Pints With Aquinas - Catholic Morality Explained w/ Dr. Matthew Minerd

Episode Date: February 27, 2022

📘 My New Ebook Aquinas' Meditations for Lent! https://pintswithaquinas.com/lenten-ebook 💪 Exodus 90!! https://exoduslent.com/matt 🙏 Get a free Trial of Hallow! https://hallow.com/mattfradd ��� Support the Show! https://pintswithaquinas.com/support/   📒 Made for God! Dr. Minerd: https://ascensionpress.com/catholicmorality 📚 Dr. Minerd's Books: https://www.philosophicalcatholic.com/books  

Hey, welcome to Pints with Aquinas. Thank you so much for listening. If you like Pints with Aquinas and want to support us, you can do that in one of two ways by supporting us on Locals or Patreon. If you go to pintswithaquinas.com slash give it'll let you know there what you get in return. Thanks. Good day, good day, good day, good day and welcome to Pints with Aquinas. Today I have Dr. Matthew minded on the show.

We're going to be discussing all of your questions concerning morality and who else who knows what else? We'll see we'll see what happens a couple of things I want to say before we get going next week is Lent or the great fast depending on whose side you're on and I've got two things I want to tell you about I have put together a beautiful PDF of Thomas Aquinas's daily meditations for Lent This is not something that I excerpt from his works and threw together. This is something he actually wrote.

It does sound like a Matthew Kelly thing, like, you know, a day, you know, but it's actually Thomas Aquinas. So it's free. So click the top link in the description below and you can get that ebook and read those daily meditations throughout the Great Fast until Easter.

And they're about a page each. So they're definitely doable. And so if you're still looking for something to do for Lent, I'm just going to go back and forth. Great Fast Lent. Click that link, download it. And as I say, it's completely free. So that's there for you guys.

Now, second thing I want to do is say thank you to Exodus 90. Over a billion people all over the world will start living different in some way. At least that's the hope. Maybe giving up alcohol or chocolate or whatever. For a lot of Catholics, Lent is a time of finding the easiest way to give something up. But at the end of those 40 days, does the sacrifice really make a difference? I hate when people do that to me, actually.

It's the ad read. I know, but like when people guilt me, are you giving up candy? I'm like, well, candy's hard. So how about shut up? This year, there's another opportunity out there specifically for men that will actually help you grow closer to God. Now, you've heard of Exodus 90. We've been talking about them for a while now, and many of you

probably joined in January, leading you up to Easter. But let me tell you about Exodus Lent. It's a 40 day journey that will challenge you to dig a little deeper this year. So if you were trying to start Exodus 90 in January and didn't, you can still do this. Now, if your first reaction is I'm absolutely not taking cold showers. Well, you're in luck. Men who take excess lent get to take warm showers, drink alcohol. And when you're with others, watch TV and sports.

But don't be fooled. This will be a very challenging 40 days. So if you're looking for something to do, actually, I'll give you a different link here. It's Exodus Lent dot com slash Matt, Exodus Lent dot com slash Matt. Check that out and join a bunch of other men around the world who'll be doing Exodus Lent. That's Exodus Lent dot com slash Matt.

Dr. Matthew Minard. Good to be here. I'm watching. I don't want to turn. I have to sit in my spot. Very still. Chosen by spot. I have a little button that will electrocute you from the chair that you thought was a

normal chair. I've got strong legs. I'm a runner and a skier, so I'll stand up. It's nice to have you on the show. Good to be on. Yeah. Last first time I heard about you, you on Reason Theology. You had a bow tie, which I thought was cool. Yeah. And I do still.

And you know, sometimes the Ascension people tell me wear the bow tie because people think that's yeah, it makes you look professorial. But you know, there's a risk. There is. But there's the risk that I sound like a professor. So I said, you know, let's at least have like the. It's a nice time. I have the just a tie with the little flowers on it. So very good. Well, this is the first time we've met and it's a real honor to meet you Yeah, it's been really enjoyable up to this point to all the bantering that happens before the show. It's amazing You put out a book recently on Catholic morality. Is that the latest book? Excuse me. Let's book you put out of well, it's the latest book in my in my name

I do a good bit of translating and I've got a number of things that are just on the edge of all coming out right now Yeah, so there's a book on conscience that Clooney Press has done, but it's very technical stuff. So this is in a different register. Very popular text. And what's the book called again? Made by God, made for God made by ascensionpress.com slash Catholic morality. They can be very happy. I know I have to get two times and they told me months ago. Always remember two times.

So but now. So what do you teach? So I degree in. Yeah. So my degree is. So what do you teach? What's your degree in? Yeah, so my degree is actually in philosophy. Primarily teach philosophy, but I also teach moral theology for the Ruthenian Byzantines and the Melkites. Now is he already too far to the right? No, he's good. No, you see I'm good. Alright. I listened to your guy. No, it's fine. So you teach, sorry. Yeah, no, it's fine. So I teach for the Ruthenians and Malchites at St. Cyril Methodius Byzantine Seminary. I actually teach at your alma mater too, of course,

at the Holy Apostles. So a friend of mine, Dr. John Kerwin, used to teach and he was Finnish. I said, Ed, you want to take these? And I said, that's nice. I can teach a bit of Thomism over there while not doing that so much with the Byzantines. They wouldn't want you to do that?

Even a little bit? A little bit, but you have to always convince them because they think you're Latinizing them. You're not being sufficiently Eastern. That's fair. So the I teach our Moral Theology course sequence. I should do some history of Catholicism. So 20th century stuff on Vatican II and whatnot.

And then our philosophy. We don't have a huge philosophy program in the East for our seminarians. We sort of have permission not to do that because the code of canon law doesn't say it. But so I do that as well. So when did you switch from being a Roman Catholic to the Ruthenian Church?

Yeah, my paperwork was I actually think it was like, you know, the covid year ruins everything, right? You sort of forget which year is which. So it's either 2018 or 2019 that my paperwork went through. But when I was dating my wife, my then fiance, I had moved back while I was in graduate school from Washington, D.C. to the hills of western Pennsylvania. Was working on a house, it was my grandparents house

that we moved into. And it needed a bit of work, and I'm living there before we got married. And was lazy, to be honest at first. She and I would normally go over town, it was a couple of towns over for me actually, an hour or so to the traditional Latin Mass. And I always felt, that was always the world I was in

in which I was just safe from liturgical excess and abuse. Never quite felt spiritually at home, but I had lived for three years in simple profession as a Benedictine, so liturgical spirituality has always been sort of at the core of my spirituality. So the CLM was at home, but it was snowing. I had a little tiny Nissan Versa because I was a graduate student.

I managed to make it off the mountain and I thought, I'm just gonna go to that Byzantine church. I know that it's in town. I don't know if you've had this experience or I don't know if your viewers have had this experience. You can run into a very anti Latin, anti Western vibe in the Byzantine, Byzantine Catholic world. Right. It feels like you're walking into an Orthodox world. Right. And there's a real sense in which we Eastern Catholics really want to someday be Orthodox in union with Rome.

But that that's not the state of affairs right now. So that anti-Latinism I ran into during a period of my life when I lived out on the West Coast and there was a very devout and nice Russian Catholic priest, but he also made a couple of just rather snarky, I would use my stronger language remarks to me because I was wearing red on Pentecost, you know, not knowing my color scheme, it should have been green, blah, blah, blah. And he said something in his homily and I made a remark to him jokingly afterwards and his remark was like, oh, I knew that I was making that for you because you came looking like a Latin and I heard of this attitude, you know, and it just left a terrible taste in my mouth. I was, I was at a Byzantine Ruthenian church recently and I was

gathering for donuts with everybody else and there's a little gift store there and there was a Chotky and it had a bead after every 10 knots and I said oh that's cool because you could you pray the rosary on that as well we don't pray the rosary. Why do you have to be that defensive? Why not just acknowledge that the rosary is a beautiful devotion that you could pray if you wanted to. Yeah, that you can meditate on the life of Christ and you don't have to lose yourself. After saying that I think I completely understand when you are the small guy yes you have to vigorously defend yourself against the encroachment

of the Western Church, which has happened many a times over. And I didn't live through that since I switched ritual churches. So it's just harder for me to affectively get there. But it's exactly what it is. Is whenever you're just you're going to be swamped by the Latin church, really throughout the whole universal church in Canada. You have to be violently in for French. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So anyway, that that experience plus

and we didn't get to this when we were talking a little bit earlier. I went to a low liturgy a number of times. Have you ever experienced that audity? Not low Latin mass. I'm talking about a low divinely. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. One without without any epistleistle with just a gospel. So for you, is this usually not a daily divine liturgy?

This is not what they should be like. So it's interesting. We'll come we can circle back there. But your peer view, your poor viewers are like, they've just gone into the esoteric of a church that I've never even heard of. Ruthenian. This is not about them. It's about us.

We just want to talk. Welcome for the ride. But yeah, no, it, it's really quite improper. I mean, we used to have a forum like this, so that was akin to what the Roman church has in the old form. It was effectively a private mass, but with communion, with preaching, maybe.

But this was on Sundays being done at a parish, just on the other side of where I had grown up. And so sometimes when certain relatives would be in town and I'd be trapped in my old hometown. I didn't want to go to the Roman church there because it was always quite goofy, actually. I'd go there and I thought, this is strange. But I didn't know any better. And then after becoming Ruthenian, I realized this priest had been doing it forever that way and just never changed when the books changed. So when he died, that poor parish had to get introduced to. How long is the, was the low divine liturgy? 40 minutes.

Wow. It was 40 minutes on the Baptist or the circumcision of the Lord on, because we don't celebrate, we celebrate synaxis of our lady the day after Christmas. Whereas the West celebrates that at the beginning of the year, right? Mary mother, God is the first January. Yeah. So we celebrate the circumcision like the West used to. So it's a significant feast day among the mysteries. And it was just a 40 minute liturgy. And I took some relatives who were visiting my folks to it

and they never had gone. And I can't even explain to them what just happened. I just said, I'm sorry about that. Yeah, I should have just let you go to a Latin church. So these experiences pretty strongly, in two different ways, disposed me against it. This snarky anti-Latinism and what in the world was this of may he rest in peace, like eternal memory,

Father Salco, whatever his name was. So I go down to the church in Uniontown, which we could even call it Uniate Town. It's the home of where we Easterners came to here from Ukraine and Transcarpathia. And I almost immediately, that first liturgy, felt right at home in a way I never did. I mean, I have a PhD. We tend to live in our heads, right? It was that experience of my heart just immediately melted.

