. I was going to quickly interject there, just like false things we believe today yes that are apparently backed up by scientific evidences will seem absurd 200 500 years from now exactly a lot of our beliefs uh you know scientifically that we think we've got evidence for the evidence is not as shaky is not as solid as we think

and in 500 or a thousand years time that's going to be obvious. So people are going to look back and say, global warming, or whatever it may be. That's the scientific fad of the day. So Aquinas is doing the best he can with the science of his day, but when he's dealing with non-scientific matters like metaphysics, well, metaphysics is philosophy. It's not science. And so it relies on a different set of principles. And so if the underlying metaphysical principles that Aquinas uses are accurate, then the conclusions he draws from them should be taken as accurate. Just like if the scientific things he was talking about had been accurate, the conclusions he drew from them should be accurate. I mean, if it was true that the stars had the kind of influence he thought, then his reasoning would be sound.

Turns out the basis was not solid. The stars really don't have that influence. But in the ideas of his day, he's basing that on things like Scripture. And so you have to—it's the garbage-in-garbage-out principle. Aquinas is a good reasoner if he's given good data from a given source, whether it's theology or philosophy or science, he'll come up in the main with good analyses of that. But you have to ask the question, how good is the data he's being given? Yeah, it takes a nuanced view, doesn't it? Because on one end of the spectrum, you'll have people who will see some of this stuff and say, well, you can't trust him with regards to anything. But on the other end of the spectrum, I can see some people, maybe

particularly in the traditional camp, who wouldn't want to question Aquinas on anything. So for example, and I want your take on this, one of the things Aquinas says when he talks about nocturnal pollutions is the idea that maybe we had, I think he talks about eating meat and how this can sort of stimulate the passions. And I think there is this idea among the ancients that when you eat red meat, this can make you more passionate. But I actually heard someone say that to me the other day as if it were a fact. And I think their only basis for thinking that was Aquinas said it. So what is- Well, that would be a scientific claim. That would be, right.

And so I would want to know, have there been modern scientific studies that would back that up? And as far as I'm aware, the answer is no. Well, it was funny because this person was of a traditional bent and not terribly friendly with vegans. And I said, well, if that were true, wouldn't that make vegans just super placid, gentle people? And she wasn't willing to go along with that. But that is interesting.

We have to make these distinctions. This is why Jesus Christ established a church, to be able to guide us as we read Scripture. We can't hang our hat on one particular saint and say he's right and everyone else is wrong no matter what. Well, and Aquinas himself would not want us to just take everything he says uncritically. He himself was an integrator of knowledge from multiple different fields, and he would want us to take a similar approach and be open to knowledge coming from multiple different fields. Well, finally, crystal healing. I remember when I was about 17 years old, I still wasn't yet a practicing Catholic, but I was beginning to be open to spiritual sorts of realities. And I very much like the New Age spirituality because that seemed mysterious without placing any sort of demands upon me. I remember getting a book on crystals and the healings that can be got from them. That was just an interesting thing that came to mind.

But what did he have to say about crystal healings? Well, this one's kind of short, so we may want to talk about another subject beyond this. Sure. But crystal healing, so if Aquinas thinks that the stars give magnets their influence to attract iron, it's not going to be unexpected if he thinks the stars give other things an ability to accomplish certain effects. And so one of the examples he cites is he thinks you can use gold for depression. And not just you're happy because you have money. He thinks the gold itself will improve your mood. He also

thinks, now gold isn't a crystal, but sapphire, not the way we think of it, but sapphire is. And he thought that sapphires can stop bleeding. So they have a blood coagulant function, which would be a kind of, and so between both of these, you'd have this natural substance healing. And he's not unique. This was standard medical thought in his day, that different kinds of stones or substances, metals, would have a medicinal effect. I mean, this is not just him. Like, you read Hildegard of Bingen. You know, she's another doctor of the Church. She's got a book of this stuff about the effects that different natural substances will have. And this is not something that we should—now, the idea you carry around a crystal in your pocket, it's going to heal you, no, it's really not going to. But we shouldn't be

automatically dismissive of all of these claims because sometimes they hold up. In the case of zinc and copper, they actually do have medicinal effects because both zinc and copper are antimicrobial. That's why in a lot of buildings, the water pipes are made out of copper because the copper in the water pipes will kill microorganisms in the water. It's also why doorknobs are often made with copper because the copper in the doorknob will kill germs from people's hands that have touched the doorknob. Um, zinc also has similar properties. Um, even gold has some medicinal properties, but not with treating depression other than you're happy because you've got money. There, actually, gold is a promising cancer treatment because if you micronize it, if you make it very small and inject it into a tumor,