I grew up in a rather Slavic background as I shared with you, because my mother spent an immense amount of time with her grandmother. So all of that, you know, cold patch town life of the hunkies, my mother just adored it. And so try to keep at least the cultural practices down to our household's life. But I was Roman Catholic, but we went to Slovak Roman Catholic parish growing up. And I think that some of the Slavic elements that are in the Ruthenian liturgy, which will

be like that in the Ukrainians too, right? Because it's going to be different from church to church. Go to a Melkite church and it's going to feel like you're among the Arabs because that's their liturgy. I mean, whatever Greek influences from Constantinople are extra for them that the Slavs don't have it's Arab right I mean the tones sound Arabic etc and I just said you know that that part of my soul boy talk about being too light-hearted that part of my soul that when I was a five-year-old kid that never

did artwork whatsoever but then went with his parents to see Fiddler on the roof which is just a bunch of Ukrainian tones of the you know said yes for you know a Jewish story though That loved it was the only artwork I ever did was like tried to make this like cut out fiddle It was like you know for years was the only artwork on the wall that my mother had by May You know I always said that there's something in that Ukrainian music that you know is like from birth has been in my soul But spiritually it felt at home. I had a priest who was, I didn't realize till after he died even how just authentically Eastern he was. I knew we really ran the liturgical schedule as you should in an Eastern parish with, you know, as many of the special liturgies as

possible throughout the different seasons. But then I talked to our rector at the seminary recently and he looked at me and said, that's very strange for parish use. But Father Ron on the other hand too, just did not, one iota care about the Latin problem. He was so at home. He'd get so mad at the anti-rosary stuff. We weren't saying it before liturgy, which could be told fine.

Parishes in the Roman church do it. There's a sense in which you shouldn't do it there. It would be, it's a shame. Why can't you do one of the little hours or something? I love the Liturgy of the Hours, but I'm an ex-monk, so maybe I don't understand that. But he was very much at home with the Brewery in the West. There would be feast days. He would just pull out his Western Brewery because he'd usually read the Office of Reading's readings, even though he would do his Horologian.

He lived a very monastic life. He was kind of John Vianney for the little poor hunkies in Uniontown, really. I think he was a saint really. So I felt at home uncomfortable, like sort of at least exploring, but I you know started going pretty regularly and after we got married we drifted into going more and more. What about your wife? That's a good segue to get there. Because the first time we experienced the Byzantine liturgy I felt like you did at home, but my wife felt that even more so. Because up until this point, I was dragging her to the Latin Mass. Yeah. And her experiencing the Latin Mass is like trying to convince someone that this is an

objectively beautiful piece of art, but they just can't see it. Yeah, they can appreciate it for what it is. But they just like, yeah, it's beautiful. Yeah. It's like someone who looks like a Dutch, like the Dutch masters of all the realism. They're like, it's great, but like we have pictures now, you know, I mean, they can see the art. I mean, not exactly that. We were just in Sarasota this weekend and we went, we went to the Latin mass and it was the same thing. She's like, I just, I can't, I just, you know, I feel bad that I can't, but I can't. But when we walked into that Byzantine church, she was just very much at home. Yeah. And so my wife was wife is much more spiritually at home

in the West. She also though, all throughout her graduate school experience just went to every liturgy under the sun, be it Latin, Western, whether or not she'd joke, whether or not she was looking for a husband at the time. Yeah. But then she'd even go to Coptic Orthodox liturgies. She said, I'm the only, and she's Irish and Northern Italian is what she comes from.

So she's just this really white person among a bunch of cots, you know? But she was much more comfortable in the East. I'll admit quite humbly, I'll even tell the story. We're passing by a church in Greensburg. This is before these experiences. And she and I are both tell the story. We're passing by a church in Greensburg. This is before these experiences. And she and I are both in the car and she crosses herself Byzantine.

And I'm still quite Roman at the time. And I crossed myself Western. And I said to her, I went like this with my head, I said, West is best. And so, and God has humbled me. Has humbled me. You know, I used to think, I used to think the East is a bunch of wooly haired people

who have a chip on their shoulder. This is what I thought. What does wooly haired mean? Oh, I mean, think of like, you know, think of a, you know, a Western or an Eastern monk, you know, sort of long hair, right? Let it not be pulled back. It's wooly haired, you know?

Yeah. So, so she was actually, she's always been comfortable there, quite comfortable there, but she spiritually, she's still canonically ramen. Yeah, you know, it's it's her home. She she sometimes by herself and sometimes with me will go to the traditional Latin Mass, you know, on a Saturday or she prefers that she prefers it. But she doesn't begrudge going to the strange point in sort of Catholic history where we have, we are exposed to a

multitude of different liturgies. I grew up in just like a regular novus ordo. I didn't know that there was anything else, including the Latin mass. So it was like, it's this or nothing. What has it done to our spiritual lives now that we have a sort of cornucopia of options? Is this good? I think it's good. I think it's rich if you don't get become a dilettante, but I think it is good because

I think it heals some of the experience of groups that have never seen each other, they can experience each other, but you also grew up in a very Western place. Welcome to Rust Belt America, where you are now. I mean, that's just, it's unique. If you look at the Byzantine maps, we have an idea for gender reveal pierogies. You know, my cousin and I want to do it.

I said between Passaic, New Jersey and Toledo, Ohio, we're golden. We're millionaires, right? Because that's that's Byzantine country, right? So that's some of that as well. Right. But we are, especially because of the stuff with the traditional Latin mass, that's opened up all these other liturgical conversations that really didn't exist. And not just that, it's the internet that's allowed them to, like, who the heck is interested

in having a conversation about Byzantine and Latin Mass? And when would EW 10 invite you on before the time of YouTube to give you a 10 minute site or a three minute sound bite about the glories of Byzantium? Yeah, so I'm sort of my story. And I mean, I just sort of muddled along and slowly but surely one of the cantors sort of kept saying to me, come over and canter, I can hear you. I said, no, no, no, I I said I'm just a westerner and then when I met him he sounded like The trads I knew in some ways because he was so worked up about the new liturgical books

Which are in many ways mild if you've gone through the the I don't say cataclysmic the large changes of the way Thank you cataclysmic changes that happened within the Western liturgy. You should say, sit down. And translations too. Drink. Calm down. It's like, go throw back some Slivovitz, right? Have some Plum Brandy that those Slavs have.

But very, very good guy. And it took his big temperament to sort of pull me in. And probably that filled some part of my soul that needs that as an ex-religious, just to have a certain ministry in the church. Now when you went east, did you find that you had to make a conscious choice to invest in the spiritual life of the east, even in your private devotions, even to the point of choosing to move away from western devotions?

It wasn't very hard. It was a matter of changing one set of Liturgy of the Hours and guess what, Lexio Divina works both east and west. So you weren't praying the rosary and things like this. I am bread and butter and I always have been. As a kid even, with little pious kid, my family was not very observant, but because of someone I dated in high school became more and more Catholic, I still never felt at home with the rosary.

It's a very beautiful devotion for meditating on the mysteries of Christ's life. We should always have the sacred humanity of Christ before our minds eye. So I'm not at all saying anything negative there, but it was never affectively my. And I still remember my first experience with the Liturgy of the Hours. I was just bowled away. I thought, what's this?

And it's in a sense, that's always been the central pillar of my devotional life. I miss, in some ways, Liturgy of the Hours, talk about something that was bombed in the West, because it really got pared down in the liturgical changes People don't talk about that one a lot But there's a way in which the the current bravery is a good layman's devotion because it's so brief in the West I

Missed some of the sequence there. I spent so many years with the grail Salter for all of its problems You know, that's the thing that even if I sometimes go back and and I'm at a Western monastery I can almost rattle that stuff off from my years as a monk. So I miss that. The sequencing is very repetitive. Very often I'm doing something out of the public and prayer book that the Melkites do, and you're stuck on the same psalm sequence every day. But nonetheless, it was fine.

That doesn't really deeply bother me. So it's just not an issue. So you're in this interesting point, though, where you are teaching at a Catholic Eastern seminary, as well as a Western Catholic seminary and college. And so you have a great love for the East. And you also have a great love of Thomas Aquinas. Yeah. Can you help me understand why the Orthodox are so averse to Thomas Aquinas and the scholastics? Yeah, and I have to be careful here because right now I will go out into the technicalities. I think it's two things. There's a fundamentally different idea of what theology is. The West thinks, the West tends to use the word theology to refer to something like theological science,

notional theology, reflective theology, in a sense something like scholastic theology, not necessarily scholasticism, but this kind of academic theology. And that's due to a whole host of things that happened in the 13th century onward from the time of Aquinas onward. Everything that happens with the reception of Aristotle very much's such a huge sea change from a monastic idea of theology is just meditation on scripture and then preaching there upon to this scholastic model, which is this academic model is just something that you don't have the same echo. You don't have the same echo in the East. It's there, right? Of course you can look at systematic texts like something on the Orthodox faith by John of Damascus. You can't read St. Gregory Palamas

without realizing the kind of significant Byzantine quasi scholastic stuff going on there. But even so, the coin of the realm is mystical theology in that ancient sense of mystical theology, mysticism, ultimately something that caps out in prayer and the liturgy. And the East never had the same. It's interesting. Cultural development.

If I was to sum it up in a sound bite, would you say, and you don't have to, I'm just for my sake, would you say that in the East you could say a theologian is one who prays and in the West, if you were to say, what is theology? You would say somebody who studies. Yeah. That's what you, the emphasis would be on the study, not the prayer. Even if that's an unfair sort of dumbing down. Exactly, that's at the cultural level, right? That's very much taken in.

That Evagrian line from Evagrius, the desert monk, about the theologian is one who prays. It's funny because St. Gregory Palamas does distinguish that kind of theology from a kind of scholastic-y kind of theology, right? A reflective theology. He does do it, but it never is institutionalized, that second one. The theologians he appraises really in the end, still the sense of what it means to be a theologian.

And I think that's a cultural thing, that you don't have the same university culture. The West becomes so wealthy and developed and urban that that kind of scholastic thing can like endure. It's huge. Like the the edifice of if you ever read like the later scholastics, so blasted technical that this can only exist in a really high level society. Gotcha.

So the other the other side is to give me a trouble. I think there is in Marcus Plested, who's an Orthodox author says the same thing. There's a kind of insecurity sometimes I think that you're going to lose. You're going to get swallowed up by talking in a Western way, right? So you have to push against Aquinas totally or against scholasticism totally because otherwise you're just going to do theology like those Westerners. And I feel comfortable saying that only because an Orthodox author himself who's done like Orthodox readings of Aquinas is one of the texts Plested has written. And he really is imploring his Orthodox brethren to have the steel spine to say, I can do this and not lose

my identity, right? That's a mark of being mature is that you're not echoing everything that you're around. You learn to take in your environment, to respond to things, to talk to people, to debate, and maintain your identity the whole time and not collapse. So it's like both of those. That's like we have to assert that we're not Western or not scholastic, but a priest that we both know rather well said to me once, he said,

I'm gonna be preaching to some Ruthenians, and he said, I have no sense of what the spirituality is, except everyone keeps telling me it's not Western. Yeah, it's like, oh. It's like Canadians who say we're not American. That's their identity. Not going to take you very far. I mean, you know, I guess it'll help you sleep at night,

but I don't mean that as negative, right? I mean, it's a real fear to have. You can scholasticize your theology. And I appreciate this more and more with my time in the East what is it means to scholasticize once theology in a way that's negative? Oh in a way it's negative, you know I'm sure you're aware of this this kind of genre where everything becomes a kind of repetition and hyper commentary or rep You know like it's I'm just commenting on that which is in Aquinas That's really even that's the most tempting thing because he's the big man,

big man in the room. Like you can guess what someone's going to say. Right. Like you could. The risk with my book, which someday we'll talk about, I'm not blaming you. I'm thinking Ascension Press is going to say, wow, he talked about lots of Byzantine things this whole time. But I knew I had to rein myself in from basically having the moral part of the suma open and just sort of

redoing it there were so many books that just do that right yeah, and you know you want to you want to have a different way of incorporating the mysteries of about our divine vocation our Christification through grace without just sounding like you're saying okay. I'm doing be attitude now I'm talking about human acts talk about the passions next because are, you know, the next subordinate principle of human acts. This is what I'm doing is tracing the prima par, prima secundae of Summa, of the Summa theologiae. So you don't want to do that, you know, you don't want to only do that, this kind of hypercommentary, which is a real temptation. Have you ever read Columba Marmion? No.

Oh, it's quite well worth it and as an Easter tree you might like it. I probably wasn't ready for Marmion, Don Marmion when I was a monk actually, but I'm reading his Christ and his mysteries. As a toa-mist I see behind the scenes what he's doing and in some of his works he does cite the stuff out of Thomas he has in mind, but it's really all just a mystery. It's all a reflection on the mysteries of Christ's life as really our own mysteries because all of our grace flows from his grace as head of the church. The Christ's what they call capital grace.

And it's done in a way that doesn't feel like I'm just working out the- Regurgitating the blindness. Regurgitating a kind of Thomist line, right? So that's sort of what I'm getting at. And there are lots of other doctors and lots of other approaches and there's an entirely different liturgical year for just considering the mysteries, right? I'm getting at. And there are lots of other doctors and lots of other approaches and there's an entirely different liturgical year for just considering the mysteries, right? So if you're reflecting on the mysteries of Christ's life, you're just gonna do it in a different way than St. Thomas does because you're living in a different liturgical context.

So the East's pushback on Aquinas and scholasticism isn't, let's not think carefully about these things from an intellectual perspective, right? Because as soon as I ask a question, you have answer me if you are to answer me intelligent intelligibly You're going to have to be thinking and using logic and correct and the best revelation best You know the best in real orthodox theologians will totally agree with that. Yeah so Okay, so then so so when again, I'm still trying to understand the pushback against Aquinas or against scholasticism at whole, like what's what's the problem?

What's the problem is it that he gets too too far into the weeds, is that he's trying to explicate that which can only be revealed as mystery and can't be understood a great degree? This is funny to me. I don't know, because I've read these later scholastics that come afterwards. That's all weeds. The guys who are writing, you know, in the generations after Aquinas, since some of them from my great devotion and love, Thomas de Vio Cajetan, my first daughter is named after him, John of St. Thomas, Sylvester of Prius, all these people. That's the weeds

of like, okay, we can split this hair 16 times over to make distinctions. So then you go back to Aquinas and you're like, it's just this, it actually is this beautiful, I find it like clear. It backs itself on scripture and the fathers. It doesn't try to actually push too much into the details. That drives the technical theologian mad, right? But I think it is a fear of getting lost in kind of scholastic precision, imagining that that kind of thing is the whole of theology. I guess that that happens too. I really want to be careful.

It's easy to just say, oh, that does happen, right? Because then you can kind of just throw some people overboard and say, oh, so the Orthodox are right to see that. That's very unfair. Who lives their spiritual life like that? I mean, we all know people who think the answer's in the book. Because it's an easy temptation.

The Catholics do this, right? Catholics are like, I've got a problem in my life. And then, you know, well, here's a book that will help you. You know, it's like, well, no, it's really the practice, prayer practices of the church are what will help you. But it's a pretty rare person who says that. Right? Who says, the book, no, the book.

No, I would say most people would say the book is the answer. Oh, see, do you see me? I'm trying to, from the East, be as positive as I can be to not do one of these anti-Western tropes. Yeah, no, but it is that. That's been my experience. That is what they're afraid of. But they would say that the book will lead you

into a different way of living. I mean, but maybe not, maybe not. Maybe it's like the book will lead you into a different way of thinking. That's what, you know, it bugs the Orthodox soul because the Orthodox soul is still closer to what the West was like when it was a primarily monastic church. So what would the you didn't know who was going to speak to you did you? They freaked you out.

I didn't. So please there's a voice off camera. No please no. So if it's about you know changing activities what would what would the East recommend instead of books? Oh Well, I mean, of course the the East does have you said spiritual spiritual classic There's all the stuff together is you know, the Philokalia, but you know, it's just go go to liturgy Pray the Jesus prayer and go to liturgy and go to liturgy and you know, I'll even add lexio divina

It's more of a Western thing in its term, but still it's it's a universal practice and like that's it Yeah, live the liturgy. Live it in practices. Even today, I think what attracts Westerners to the East is the simplicity it seems to have. Like Jesus' prayer, liturgy, light your candles, do your bowing, that's it. Even when you compare, and this might be an interesting kind of essay,

just to kind of compare the Chotky with the Rosary as analogous to how complicated things can appear in the East versus West, right? Because I think when a Westerner first gets introduced to the Chotky, like, all right, how do I do this thing? And you're like, well, you say this one prayer. I mean, you can say, no, it's probably theotokos, save us if you want,

but you don't, just that's it. And you're like, I don't understand. You know, and sometimes, because then people take them as being- You need a whole manual to understand how to pray the Rosary. Yeah, and it's like, okay, which mystery do I have to remember? No, you're just praying to God to forgive you as a sinner.

That's it. That's what you're doing. Glory to God. Yeah, and it's interesting. There's a kind of a different parallel. I think this is appropriate. I was at St. Peter's this morning, and it was,, I guess downstairs in their chapel, it's a perpetual adoration. So, you know, various people are down there kneeling or sitting and praying, you know, and there's a kind of like earnestness of sitting with Christ, there's this earnestness. And then I took my, I had my horologian and I just,

it just structures my life as praying the Liturgy of the Hours. It's just my thing. Like that is not a judgment. It's just I realize it. But you know, there I am, it probably looks, you know, complex, but it's it's like you know just over and over again crossing myself you know. But in a sense I find that to be very like loose and floopy right. Whereas there's this earnestness of mental prayer going on among my Latin brethren there. And in a sense no matter how much I'm doing externally I feel sort of like you know I'm the one who's you know you know less earnest because I'm sort of following my liturgical book. Now, there's no real insecurity there on my part,

but, you know, just sort of like doing the liturgy, doing these simple devotions. You're right, I think that takes people in. Even when you look at the different liturgies, if you look at the Latin mass, it seems more kind of militaristic. Yes, turned, yes. Exactly.

When you look in the East and it feels like you're in an ocean and being battled about by the waves. It feels more motherly. Yeah. Go to a big divine liturgy where you have like you go to the Melkite Parish down in DC, Holy Transfiguration. They've just got scads of like subdeacons and deacons and it's an an acolyte or servers.

And it's just, you know, it's in there. It's the Arab culture, too. So it's just kind of like people wandering around. Beautiful. Yeah, it's beautiful. It's just so beautiful. I I nudged my wife. We were there. This is why the cues don't make sense in the East, maybe not even in the West.

But yeah, but in the East, it's like, why? Why do we have these? Why is that order? Yeah, of course, is a tremendous and beautiful order. Yeah. But in the in the in the in the divine, but to see the order is is kind of like lost if you're just looking for that It is very cut and clean my wife loves yeah in the traditional. Yeah, I don't I Tend towards that but only from the part of my personality that I think needs to be curved It's not actually a good thing in my sense

So do you think then that when there is perhaps? Well, let me put it this way, when you were a Westerner, did you see more of a temptation towards scripturosity than when you journeyed east? Because that's the experience some people share with me. This is not meant as a, you know, I know my list of sins. And as I joked with my confessor the other day, I said, you know, oh, that's nice. I know my sins are over here and then I'll have a different set of life conditions.

And that whole other part of the house that I didn't realize was leaky is also leaky. So I'm not kind of batting aside your question, except when I was a kid, I never really had an issue with script velocity. And did you eventually? No. No, that's nice. So hence I didn't have that release from that. The Lord Therese of Lisieux and the sixth session at the Council of Trent exercised

me of script velocity, but it took a while. Okay. Yeah, no, that was, I mean, when I was young and sort of, but it took a while. Okay. Yeah, no, that was, I mean, when I was young and sort of I was dating a really beautiful soul, evangelical girl, who was actually the reason that I started taking my Catholicism seriously at that period I did. Did you?

But no, I mean, probably there's a sort of laxity in my personality, in my temperament that way. It's like my wife says that last 10% at the end is always hard for me. So, but no, you know what the East cured me of though was anger at the church. How so? It's just funny because usually people go to the East

and they, not usually, but a lot of people go to the East and they get mad at the rest of the church because they're so mad at the Western Church. So how did it cure you of your anger towards the church? Well, there's a sense in which with all the, all the various things that people carp on about in the online world, which probably I know I'm on too much as it is, I don't care.

I don't care. It's sort of like you can go to whichever complaining sites, I'd use a much stronger word than that, and see what is it that the current pope has done, or the Curia, or I have a list of, from my bad experiences ecclesiastically, of like bishops that I could go and look and see what they're doing just to get mad.

And there's a lot of things to be mad about. And that used to just pollute my life. I just don't care. It's just in the rear view mirror. I care, I pray for all of it, but emotional. Fair enough, but, and I think I understand exactly where you're coming from. And I experienced what you're talking about, too

But why is it the east that that cured you of that anger? Oh, well, because we don't matter to the West is one thing So it's like in a sense my life has become so like I'm off the radar, you know But so much of that is just there Western conversations, right? So many of those start at home with you like some experience liturgically or some experience in your Western diocese. And sometimes we get these mailers from my wife's diocese because we're split ritual household. So it's like we live in two different diocese in a sense. I'm in the Archeparchy of Pittsburgh

and she's in the local diocese. We'll at least leave it there so that the next comment doesn't cause some problem. I don't wanna be detractive. But sometimes you see these, the fundraising things that come from the diocese. And I mean, I throw it at her. I'm like, hey, how's your church? She gets her so mad. I say your church, because it's a sui or a church. It's like, how's your church working out? And she gets so mad at me. She says, you're still a

Catholic, you know. Doesn't mean I don't get worked up about it, but there was some tomfoolery, because I want to keep it abstract enough, that happened in the Latin world, tied up with just everything in the past, we'll say 10 years. I mean, you cut me off if it's inappropriate. I don't believe in being too negative about the current pontiff publicly, like some people do.

But there was a set of discussions, it wasn't at Morris Letizia, another set of discussions that came up and I got frustrated about it. And now I'm an academic and this is what I'm gonna do. I'm not saying this is what everyone else should do. I just went and translated a book from the past I thought was better than that, what was said.

And it's a book called, The True Christian Life by Father Ambrose Garda, CUA Press is publishing it. Real beautiful meditation on divinization, our call to be Christified in grace You know and that was my way of dealing with it. I just didn't have the kind of pushback anger Yeah, I was just like this is what I'm gonna do and I don't feel the need to sort of Go on the internet to see where someone is wrong, which was my which was the temptation before that

I never was really traddy, but that kind of like wanting to be angry at everything, you know, was a real thing I struggled with. I mean, I still do. You know, my poor parish priest confessor, you know, he has to hear from me all the time, you know, the weird confessions of an ex-monk, cause you're mad at things ecclesiastical, a way that normal parishioners just aren't right.

Like it's like, you know, how many times have I said negative things about priests or bishops or whatever, you know, that needs to be confessed, you know, but it's not the same that it really freed me from that becoming Eastern. Mm-hmm. Yeah Let's talk about Catholic morality. Yeah, let's go about morality in general. What is morality? Oh I can say I should I used to be able to rattle off the old scholastic definition of it's a transcendental relation to the moral rule. Well, I mean, ultimately moral questions become a question

of how our acts should be measured or what is the standarding of our acts? What should we be, how should we be living in our acts that are freely willed? But I like to pull back from that almost immediately, right? Because ultimately, especially at the theological level, which the book was written at, morality asks the question of, are we living our destiny?