you can then irradiate it in a way that heats it up and kills the tumor but not the surrounding tissue. And so there actually are medicinal uses for different things, even a form of crystal therapy in that a lot of lasers are based on crystals, you know, like a ruby. Well, if you can cause a ruby to laze, you can use that to make a laser and do surgery on someone. Lots of people have their eyes fixed that way. So, you know, it's not what they would have understood in Aquinas' day, but it turns out, you know, just like they were wrong about alchemy, but you can take the principles and get chemistry out of that in the same way there are underlying principles. Other things

like herbal healing, you know, that was a very big thing in Aquinas' day. And it's true that some herbs have healing properties. One of them is willow bark. Willow bark is able to decrease fever and pain. And the reason is it has a chemical in it that is related to aspirin. And willow bark is a kind of natural aspirin. And so it has salicylic acid and aspirin, of course, is acetylsalicylic acid. And so in the past, before they had aspirin, which was invented in the 1800s, people would use willow bark. And so we shouldn't automatically dismiss as, oh, this is just old bogus stuff. There actually are principles there that can be found and extracted. And Aquinas has a very interesting set of principles. If you read his discussions of the occult, he's got a really interesting set of principles. And in an article

I wrote on this, which I'll make sure you have a link to, I charted his principles for analyzing, is this occult thing okay or not? And there's a set of questions that you need to ask whenever you're considering is this thing okay? The first question is, is what you're trying to do good? Okay? So, like, let's say you're trying to hurt a child with the evil eye. That is not good. I have tried to do that on more than one occasion during Divine Liturgy. Well, Aquinas would say that's not good, so that's not awful. You can't use the evil eye. Okay. But suppose what you're trying to do is fundamentally good, like heal somebody. Well, the next question is, will the method you are using actually work or is it expected to work?

And Aquinas would say that if it's not expected to work, you know, then it's not going to be lawful. You're just, you know, you're wasting your time. You're wasting the other person's time. You may be doing something superstitious. you're wasting the other person's time, you may be doing something superstitious. For example, to give an example of the sort that he would use, let's say you're mixing up some willow bark to give to somebody to help them get over their fever. Well, if at the same time you are praying to a pagan god,

that's not going to add any—well, actually not. Let's do a different one. Let's say as you are mixing up the willow bark, you believe you need to turn around three times and spit on the ground in order to make the willow bark effective. Well, okay, the turning around three times and spitting on the ground isn't going to help the person. So Aquinas would say, don't do that part. But you can mix the willow bark. So strip out any superstition you have that's not really going to be effective. You only want to focus on the effective stuff. Okay, so you've got the willow bark.

You know it's going to be effective, even though you're not turning around three times and spitting on the ground. Is the effect that this thing is going to have purely natural? If it's purely natural, Aquinas would say you can do it. So since the willow bark has this natural effect to reduce people's fever, you could go ahead and do that. But what if the effect isn't purely natural? What if you're invoking some kind of intelligence for help? Well, if it's a pagan god or a demon or something like that, you're not allowed to use those sources. And Aquinas would even say pagan gods, to the extent they're real, would be demons. So don't have any involvement with demons. But what if you're not doing that? What if you're saying the Lord's Prayer when you're mixing up the willow bark or making the sign of the cross over it and you're asking God's help?

cross over it, and you're asking God's help. Okay, we're almost there, but there's one more question you need to ask. You're invoking the right people, if you're talking to God or the angels or the saints. Are you being reverent? Because you can be irreverent in the process of invoking them. You can be superstitious in asking God to do something for you. So if you think, oh, in order to make this willow bark effective, I have to say the Lord's prayer three times and make the sign of the cross seven times. Okay. That superstition, that's not reverence to think, oh, it's going to gain efficacy because I do this a certain number of times, and I must do it that way, or God won't hear my prayer. So you not only, if you're being irreverent, then whatever you're doing is going to be unlawful, but if it's being reverent, if you're being reverent, it's going to be fine.

So basically, if you want your practice to be lawful, in Aquinas' view, you need to be doing something good. It needs to work, and it either needs to have a purely natural effect, or if you're talking to somebody, it needs to be the good guys, you know, God and the saints, the angels, and you need to be reverent. Here's a question. What about something like reflexology, which I think is the idea that if you apply pressure to feet or primarily feet, maybe ears and things, that this affects different parts of the body? I could see somebody approaching this and with goodwill thinking there might be a natural solution to it. And maybe there is. I haven't looked into reflexology, but it does seem like one of those things that borders on the spiritual or the unscientific. Well, we have reflexes, and we know about those.