Are we living the destiny that we are created to be? And then you have to ask yourself, oh, what are we created to be? Well, we're created actually to be graced and to live quite literally through grace, the divine life of God. Like we are adapted in our souls to live the Trinitarian life through the grace that comes to us from Christ

in our life as Christians. So then what do our actions look like? Sort of what are the consequences of that? What are the character traits that we should have, the virtues? And then everything that flows downstream from that. Now I know we have this sort of false idea, many of us, that morality is a list of rules

that don't have to do with happiness, right? Exactly. And I want to get to that. But before we do, I want to take kind of more of this sort of the atheist-theist discussion about objective morality. Yeah. I would actually be very much open to changing my mind on this, but it does seem to me,

and I know it does sound maybe like an apologist-theist trope at this point, but I don't see how you get out of, I don't see how you get objective morality if you don't have a God. Oh yeah, I mean, cause ultimately it is, it's hard because you need a transcendent grounding of your norms. Like the, we are well aware that ultimately, especially things like justice, mercy, all of these exist in even in a secular mind, right? A secular person can have a vague idea of needing to be just, of needing to be fair, of needing to be merciful.

It's easier with the stuff with justice. Of needing to not be so attached to things in the world that you basically mess up your relationships. I'm trying to kind of recast the virtue language in something that a secularist can understand. We can even see from our own subjective experiences that there are certain ways of acting that lead to me being more happy

or lead to me and my family flourishing. And there are certain actions that derail that. Exactly, and so somewhere in that insight, you start to see, I mean, you see there's something that's immaterial, right? There's a moral law that's not limited to my specific circumstances, but I stand before that law. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not convinced of that yet. I don't see that. I don't see why one has to appeal to them to the immaterial right away.

Oh, OK. Yeah. Why can't why can't Rowley just be an evolutionary development? Like useful like our hands and eyes they they they they are conducive for our survival and that of the species why can't morality have a have evolved in that way if we were raping and pillaging on a large enough scale humanity wouldn't have ever gotten to where it's gotten and there's there's a sense in which probably some of the you know predispositions we have from lower stages of evolution actually do predispose certain moral things.

But who experiences, especially when you experience guilt for having done something, who experiences that as merely some kind of utilitarian? What you just said. Let me try, let me try. So one thing I've noticed, and one of the reasons I don't read

my YouTube comments anymore, and I think most people who are online, they run some kind of social media page, get this, you can read 10 positive comments and one of them is negative and it's so much louder than the 10 positive comments you just read. I could see somebody saying, well, we've evolved to be keenly aware of the disapproval

of those within our group because it's a good thing to remain part of that group. Oh, I'm sure. OK. And so therefore you could say that guilt is a sort of byproduct of of of of recognizing what I've done that's gone against the group. And so there's that. You also have situations where people feel guilty for things that are just kind of, you know, that they shouldn't feel. Yeah. flip it.

No, and this is true. It's like, you know, because there's a sense in which, of course, when I teach in the seminary, I just start at the heights of the gift of grace and come down. I don't do a lot of the apologetic stuff. Yeah, let's start down, though. No. Just to think about it.

No, no, because, you know, I guess, part of me wants to say that there has to be, in everyone's experience, you know, I think about it as a parent. So if you're talking to someone who's a parent, this is the problem. We're in the ancient sense of ad hominem, we're arguing to a person's position, right? We're taking a person's position. The ancient idea of ad hominem is that you're

just conceding what someone says, like what you just did, and then try and figure out how to get out of it, right? How to argue them out of it. If someone's a parent, for instance, there are certain things that you do where you mess up the raising of your children, right? Happens all the time, and I don't think it comes from the theist part of my soul. You just have a sense where, you know, I don't wanna make fun of you, it's like, crikey.

I'm a, what a fool I am. Once again, I would use a stronger word than that. Like, and it's not mere, you know, unless you're, you have to have an entirely reductionistic metaphysic that's gonna say to you. That's okay, that's what I wanna start with. Yeah, no, that's just gonna, well, I know're you have to have an entirely reductionistic metaphysic. That's going to say to you. That's what I want to start with. Yeah, no, that's going to. Well, I know you have to convince.

So maybe I can't understand. I can't understand why my eyeballs see. Yeah, I can't understand why I feel guilt or shame, but I do. And I don't have to posit a God for that. Well, and I'm not going to get to the God. Right now I'm staying just at the level of time. Material. So all of them.

So I guess what I'm trying to get us to. So let me give you sort of that's like the the wig history. What's the where am I directing us to material. I'd have to pause the material. So I guess what I'm trying to get us to, so let me give you sort of the wig history. Where am I directing us to at the end here? Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Is just the inside of, there is something that is more than my own sense of my place in the community or my own self image that condemns me.

I can't put it quite into words. I'm not saying a person even. I'm not even saying God or anything like that. I'm just saying it's really like just moral rightness. I have failed at being human and you know, that by itself, no matter what, if no one was around, if nobody was around me, I would still find gnawing at my conscience

the idea that I've fallen short of what I am to be human. You may, there's no way of you just knowing that. There's no way of anybody knowing that. If I haven't come into contact with human society, I'm not sure how I would feel. Maybe I wouldn't feel any guilt. I mean, perhaps, you know, I have a real hard time with these kinds,

these styles of arguments, because I'm gonna say whoever's doing this is living in such a fabricated online comment world that you've not lived life. Sometimes you wanna say just, I guess you've never, I guess you've lived on the surface of your life. I'm gonna be, and I'm not trying to write you off, but it's like, go take care of your dying parent.

I can say this having done it. Go do that or go not do it and watch what your conscience, how you feel. And ask yourself, is it merely because of what people think how you feel and you know ask yourself is it is it merely because of you know what people think of you or not and you know spend some time alone which is hard for humans and you know deep within there you're going to have a sense of the injustice that you did or maybe you know whenever your you know mother was a mixed bag i mean a good woman but also she had some real demons with alcohol she struggled with you know and i could have chosen to

avoid caring for her, right? But the sense of why did I do that was not because what's the family gonna think, but it was right. Like in the end, our relationship was better than most of the other ones she still had. And so you have to dig into a person's experience to get them to see that. Yeah, no, I agree.

I think our subjective experience of the moral order is more loudly true to us than any argument for Moral skepticism. Yes, and it's more convincing. I think so in my life it is but it doesn't mean that it is that way it You know, I maybe I could say well, I don't understand why it is. It seems just to help her as opposed to not help her. But it but it does for some reason, and I'm not going to conclude moral objectivity because of that.

Well, because the next step is is actually even at the level of philosophy, really, it's actually quite hard because it's an immense amount of abstraction to then make this next step from this hazy sense to then say, you know, there's a norm or whatever you want call it, that is always there. It doesn't matter where it is but what the circumstances are. But when you're faced with something where you're called to this kind of familial justice

or piety as it used to be called, it's there and it measures you. And guess what? You can not do it, you'll fall short. No, I'm with you. So, you know, but that's already, you're on the pathway to a kind of like metaphysical abstraction that's more than you know most people push back if you if you if you're thinking in my vein here against him but my next step is

no my next step is we're so we're so marked by sin and selfish because of the effects of the fall that most of this stuff you actually just need conversion and grace and the experience of christ to even see these natural truths well okay I'm a pretty strong believer in that. I think I'm like that. All right. You can argue to it. Then you can argue after the fact and then after the fact. It's sort of the way Aquinas would say you can show that the Trinity is not incoherent,

but you can't prove it. I think very often on the level of the natural truths like philosophical truths because of how like people you're arguing against are so turned toward the world, right? I mean, we would all be there by our own power. You even have to do that for like many philosophical truths. I become more and more convinced that, which does not sound like a Thomist, which is why I fit in with no one.

No, I wanna talk about that in a minute. Did you? Yeah, I guess my pushback would just be that example from the beginning of people do feel guilt for things that would be kind of within understanding of the hierarchical objective morality that people would consider just not something you need to be guilty about.

Like we talk about scrupulosity. So that would be an example of some time when someone's feeling this primary and I don't wanna over characterize what you're saying, but like this divine feeling of guilt about something which is, you know, from the... Misplaced. Yeah, no, there's a lot of that.

So is your point then that because it can be misplaced, it might be altogether useless? Or not in keeping? How do you, if people are feeling these primary feelings about these moral experiences, then how can that be the foundation if those things conflict? So what is the, what's different about you feeling guilty about, you know, a family situation versus someone feeling guilty about scrupulosity? Is it equality of difference? How do you define that? Yeah, that's, I mean, that's, I guess, the old Socrates abuse here.

You need to be able to fair it. That's not an argument against objective morality, is it? Like, that's not what you're trying to do. Well, that's an argument. Because that would be like saying some people are colorblind, therefore colors aren't real. Color has no, yeah. Well, what if they are colorblind, therefore colors aren't real. Color has no- Well, what if they saw colors differently, then you couldn't say that everyone sees color

objectively and colors this objective thing. It's not to say that there isn't some underlying objectivity to it or not. It's just saying, if we're saying the reason why we know that color objectively exists is because I see it in some particular way. No, no, hang on. See, now aren't we kind of making the distinction here? Or shouldn't we make the distinction between moral ontology and moral epistemology? Like, how we come to know things is a very different question. To do those things exist. Someone might get their sums wrong and it might seem to them that a particular math

equation works when it doesn't, but it wouldn't follow that there isn't a right way of going about it. Yeah, so that would just be my my pushback is that it seems that your argument for the ontological existence of moral truth is just an epistemological antidote. And I jumped into the theory of knowledge, the epistemology side more quickly because I wanted to just get it right. We're talking kind of the subjective experience. I need to sort of unpack

from within the subjective experience what may eventually be the ontological claim that there are, you know, there's something immaterial about these values and that in a way is gonna be a path somewhat like what Newman does through conscience to get to God, right? But the first step is just, you know, let's look inside your experience.

And I'm using guilt because that's, you know, that's, it's, I guess, a, it's like kind of phenomenological register. It's a register within your experience That all of a sudden it puts the law right in front of you this experience of guilt is where you you feel the moral law I don't 100% like the moral law language I really in a sense don't like because laws of a derivative concept I mean moral law is fine, but if you think of law you tend to think of morality like rules

Which I love to avoid I mean you're sensing the fact that you're falling short of the very thing that you should be doing. Now, deception is manifoldly possible here. I mean, individual actions and circumstances are just, I mean, immensely complex. You know, this is, in a sense, why our Lord is like, and don't go judging others, you know.

You know, leave that one for the angels at the end of time. But once again, I think anyone who's lived in an adult life has a sense at times of things that either they were called to do, that's the positive side, not guilt, but things they're called to do and they would feel guilty if they did not do it. And guilt doesn't need to be our main thing here

I'm not saying guilty the only way to do this is just you know sitting here what I've backed myself into rhetorically But everyone's had you know some sense of that if they've been mature and not merely floating about I really do think I You know, I think it it requires a kind of perversity of an immaturity to get into that forum, online forum kind of mentality. You want... Let me see if I see what you're saying, because I think I agree with you. It's almost like the tail ends up wagging the dog, where it's like maybe you're beginning with a conclusion that God doesn't exist, and then you've got to rewrite and re-explain those experiences that seem so obvious to you.

Sort of like the... I remember when I was 17 or 16, I had a bout of solipsism. And suppose I was a solipsist. It was like the explanation I now have to come up with is far more complex than recognizing that other people do exist, even if I'm not sure how how it is, I'm interacting with them. Yeah. It's almost like it's simpler just to dismiss everybody else and go with that hunch. Yes. Just as it might be simpler to dismiss the immaterial and re. Yeah, let's say you have a completely

scientific outlook that it is all matter all the way down, which is actually metaphysically impossible. But hey, that's not our discussion right now. But if you've got that kind of, you know, pre-conception, which is going to also have an atheistic side to it as well, what you don't want to leave in and you can't quite epistemologically leave in some transcendent non material component And even if you're not thinking of that quite at the at the beginning still those kind of reductionist arguments that would get you You know to say that it's all just kind of conditioning be it from evolution or social conditions or whatnot

It's gonna be one. It's one nice little piece in your your materialist world So you're not rocking the, sit down, you're gonna rock the boat if you do anything else. I mean, I think some of that is motivated by that sort of thing. So yeah, I mean, I'm arguing ad hominem in that ancient sense of ad hominem through you to someone who's not present.

So I'm not sure if we finished, you know, but I mean. I guess the point I'm trying to make which you might agree with is I don't see how you can believe yourself to be within a godless universe and think that there are certain things demanded of you. Yes. Because he and he is why like where would I base morality in I can be nice I can base morality like sort of again ontologically, either in that which is beneath me, that which is at my level or that which is above me. And if the supernatural, if that beyond us doesn't exist, maybe this is too simplistic a way about it, but this is how I understand it.

I've got beneath me or at my level. Beneath me is evolution. And I can say, well, I've evolved this way to act certain ways for my own good and the good of those I care about. But if I now know that, then I can go against it. If I'm now smart enough to know what evolution has sort of wired me to do. Now, at my level, I either have what you think of me

and maybe that concerns me or what society thinks about me. But society has no more objective authority over me than you do in a godless universe since a society society just means other people So what am I left with to sort of embed now? It could be some sort of platonic realm of justice and mercy and these sorts of things But if if if I don't know it's just but even then who's doing the commanding like a moral command only makes sense between two Minds yeah, and in a platonic realm. How am I still sort of there because you're falling short of the measure I mean, you'll have some.

The Neoplatonists can do this. You're slipping into a kind of nonbeing away from the form of justice, from material justice. So you can get it. It's a real there's actually like the platinus. The whole universe is filled with morality because of because of how everything kind of it's the whole universe should turn back to its source. Yeah. By a kind of conversion. So, I mean, you can do it with the platinus.

You have a source. you have a one. Yes. Right. Yeah, I mean, I tend to read Plato's on the way to Neoplatonism. Yeah. I like the harmonized history. But if I get rid of Platonism and just say, oh no, that doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense to have this.

But even there, you have something transcendent. Yeah, exactly. You're already on the path of something transcendent. What do you think? What do you think about that? So I, if I, if you don't have to keep jumping in, I'm sorry. Just to then clarify where I'm at,

then it's not to cut you out then, cause then I think this is to affirm that the person who acknowledges this, who may have still a completely messed up view at the level of metaphysics and let alone faith, or you know, a kind of theology that they've created for themselves about whether or not God exists,

the moment you start on the path to acknowledging moral norms, you're already walking down a path that leads you ultimately, only and ultimately, to God. Because you are presuming there's something transcendent. Now, of course, you have to work it out. Are we going to be Platonists? Are we going to hear the word of Christ and see that it's ultimately a reflection of God's goodness to be reflected through us and all the virtues. But if you recognize a transcendent moral law of any sort, any kind, even one moral measure of what I ought to be, you're on, you're already on your way. I think, you know, cause this is why, no,

I'm not going to go there only because it's too technical. So you can, I mean, this is why, you know, you can read the Stoics two different ways, Stoic philosophers who come in that, that period, you know, of later Platonism, one of the, they're very influential in the notion of natural law, but you can read them as natural law is, is just fulfilling our embodied nature. And that's it. Or you can take into it a kind of transcendent idea of, you know, we have a nature that we've received from the gods or God or whatever and we have to, you know, live up to that nature of what it is to be human, which is already a, that's

already a step on its way to a kind of transcendence. And is that that side of stoicism that Christianity ends up feeling most comfortable with because then it can sort of graft that onto our idea of God and our idea of the human person's place in the universe Have you done much reading of Nietzsche or Mackey? Because my understanding is at least Mackey and probably Nietzsche too is that if there is no God morality is yeah Nietzsche, I mean, it's yeah that it can all be the values can be trans valued They can be you know, they can be they're set they're set by kind of power play they're set by kind of power play. It depends on what the culture says

that the powerful and the culture have said are virtue. So this becomes part of his critique of the weakness of Christianity. Yeah, yeah. There's something very beautiful about, there's beautiful sides to the poor and troubled soul of Nietzsche, but yeah, just gotta defend the poor guy.

But my first ever published thing was a Nietzschean thing from when I was in seminary, Yeah, but anyway, but you're correct I'm interested to hear about that but just to get in some pushback while we're still on the topic of like No deosis We'll get there Basically just we were saying before that we have this Kind of the ontological idea of morality and whether it's objective and things like that not and then we said that we were slipping into an epistemological understanding of morality, where it's like, well, we just kind of innately sense these things. So I would just say that the kind of subject, the argument for the subjectivity of morality would be based in what you said, in that idea of you felt, you know, this moral sense very strongly. Other people feel this moral sense very strongly.

It's a very normal thing. But that can't necessarily be the basis of an understanding of an ontologically objective morality because people do differ in the way that they feel these things. So is that the foundation for this ontologically objective morality? Subjective experience? Does it subject to experience? Yeah. Do you realize how hard it is to prove there's an external world? Yeah, it's really hard. Yes, you know because you have to get all the way down to the the

the veracity of our senses our external senses touchdown in really existing reality as such For a Thomist that takes the whole course of metaphysics and beyond. It takes a lot to get there because the first thing we know is how Aristotle starts though, right? The first and most short principle in book four of the metaphysics is, I mean, he's done other stuff. He has his natural philosophy, but to really get down to like even starting a critique is, all right, listen, say a word and I'm going to show you how being and non-being are opposed to each other. And this is, you know, the principle of non-contradiction. It's it's just this really abstract first step from within our experience

of basically using names that you can start to see this. It doesn't actually tell you anything yet about the external world being real. You have to do a whole bunch of steps in between. Right. But you do start with what's implied in your experience because the implication within your experience is already going to bespeak its grounding in the world. It's just you have to really work yourself out from there. I think that we're trying to accomplish much more here than you can just on even my starting point, right? It actually then, it requires a ton of metaphysics

to make all the steps from, and that's what you're sensing, is that there's a lot more to be done here, because otherwise you could just say, yeah, it's still all very subjective. Well, there's a sense in which you could say, well, hey, Aristotle, it's really subjective that you told someone to use a name,

and you're gonna prove that, you prove your first principle of metaphysics, which you're being, you know? Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. I think that- I'm probably very, gosh, I didn't expect it to go this way. The people at Ascension, when they see this video, they're just gonna be weeping.

They're gonna be like, we wanted to sell books. My book, people, is written for normal people, I assure you. But this is an enjoyable conversation, so just come along for the ride for a bit. It seems to me what you're getting at is just that basically morality in some sense, we all experience subjectively in that where the one's experiencing it,

but we're still presumably experiencing objective. Yeah, it's like the path after this is to show what is happening in the phenomena of your experience now is implying. Yeah. Objectivity ultimately implies something about reality as long as it doesn't have deception. So you have to talk about deception and all that.

But objectivity has within it, like for just to have objects of knowledge, already has built in there. Yeah. Something that's real. Which kind of took my probably basic beliefs in a sense, right? Like I cannot prove the external world exists.

I actually don't know how I would possibly do that. Yeah. I don't know how to prove that history is five minutes old with the appearance of exists. I actually don't know how I would possibly do that. Yeah. I don't know how to prove that, that, that, that, that history is five minutes old with the appearance of age. Yeah. I don't know how to prove that you exist and not just a, I don't know, as some sort of a robot, sophisticated looking robot. Yeah. I actually don't. Um, and people do have, you know, I mean, uh, what's his name? Um, 17th century French bloody hell Descartes.

There. Uh. You know, Descartes had that sense, right? That the, as you say, the veracity. Yeah, veracity, truthfulness. Yeah, exactly. Of our senses. It can be deceived.

Yeah. But just because, but I don't go from, they can be deceived, therefore the external world doesn't exist. I might do that. Yeah. And similarly, I don't have to go from, well, my guilt might be misplaced. Therefore, there's no such thing as sort of objective facts. Correct. But it just takes tons of

unpacking. But you try to just rhetorically, you try to just get the punch if you're talking to someone. Yeah. Get them to a place without, you know, don't reduce them to tears over their dead parents. You know what I mean? But find something in their life where they had a profound sense of what they should do. If I torture your daughter, please don't go there right away. Yeah, that's not advised people. Yeah, but I'm probably really influenced

in the back of my mind by my professor, Monsignor Robert Sokolowski, who was a sort of mixed phenomenologist and Aristotelian Thomist. So he lived in both the world of scholastic talk, but also phenomenology because of his era of training at Levain. And probably elements of that have all seeped

into my Thomism. I'm not isomorphic with him. I'm not the sort of one-to-one with him, but he profoundly left a mark on me in graduate school. I was just the best professor I ever had. So no insult to other professors, but he was head and shoulders. And very like like stayed character.

You know, had a very staid, you know, he wasn't like a big and bullying character, you know, his conversations would not be like this, but he was just a profound soul. So there's a, you know, I'm no phenomenology guy, but there's this phenomenology that found its way into my thought. So I take very seriously. it's like the object, which doesn't necessarily yet mean it's a reality, but the object of my experience may well have hidden within it this path that takes us toward the transcendent grounding of it all.

We can move on from this, but I just sort of want to sum up by saying, making that analogy from the external world and objective moral facts, if one object outside of me exists, just one, then it follows that the external world exists. Likewise, if one thing can be shown to be a moral duty, one thing, just one thing. To be a transcendent measure that I must, in a sense, bow the knee of my will before.

If just one thing, then it would follow that objective, that there's an objective moral realm. Exactly, and then it's a question of what that is. Is it a bunch of forms like Plato or whatever, but all of a sudden there's something above me. And boy, for an atheist, it's a dangerous path after that, because I will say that either philosophically or ultimately theologically as well through faith, it's a path that leads to God,

and a path that with sufficient proposition and a path that, you know, with sufficient proposition of the mysteries leads to Christ, you know, so. How, okay then, so moving away from that, how do you think many Catholics understand morality in an inappropriate or improper way? Yeah, it's, you said it already, it's a list of rules. You know, so the precepts of the church and the precepts of the natural law or something like that.