I mean, that's why the doctor hits your knee with a little rubber hammer to see do you have the right reflexes. And actually, reflexes play an important part in keeping us healthy. That's why if you eat the wrong thing, if you, let's say, eat a poison or if you eat food poisoning, you're going to be inclined to either vomit or have diarrhea because that's a reflex in your body. The mechanism is called peristalsis. That's the contraction of your digestive tract. And you either get reverse peristalsis, which is vomiting, or active peristalsis, which pushes it out the other end. But that's your body's reflex to get rid of toxic substances. It's also the reason we have fevers, because microbes typically can exist in a fairly narrow temperature range. And so when you get a microbe in you, your body gives you a fever to heat it up

and cook the microbe to death. So reflexes are real things and they run a lot of our health. And so the idea of using our reflexes to promote our health is not a bad thing. The question would be, are you doing it in the right way or are you off on some unscientific tangent? And often it feels like we're not in a place to assess that as a lay person. You know, you're going to a doctor or you're going to some person who's telling you that this thing is backed up by the science, but that's what every kind of snake oil person has said forever. So it's hard to I Recently did an episode of mysterious world on acupuncture where I talked about this because acupuncture if you really dig into the literature It's actually mixed. It turns out all of the literature scientific literature on acupuncture done in China says it'll cure anything

all of the literature done in the West says not so much. Why do you think that is? I think it's because acupuncture is associated with Chinese national identity, and the Chinese Communist Party wants things that are going to glorify China. But there is a study group, it's over in the United Kingdom, it's called Cochrane. And what Cochrane does is it reviews the medical literature and looks at the best, highest quality studies to see what works and what doesn't. And so there are services that doctors can use and that laypeople can use. You can go on Cochran's website and look up, okay, what do the studies say about this?

And they'll give you what they intend to be a neutral, unbiased look at here's what the evidence shows about this procedure. Okay. Well, there you go. Interesting. Now, you mentioned one other thing that I think we want to discuss before wrapping up, and that was the drawing of straws. What's this thing called? Okay. Well, there you go. Interesting. Now, you mentioned one other thing that I think we for this, now this is just one form of procedure that, um, there are a lot of variations on this, but the basic idea is humans are not in control of which lot gets drawn. Okay. And, and because we're not in control of it, God could be in control of it, or some spirit could be in control of it. So this is a phenomenon that humans are not in control of.

And so since we're not in control of it, you could use this phenomenon, you could use this procedure to ask questions of non-humans that could be controlling it. And we actually see this in the Bible. This is something that happens, and not just once. It happens actually quite a bit. The high priest in ancient Israel had, as part of his breast piece, a couple of objects called the Urim and the Thummim. And depending on which one he drew, he could use them to inquire of the Lord. So he could, like, ask a question of God and then use the urim and thumim to determine the answer, at least some of the time. There's also a passage, like in Proverbs that says, the lot is cast into the lap, but the decision is wholly from God. So the idea is you can inquire of God using something that you're not in control of

to ask what his will is. Now, this doesn't always result in God telling you stuff, and the Old Testament is very much aware of that, because, for example, when Saul goes to the witch of Endor to consult the dead prophet Samuel, the reason he does that is because he's already tried inquiring of God through these other means, He's already tried inquiring of God through these other means, but God is not answering him by dreams or prophets or by the Urim and Thummim, so he's not getting his answer through the normal way. So presumably he went to the high priest and said, can you ask God about this for me?

And the high priest was not able to determine it. Maybe he drew the lots multiple times and they kept giving different answers, and so this is God's way of saying, I'm not telling you. So that's why he goes to a spirit medium to try to get an answer he can't otherwise get. So they're very aware that God isn't always doing this. He's not always answering, but sometimes he does. God directed Samuel—this was how Saul became king—God directed Samuel to use lots to determine who would be the new king of Israel. And so Samuel is like drawing, let's find out which tribe he's from, and let's find out which clan he's from, and which family he's from. And oh, guess what? It's Saul. Also, this is how Jonah ended up in the fish, because when he's on the boat and God sends the storm and he's with all these pagans

and they're all praying to their individual gods and they figure out, okay, it must be a god is mad at one of us. Let's find out who that is. They draw lots, and the lot falls to Jonah, so they pitch him overboard, as you do, and he ends up getting eaten by the fish. So this happens. This is a recognized way of determining God's will in the Old Testament. And it happens in the New Testament. Testament. And it happens in the New Testament, because when the apostles are meeting in Acts chapter 1, Judas has hanged himself, and they're no longer 12, but Jesus instituted them as 12. And so Peter says, we need to replace Judas, and he names some qualifications the replacement will need to have, but then they end up saying, okay, we've got two good candidates. We've got Matthias, and we've got this other guy,

and so we don't know which one of them is better, so let's pray to God and draw lots. And the lot falls to Matthias, indicating he's the one that God wants to replace Judas, and so he gets enrolled in the Twelve Apostles. So there's Christian precedent for this as well, and it didn't stop in the first century. This has continued to be used in various Christian circles. It's sometimes used in Eastern Orthodoxy, and it's always used in the Coptic Church in Egypt when they elect a new Coptic pope. What they do is they find the good candidates, they nominate three of them, any one of whom would be qualified to be the new leader. They put the names in a chalice, which they then put on the altar. They say the divine liturgy, which is their

mass, and then after they've invoked God through the mass, they draw out the name of the new Coptic Pope. And currently, the most recent one is Pope Tawadros II. So this is something that various groups of Christians have used down through the years. Just like the apostles replaced Judas, the various other groups use it to determine who goes into a particular office. Now, given the biblical precedent for this, Aquinas can't just say, don't do this. But he has some cautions about it, and so he says you shouldn't use it this way and you shouldn't use it that way. Oddly, he doesn't think you should use it to determine ecclesiastical offices, which seems bizarre to me because that's exactly what the apostles did use it for. Do you remember his reasoning for that? Well, yeah.

He says they later appointed people to office rather than using sortilage. And that's true, but that's not the same situation as what if you've got two really good candidates and only one of them can have the job? You know, if you've got two really good candidates to be priest, great, ordain them both priests. They can have different parishes. But if you've got only the one slot, like who gets to be pope or patriarch or bishop, and you've got more than one good candidate, well, that's the kind of situation the apostles were faced with with replacing Judas. Because you can't say, oh, we've got these two great guys, let's turn the 11 into the 13. That's not what Jesus established. He established the 12. Right. Yeah, that makes sense.

Well, this is fantastic. This is so great. Thank you so much for going over this with us. Fantastic. This is so great. Thank you so much for going over this with us. I know. It's really neat when you read more. I mean, you know, growing up, and not so much growing up, but when I was in college, you know, I took lots of Aquinas, but it was all his metaphysics and his philosophy and his theology and stuff like that. And there's just a lot more to Aquinas and to these other authors from this period than simply their philosophical and theological writings. There's material discussing all kinds of fascinating stuff. And so even though, you know, from a modern perspective, we'd look at a lot of this and say, eh, superstition or bad science or whatever, it really shows how they were trying to use the resources they had in their day. Even though the science was bad,

they were still trying, from our perspective, just like our science is going to be bad from, you know, 500 years from now perspective, they're still doing what they could to reason with it, and Aquinas is a really great example of that. I especially like his kind of questions to ask to determine, is this lawful or not, to sort the good from the bad, and not automatically say, just because something is hidden from our knowledge, just because it's a cult, that means it's automatically bad. No, he's got a procedure to help us sort the good from the bad as we work through those questions. Wonderful stuff.

Well, as we wrap up, Jimmy, anything you'd like to tell our listeners and viewers about? We've talked about your fantastic Jimmy Akins Mysterious World podcast, which people need to go and check out. And I'll put a link below in the description. But anything else you're working on or have just produced? I just turned in another book manuscript. This one is a fairly brief book, but it's designed to do two things. One of them is to help bring people back to church, because a lot of people have been out of the habit of going to church due to the COVID crisis. But it's also meant to be something you can hand to a non-Christian

and say this—or a Christian, but a non-Catholic—and say, this will explain in a simple, easy, friendly way why you should believe in God and in Jesus and why you should become Catholic. And the title of this is still being determined, but it's going to be called something like the words of eternal life. It's based on how on Peter saying in John six that Jesus has the words of eternal life. OK, well, fantastic. Thanks again, Jimmy, for being on. My pleasure. OK, OK.

Thank you very much for watching this week's episode of Pints with Aquinas. Be sure to subscribe below and click that bell button. That really does help the channel and we'd appreciate it. Hey, I have created a course that helps people break free of pornography. It's called strive21.com. We have over 21,100 men going through the course right now. If you are a man who struggles with pornography or lust in any way, go check out strive21.com. It is 100% free and you can be as anonymous as you want. And if you're still not convinced, be sure to go and click reviews up here. And then you can see

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