You know, that there's a, morality is ultimately discussion about, you know, what are the roles that I have to follow at certain times, you know, and sort of the guidance that I should follow in my life as well. Which is not wrong, but it's sort of like the lowest part of morality, right? I mean, not the lowest part, like as in kick it away,

but it's so derivative from, you know, really the fact that, you know, morality is ultimately, or moral theology unpacks everything that's involved in the claim that all of our acts are to have as their principles these virtues, which ultimately in their most profound place are the theological virtues. And you would still call, you would actually call yourself a Thomist,

I would presume. Do you use that? I don't necessarily attribute that to myself. I have to, even though I have to because of the nature of all my work. Because I'm not even sure what we mean by Thomist. I think people mean different things. Yeah, I've got a real cramp.

What you said earlier about like, reading the Thomist is far more difficult than reading Thomas. Yes. So it depends what you mean by a Thomist. Do you mean metaphysically? Do you mean? Yeah, it's like, I mean, I just find myself

to be a member of the Thomas school as a big discussion group, the traditional Thomas school. But the Thomas position, which I think is, I think it's correct, but it's not. But what position? I'm getting there. I'm getting there. Sorry.

It's not Dave Fede, but it's a theological position about the infused moral virtues. I see. There are Christian moral virtues that derive also from faith, hope, and charity that influence our justice, that influence our courage, etc. There's a Christian courage, a Christian prudence, a Christian justice, etc. So all of that, like unpacking the implications of all of that apparatus of what we are as Christians. What is it that our life should be, our life should be a kind of wellspring by which grace passes through

Faith hope and charity primarily then all the Christian moral virtues But even all the natural aspects of the natural law becomes subservient to what ultimately is a divine call to union with the Blessed Trinity as members of the mystical body of Christ because moral Morality is not from a Christian perspective, especially from a Catholic and Orthodox perspective, merely kind of moral philosophy with a gilded, a golden Christ, you know, a topping on it, right? Like, we take the natural law, we kind of take some of the discussions, sort of things we've been talking about now, and we sort of say, but of course Christ is the model for us. I see. You know, no, it's because it's actually just part of theology. And theology is just one

thing. Theology is just the discursive unpacking of the mystery of God, God in himself or God with us. But it's all God all the way down. Right? It's the two great credit Belia, the two great things that we believe are that God exists as Holy Trinity and that God is a merciful and provident, just yes, but merciful and provident God, and that's, you know, most fully seen and the greatest gift that was ever given, which is the grace of union as the theologians call it, or the incarnation of Christ and his whole life through his passion, death and resurrection.

And everything else just falls under that. So to do moral theology is just to ask the question of what does God in us, in our action look like? Because that's what the Christian moral life is. So. Cool. Sorry. Yeah.

So from an Eastern perspective, right, this is the idea of theosis. Yeah. You know, we are to become becoming divine Right. Sometimes in the West would be referred to under the rubric of divinization. Yeah. And you know, it's it is fair The Orthodox for instance in a kind of polemic say it's all legal following of rules. That's what Roman Catholics think. Mm-hmm It's unfair. There is such a rich appreciation of Divinization it's at the heart of Thomism. It's the heart of other schools too. It's the heart of Thomas's moral theology is the idea. Some people talk about as happiness and beatitude, but

ultimately too the deep roots of this is the fact that it is the in the gift of grace we are living God's life. Quite really, you know, it's not pantheism, we're not being absorbed into God, but the very object of faith, hope and charity, which are the soul then of every other act that we have, is God in his Trinitarian mystery. So that's everything else downstream from that is just changed because of what the gift of grace is and what our vocation is. But there's something true to the Orthodox claim

because of various vicissitudes after the Reformation in particular. There was a lot of legalism that was kind of a, you know, where do the rules fall? There were all debates. Like St. Alphonsus in a sense is kind of gloried among moral theologians. He brought a lot of that to a halt. All these debates of her conscience, you know, just where am I free to do something? It's kind of like the teenager, how far can I go with my girlfriend without sinning? There was a lot of that in the West,

but a couple of the really profound Dominican theologians. Oh yeah, I've got to kind of, pink hairs is good, pink hairs is good. But the people that pink hairs refuses to mention because people in the 60s decided they didn't want to mention the people they learned from. Sorry, this is like a blood. It's like a blood feud for me.

Pincairs is good. But yeah, go read Juan R. Intero, Ambrose Garda, Reginald Garagui-Lagrange. It's all this. It's all this. There's stuff in that everyone thinks Pincairs critiqued. He was the first one to critique, you know, casualty or something. It's all throughout the guys, a generation or two beforehand. And it bothers me. to take, you know, casualty or something. It's all throughout the guys, a generation or two beforehand.

And it bothers me. This is- Why doesn't he reference them? Or at least reference them sufficiently? No, I think, I mean, some of it may just be accidental. So let's, I don't wanna, I don't wanna cast that anger part of my soul. I think some of it is, you know,

the bad experience of like World War II and what people thought about the conservatives of that generation. Some of them didn't get on board quickly enough against the French government that was stuck in by Hitler. Um, it's very unfair though. People like make claims of antisemitism that are just not true, like not true at all.

Some of it was some bad experiences in the forties and fifties in some theological debates that then after the council, just the generation just wanted to act as though they had no teachers. And it was, you know, we don't want that, that kind of precancel your post-conciliar attitude, even in a lot of conservative faithful guys exists because they're living sort of after the council. And there's a real, get very mad about this, an attitude that a certain party won.

That the, you know, be it the progressives won or not trying to get you in trouble here, but you know, even you'll find, you know, Bishop Barron will talk about how the Communio school won. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubach, Ratzinger and others, they won against a certain dry neo-scholasticism beforehand. There's a kind of basis for that. It's so horribly divisive though of how these guys were trained. And the Dominicans in a sense didn't,

none of those figures I just mentioned were Dominicans. So they did not have the ascendancy with the kind of conservatives after the council. And so there really was a rejection of what came before before and they had to float around and finally say it's safe for us to talk about. So you have up here one of my Garagu translations. It's safe for us to talk about Father Garagu Lagrange. Like people used to kind of up their sleeves say his spiritual theology is good, his spiritual, but that's all they would say because they thought he was an anti-modernist, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah blah blah blah But no one would talk about it

And I kind of like bitterly want to say it took a layman to translate the stuff so that now you people feel safe Now there was a movement from really we could say it was another layman ten years earlier father a Nichols wrote a book on Garagoo he gives some yeah some lectures at other Cambridge or Oxford, but it was Matthew Levering dr Matthew Levering got that published so it's like you, the cunning of laymen made these priests finally feel like they could talk about their older school again, because they didn't want to seem like they were against the council. I got you. Because traditionalists took over a lot of that precancelier stuff.

So that's what I think motivates Bishop Barron on some of this is sort of his bad experiences with traditionalists is that he just sees the scholastics as being the scholastics of the late 19th century and early 20th century as being preconcilier people who ultimately would have been in line with the trads. I think that that's sadly. Now, so Frother Pinker's is echoing though, he's echoing the glories of that earlier generation.

Sum that up for us then. So basically what I just said about, like theology is ultimately a reflection on the divine mysteries across the board, every single thing. They're not departments, nothing else. The mysteries of Christ are the mysteries of our life. The mysteries of the Trinity are the mysteries of our life. The mysteries of Christ are the mysteries, you know,

ultimately the grounding for the mysteries of the church, which, you know, is kind of gets us back to our idea of the Trinity, because the father sends the son who threw his mystical body, incorporates us into himself so that through the spirit, we're led back by kind of gets us back to our idea of the Trinity because the Father sends the Son who through his mystical body incorporates us into himself so that through the Spirit we're led back by kind of reflow to the Father, right? And then in the world of morals, then morals is just about moral theology. It's just about how do I understand that divine vocation which has its rooting in the Trinity and yet every single person every lay person etc is called to that life. People know this under the rubric of the universal call to holiness but

people were talking about this you know long before and yeah some of the really I think Wan'ar and Tarot and Father Gurday so in my book I quote Father Gurday a ton because it's I was editing that translation at the same time But Garrett father Garagoo to they just exposited this magnificently father Garagoo Lagrange taught at the Angelicum in Rome right from 1909 to 61 or something and there are stories about him even in the 50s So it's after World War two so like really there's no reason to see him as some horrible Nazi collaborator Which no one really does there's just a kind of like progressive

who wants to sort of still say that, but everyone knows that's a lie. But he'd fill the big hall at the big lecture hall with people who come to his spiritual theology course because it was just laying this out. But you know, it's like when I gave a Garagu book to my aunt who was my confirmation sponsor, I thought, you know, I was in graduate school, I was like when I gave a Garagoo book to my aunt, who is my confirmation sponsor. I thought, you know, I was in graduate school, I was like, you're going to love this.

She's like, you know, I don't get to talk to you enough. Do you want to? This is like Skype was kind of him. Do you want to Skype and you can explain your gift to me once a week? I can't even pronounce the man's name. Yeah, I know. It's like so. So, you know, I wrote my book in a sense to to echo at a lower level,

which I don't mean with any scorn whatsoever. The the riches of that tradition that I inherited, you know, right. It's not meant to. I tried to actually make it very scriptural in its basis so that it doesn't sound like I'm just parroting Aquinas, you know. But I wrote it to sort of bring that idea of theosis of divinization to the people. It's almost like we went from moral ontology and arguments against God or for God based on our subjective experience to the heights of the study of morality. Yeah.

Can we can we maybe go somewhere in the middle now? Yeah, OK. So we've done this, right? We've grounded it in the Trinity. So, you know, morality is going to discuss, for instance, like what do all the different virtues look like? So to say that our life is life and grace, which is ultimately incorporating us into Christ. I'm gonna keep doing this

because I really wanna kick my heels out against just a kind of morality is about norms, sort of thing. I mean, not because that's wrong, but because you really gotta keep grounding things in the Trinity if you're gonna do moral theology right. And then in Christ and his capital grace, his grace as head of the church.

But then, okay, so faith, first flowering of the divine life of grace. People tend to think of faith, of charity. I mean, these are, well, charity is different, right? Charity, people tend to think is like either giving to the poor or being nice. We'll get there. Before we talk even about other moral virtues, we have to see, for instance, that our minds are divinized.

Our minds know the supernatural life, the deep things of God, as St. Paul says, the deep things of God, the supernatural life of God, the mysteries of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, obscurely as in a mirror, et cetera. But it's not merely faith, it's not trust. This is a very kind of post-Protestant thing. There's a sense in which a trust element is there, right? But faith is ultimately the acceptance of certain truths,

precisely because on the one hand, God has revealed them, but also because he has moved the depths of our soul to enable us to do it. God is through and through and through and through and through and through the one who is present in the theological virtues, which are at the basis of what we'll say that sounds more moral, right?

Because notice how close, and what we're gonna be talking about for, well, I'll say the next five minutes, but realistically, maybe the next 20, sounds like spirituality. Which bit? Everything that I'm saying now and what I'm gonna say for the next 20, sounds like spirituality. Which bit? Everything that I'm saying now and what I'm gonna say for the next 20 minutes probably.

It's gonna sound like spirituality because morals and spirituality are really close because ultimately the mystical life is what the moral life is about. And that's because it starts in its very fundamental route by the divinizing the illumination of our minds through faith. And if you don't appreciate that bit

of what it means to have supernatural vision, everything else doesn't make sense. Because then the hope we have, maybe I'm gonna back up, I'm gonna say this too, we don't believe because the church, okay, the Thomist schools develop position against many Jesuits is that we don't believe

because the church proposes it. The church is a necessary condition. And I mean that, not like something you can kick away She's the necessary condition for proposing through the ages Surely and distinctly the truths of faith, but we believe because God has moved us There's something sounds very Protestant in that if you don't understand that the Thomas really hold the church is necessary But we don't believe ultimately on the church, even on the church's authority, that faith is ultimately on the authority of God who reveals. I assure you that's correct.

I translated 700,000 words by Garagoo on Revelation, which is coming out. It makes sense to me. I know, but some people, I don't know, rhetorically get that in their case, anyone's trying to push back that he's saying something really hard. But if you appreciate that then, and you appreciate the fact that it really is a kind of supernatural eye, right? The gift of faith, our minds are raised to a kind of participation in the divine light. Ah, well, then the next step, for instance, hope, our wills have to be. Just pause on faith for a moment. How many of us in the last 24 hours or week or month or year have prayed for the gift of faith or a deeper faith?

Yeah. Because of what you're saying, I think. We think of faith as a sort of trust, which it is. Think of like, for instance, so Dom Marmion, when I was just reading in Mysteries of Christ, he says, every time you read the gospel, I mean, you should ask for faith, not just as trust, but Lord, when I'm reading these words about you, work within me so that my mind grasps

that here is the incarnate word of God. There's no distinction here except between the persons, right, that is the Godhead. So in order for me to truly grasp that, I have to have the very Godhead itself as the object of my mind to understand who you are in your person. Give me the faith I need

to see that, to see that. And then it's like only then will I understand what you say because it will be in light of that supernatural mystery. I will only understand what you've come to reveal about the father if I understand that. How often have we prayed for that in faith? And that's not, I'm not judging anyone for not, you know, oh, why don't people know this? I think an angry part of me before I became Byzantine did right, you know

It's a misplaced anger because you know the anger is why was I not taught that? Mm-hmm, but it's you know, those are the truths This is like this line from my video that I really like from Ascension I keep using it all the time now, but it worked well truths of faith are the truths of our lives You know like you need to really appreciate that if you're then going to understand anything else. Now as Catholics of course we're well aware, normally we talk about faith and works, right? But another way to see it is the impulse of faith goes further. It's got to pass through the whole being. It's got to divinize our will as well. We're just talking about, you know, our

mind. The will is actually involved here but we can't talk about that because everything can't be done here. So someone who's mad at me about that, please know that I'm aware but uh, you know hope for instance You know, what does it mean to have hope in God? You know the found the the the firm foundation of our hope is our crucified Lord Right the God who goes that far to save his recalcitrant people. It's like you think about Genesis You know, whatever you know, so I I have no problem. I know you've got a young earth are coming on, you know relatively soon Yeah, debate. So those are those at home this Thursday We're gonna be hosted

I'll be hosting a debate between Jimmy Aiken and Gideon Lazar on young with creationism both Gideon who've had on the show and Jimmy Obviously are both Catholics. So subscribe to the channel so you won't miss that one. He didn't tell me to do that. I don't know boundaries sometimes. So I have no problem with evolution, but there's a moment where all of a sudden the dispositive conditions for apes all of a sudden passes the threshold where actually no, God infuses a spiritual soul. Our first parents, Adam and Eve, are created. And boy, we messed that one up really quickly. And yet the whole rest of history becomes this divine mercy rescue mission, you know, with all the recalcitrants that it seems to wear God out,

you know. I mean, all it takes is till Noah. Wash him under, right? You know, but then all this stuff that you get in the prophets to see the God who is striving for Israel to be his people, right, is our hope, our will must be fixed with a short, you know, we're no universalists here. I'm not trying to get you in trouble. You know, bringing up things like you had in your interview with Ralph Martin. But we do have a firm foundation for our hope in Christ. And God does will all of us to be saved. I mean, but we can, you can project this,

but we have the infinite saving, redemptive omnipotence of God that should be the first disposition that we have toward our salvation. The good that we desire for ourselves is our salvation. We're going to have to go further than this, but the good that we desire for ourselves really is our salvation,

because our salvation is found in living the divine life we were given through grace and the hope for that actually to be accomplished ain't in ourselves, right? It's only in Christ and is he more in us. How many different refrains are in St. Paul along those lines, you know, that Christ may be all within me. So you can see why I kind of went to the heights first, because notice how I had to pull the heights down in to make, once again, see how high the vocation is. But you've got to go further because of course our salvation is ultimately, if we're aware of the implications of what I just said, is ultimately about the great and infinite goodness

of God himself who's, I mean, infinitely good in a Trinitarian way of the inner penetration of the divine love of persons that we can't even, it's so hard to put into words. That's far better than merely like my salvation, right? It is the infinite goodness of God itself, you know, the good of God himself, three persons, is the love of my life. There's a kind of, I'm definitely stealing from Ambrose

Garde here, there's a kind of, to use a rough word of a mystic, heart transplant that God has to do, by which the very fire of our capacity to love, which is the will, the spiritual appetite that we have, the spiritual desire that we have, the spiritual joy that we take has to rest by By our vocation and grace in God alone not merely God as Lord not merely God as Master not merely got God as creator the philosophers can tell us about that In the God has called us to a friendship to participate in You the sending of the Sun in the extended the sending of the Spirit in the return to the Father To walk in the halls of the Godhead is what our vocation is. I no longer call you servants

I call you friends. Oh, that's nice sounding Do you really want to treat your Lord's words like that and just dismiss them as nice pieties in the most? You know John the theologian the most profound of the gospel writers. No, he means what he says so much, though, you know, Thomas, his first analogy that he uses to try to understand charity. It's OK if you don't know, you know, I don't know it. Oh, I'm surprised. Like maybe Father Pine or someone here.

He may have forgotten it. I feel a lot of things. That's why these Australians are so quick talking and so, you know, happy, you know, that they forget things. Now, yes, I did. No, that's fine. These Australians are so quick talking and so, you know, happy, you know, that they forget things. Now, yes, I did. Now, that's why it's really it's fine because people don't stress this enough. Friendship he uses, right? He sees his his. Yeah, he gets in his bag of tools.

Yes. He's like, huh? OK, they're all reading a lot of Aristotle at this time. Right. And so he's like, what in my Aristotelian philosophical tool bag is going to be best? And ah, friendship. You know, by which, yeah, you know, friendship is involving a willing to go to the other. That's what everyone says. But you have to be really careful here when you say that.

So there are some goods, of course, yeah, that we can just sort of will for our own use. I mean, we had to subordinate that to hire things, but it's true of food, you know, and things of that sort, lower things, you know, um, you can will the good of another though, and it's not mutual. Right? You can wish well for someone who's down hard times and that's quite, you know,

it's quite good and we tend to stop there because we see how in a sense God did that for us. But, but God doesn't merely, don't want to, I'm going to say it this way, but my book is actually dedicated to a dear, holy, evangelical Protestant woman to whom I owe an immense amount, who is sort of like a second mother to me. So I don't mean to be throwing Protestant under the bus, Protestantism under the bus or something here, but a classically Protestant idea of salvation is that we are holy by Christ's merits, but it's his merits imputed to us, right? As though God looks at us and is like, I will the best for you and cover yourself with my holiness.

He wants to go further beyond that kind of benevolence love. He wants it to be mutual. He wants it to have that mutuality that friends can have, right? And I mean, the friend, it's not merely like, hey, I know my friend loves me. No, there's a real sense in the mutual relationship, spouses experience this, you know, but a good friend too. When you say someone, he understands me,

it doesn't just mean, oh, he can guess what I'm gonna say. It's kind of like, I remember my oldest was two. It was during the summer of COVID, two and something, and we were sitting out back at my house. And I thought of my mother, so I was mad about something. It was all that terrible for an extrovert, that terrible I've seen no one, you know,

and even my stepfather who he died in the middle of the COVID stuff. And luckily we got through his head that we should see each other because he didn't really go out and do much. So I said, we're a bubble, we're fine. Like, you know, but for a while he was kind of like I'm being careful Which I understand I'm not writing down the disease But all that psychological stress of that, you know

It was kind of at the peak of that and I just couldn't put something in the words And I was trying to get it to my wife to get her to understand trying to you know And she couldn't and I just started bawling. I'm very realistic about my mother being dead. I thought she's the only person who could put this into words. I've said this about my stepfather too, right? It's not merely that, oh, they lived with me

for a long time, so they get it. You know, there were times I called my stepdad, and he was the only guy who could, he's the only person who could put my soul into words. That's what the mutuality of friendship is like. And I didn't plan this as a kind of like endpoint to get to. I mean, that's just, yeah. And sort of sharing as two men in Christ publicly.

Put my soul into words. Yeah, put my soul into words. So, you know, commenters comment on other things, but don't comment on this because this comes from a deep place. No, I'm not. That's to try and phenomenologically get like what that mutuality of friendship looks like that's what God wants for us in grace.

That's what charity is. Ultimately is to live in that mutuality and then it should flow out. That flows out over everything else. Right. It's not merely observing his commandments is loving God above all things. It is that but it's like, okay That's more of like the moral virtues Are you is your entire life on fire? For God in every one of its every one of its aspects. Do you see God everywhere? You know, so Tavia we're talking about Fiddler on the roof earlier, much earlier.

You've seen Fiddler on the roof a long time ago. Yeah, that's fine. I don't know. My wife hates musicals, but she does like she actually likes Fiddler. Basically, she hates she hates them. It's that sort of I tend to hate them as well. Yeah, it's understandable. It is. But, you know, all these scenes where Tevye is talking to God, right? He's always, oh Lord, he's always looking up.

I mean, I remember when I was a monk when I was so mad doing that. I mean, that's what every moment of our life should be, though, that you're seeing. He's down to every iota of every everything that's positive interaction. It's only the sin that he's not the cause of, which is really just a kind of non being that we we can we can create non being, which is not creating a kind of non-being that we can create non-being, which is not creating anything, right? Everything else is this reflection to him. Like, do we live in that and rest in that

and make that just the soul of our life? It's so hard to put the idea of acts of charity into words. It's not a long section of the Summa even, right? But all of our, is God alone, like all your loves ultimately do they key down in that? God alone in his mystery because boy, he's called me providentially to this special place in his plan to now live with him here and in eternity.

Am I abiding in God? That's what charity is primarily. That's what it is primarily. Now, the extension of that, which is not merely just a case of liberality or generosity, is fraternal charity. We tend to think of fraternal charity as, you know, I mean, what do you think of fraternal charity as?

Because you've been very giving. You've left me, you've just let me go on a stemwinder. That's true. So. Well, the thing of fraternal charity, the friendship between brothers, I think of basically what you said to will your good for your sake and to do whatever I can that's reasonable to bring that about. Yeah.

So, and okay, so notice even there though, it stays at the level of a kind of. Me and you. Or that one, yeah, that one directionality, right? Now it often may have that as sort of its beginning, right? Like you're doing it. It's reciprocated. Where it's going is I want to love you this way. Yes, because, for instance, you're on hard times or, you know, you're you are my,

you know, close friend or you are when I say good, I don't mean mealy a sort of temporal good. Yeah, I want your sanctification. Yeah, but let's keep going though. Right, let's keep going. Cause what's the implication there? So it could sound like a kind of like puritanism of sorts, right? I want to make sure that you're in good grace.

You know, which is not wrong, but the goal of that is so we can live. I, my mother had a real tortured life with the church. I want to look across the beatific vision and see the tear-filled eyes of my mother that she was saved at the last minute and to see her true joy. That's the soul of fraternal charity.

And yes, it expresses itself in all the acts of almsgiving or spiritual correction or whatever else. Father Gardet has these wonderful lines about spiritual or fraternal correction, where he like, he reads the riot act against the moral theologians who basically say, oh, well, you know, all the conditions are usually not there because you don't know the people well enough.

He's like, Christ's words weren't quite so qualified as the moral theologians today. But the soul of that is, you want that. It's like the story and I use this in the book. Don't forget about the importance of almsgiving. Don't forget about the importance of mercy, right? Because mercy is in a sense, Christ in the Sermon on the Mount makes this clear. It's like how to be perfect like your father. Yeah, he rains down his good on good and ill, you know? I mean, you know, mercy doesn't like do away with justice, but even Thomas says in all of God's works,

mercy is presupposed to his justice because to our nothingness, we don't deserve to exist at all because we're creatures and we don't deserve our redemption. And yet he does both. All of this is very important, but like the soul of it is like the story of Benedict of Nersha, St. Benedict and St. Scholastica, you know, they, she's coming up to her death.

Yes. And they're together at the end, right? And you know. It's a cute story. Exactly. And he wants the Saint Benedict as a way, there's sort of, you know, secondary monastic building.

And you know, they're talking of spiritual things and you know, he has to go back to the monastery. And you know, his sister wants him to stay. They want to converse in the divine things. And so she weeps and prays, and God makes it rain. And he says, you know, what have you done, sister? But she got what she wanted because she loved more. She wanted to commune, she wanted to be together with the brother. They set the foundation for Western monasticism. They communed more in their affiliation from God through grace than they did in their affiliation

from their parents. And she wanted to be present in that. Anyone who's really shared spiritual goods. There's a monk at St. Vincent, I remember, he was down in D.C., he was kind of a head of mission for the college. And he called me up and he said, hey, I'm in DC. It was when I was in graduate school.

He was like, you know, come down and have dinner and we can just get together. And I didn't leave the hotel until like two or three and all we talked about were spiritual things. You know, that sounds like, oh, churchy people talking about church things. No, it was rejoicing in God because that's what we're going to do in eternity.

It was, you know, God in the midst of it. I mean, he's an Irishman himself. And so like with all the, you know, the bodiness in eternity. It is, you know, God in the midst of, I mean, he's an Irishman himself. And so like with all the, you know, the bodiness of a holy Irishman, you know, just rejoicing in the many things of God's goodness in life, you know, as we're catching up and shared life and God himself and his mysteries, just all of that.

That's like what the whole of heaven is like. You know, people think that sounds like a terrible, like really long divine liturgy or really long mass, you know. No, it's the flash of the ever-existent God present with no parts all at once. It's like whatever you like doing. The examples I use are like when you're ice ski. So I use the organ example very often, like a person who's really into playing an organ piece.

They're just in the moment. That's like a touch. It's like a reflection of eternity. But like if you're having a really good day on the slopes and like, you don't really, you're not thinking about going down the slope. You're just skiing down the slope. It's a bug, Father. I mean, it's, that's like a taste of what all of a sudden, like beyond all of our analogies, all of heaven is like, that's the soul of what charity is.

And that's the soul of what charity is, and that's the soul of the Christian life. And then everything else becomes a kind of like, it becomes easier after that. That's why it's worth doing this. So in my book, of course, I take time just unpacking over multiple chapters. It's like the whole first section is trying to unpack

all of this stuff over sufficient space that it doesn't feel too technical. Right, because I want people to know this. It's like when I teach it at the seminary. Say, you know, this is the vocation of everyone. Teach it to the people, you know? All the moral stuff then starts to fall into place after that, you know?

If you see that, okay, well then there are certain relationships we have with other people, you know? And there are gonna be all sorts of different types of justice. It's like the biggest treatise. So you open up your summa and you go to the part where he talks about justice, it's huge. Well some people could say, it's like, you know, get our orthodox hat on, legalism, look at all that legalism, law, justice, rights, you know.

No, it's because there are so many different ways we can talk about relationships with others and other institutions and those who are above us, and technically those who are below us. I mean, that's why it's so big. It's like there are all kinds of things to talk about there. And it's a neat section. So this is Father Michel Labordet, the forgotten one that Pincair's overshadowed, it's half Father Labordet's fault,

taught for a long time at Toulouse. And he has these notes from his teaching. They're immense, like this much on a shelf, but like they were in photocopy, whatever, you know, the mimeograph, they floated around and they're finally getting published now. He's talking about fraternal, I don't remember if it's in his fraternal charity

or his justice section, he makes this point where how people tend to think about like friendliness or generosity as charity, be charitable, you know, do the people, you know, where you don't have a real debt to do it to them. I say, notice how what I talked about was quite mystical. It goes further even what I said about charity because we could go through all the mysticism

of the perfecting of the life through the mystical ways in what I just said. We owe injustice to other people. So we owe, I always have to do this because I speak so quickly, in space justice. Thank you. Exactly, like we owe injustice to other people. So we owe, I always have to do this because I speak so quickly, in space justice. Thank you. Exactly, like we owe injustice to people. Okay, and thank you for joining us today.

We're done. We owe out of a kind of justice to people to be friendly to them, not giddy. Not everyone's gonna be like, it seems like you have a bit like my temperament, the lightheartedness, but to not be a bore with them, that's a question of justice. Yes. I think that's kind of cool though.

It is cool. It's like liberality. I taught while I was finishing my PhD in a night school program at Mount St. Mary's, it was great, non-traditional students and military guys. I loved it, right? People who were just trying to get a leg up in life and get a degree later on. And so we would read sections of the Nick and McKean Ethics and I used a little book by Saad, because he was accused of some stuff a couple years ago, Jean Vanier, it's a beautiful book from the 60s on Aristotle and happiness.

And I used it at the time. And I like to stress about liberality, generosity, you know, like owing money to people for no reason, you know, it doesn't mean like just like giving to the beggar, it's like whatever, in your circumstances, like if you know, like owing money to people for no reason, you know, it doesn't mean like, just like giving to the beggar, it's like whatever, in your circumstances, like if you know someone who could use something and it wouldn't insult them, you know, and it's appropriate, you can do it

in an appropriate way, you just owe it to other people to like share with the blessings you have, whatever they happen to be, and you know, that's just a question of justice. So don't tell yourself that like, oh, you failed in charity. You just are unjust if you don't do that. Boy, our society would be different if people took that to heart.

Boy, would it be different. Religion is actually a subspecies of justice as well. Because you know, the religious observance, the recognition of God. Define justice for us. Oh yeah, rendering to another that which is owed. Fair enough. Okay, so why is religion a matter of justice?

Because you're rendering to another that which is owed to them.. Okay, so why is religion a matter of justice? Because you're rendering to another that which is owed to them, and that debt goes in all kinds of directions. Because we owe to recognize, in our acts, in our acts to recognize our ordering as creatures to God. We need to recognize our dependent status upon God. And we would say as a Christian, because we have a much more keen or non

Just merely philosophical understanding salvation history gives us this too, right? He who has meditated he or she who has meditated on the the whole swath of salvation history owes to God the recognition of all that he has done for humanity It's just our acts should reflect that, like our external acts should reflect that. And that's the generative source of what religious obligation is. And it's a kind of justice.

Now at the heart of that, religion's an interesting virtue because it's on the borders of the theological virtues and the moral virtues, but it remains a kind of external act. Now we see though, the mass, the divine liturgy shows this so beautifully how close they are, because in a sense, all of the liturgy,

that's why this fly is it. I don't know why he's only interested in you. It's the beard balm, he's very smelly, my beard balm. The mass, the divine liturgy, or even liturgy of the hours, but let's keep it mass and divine liturgy, is a religious act, it's an externaly, my beard bone. The mass and divine liturgy or even liturgy of the hours, but let's keep it mass and divine liturgy, is a religious act. It's an external thing, right? Like you need to, in a fitting way,

there's like a whole critique of bad liturgy in there, in a fitting way, recognize God and his mysteries. In a way that recognizes the church's unfolding history of her liturgical form, et cetera. But that's all about our external acts. But at the core, at the core of the mass and the divine liturgy is an act which is in no way human because it's just through the instrumentality

of the priest that is Christ's act, the flash of the transubstantiation where now substantially he is present among us. So you see how religion is this antechamber through our acts to then bring us to the mystical life of union with God Yeah, and it's very important to make this distinction between the two and it's it can it seems very heady so My dear father Boniface Hicks and I were talking once from st Vincent and I kept insisting to him on this and was also something about prayer It's like you have to distinguish religion is a question of justice

From the mystical life and charity and you can't slur them together because religion is about our extra our External acts versus then you know the love of God the devotion to God the adoration of God That goes on in charity because the same thing goes here with prayer as well the Thomists Use prayer in a very very very technical sense just to refer to petitionary prayer and what we tend to put in there about like meditation and everything else, they stick in the theological virtues. And so here is this distinction. He was like, ah, you know, you don't, why make those distinctions? And, you know, it was either he or another Benedictine who's very dear to me, who I had the same argument with eventually came back and said, yeah, Father Gurday and the Thomists in general,

they're right to do that, nevermind. So there's like a pride for me, it's like, I got for once, I won with a priest. So it's real technical sounding, but it's interesting to think about how religion is just a question of justice. We tend to- That's good, so when you're telling your children

why they should attend Holy Mass, it's not so you can do something nice for God. It's because now you owe it and every breath of your being. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't deign you used to mess. I don't know what the Slavonic is, right? But you know, just right. And just right. And just. Yeah. I want to move away from the more dismissical stuff I want to I want to talk about. We have courage, we have courage, prudence.

I mean, I hope at some point in our conversation, we do prudence and conscience and then temperance. All right. You descend to be down. Let's do that. We'll go into those other ones. Then I want to talk about what makes something intrinsically evil or not.

I also was trying to write my master's thesis on, I was trying to argue for why consuming pornography is intrinsically evil. I couldn't do it without teleology without bringing it in. I was trying to just base it on voice. He was personalistic norm. I want to see maybe if you can help me with that. Sure.

But before we do that, I want to take a quick break and then and then we'll be back. Is that so good? Sounds good. All right. So, right. Thanks. All right.

Welcome back to pints with Aquinas with Dr. Matthew Minard. No, Minard Minard. That's a nerd. Get the nerd in there. And I want to let everybody know, too, who supports us on locals and Patreon, that we always do post show wrap up videos. Sometimes we talk about things that YouTube would probably ban us for,

let's be honest. And so if you want to get access to all of those post show wrap ups, support us by going to pines with Aquinas dot com slash give. And then you can support us on locals or Patreon. You help this thing keep going. And that links in the description. That link is in the description. But before we do anything else, I want to tell people about Hallow.

You know what Hallow is? I have actually. Hallow is a really excellent prayer and meditation app for Catholics. OK, that they have invested a ton of money into and it's as good as it gets. I'll show it to you in a sec. Yeah. Anyway, they have something special for this upcoming Lent. They have Jim Caviezel and Jonathan Rumi, who are the two people most famous for their portrayals of Jesus, leading people in daily meditations throughout Lent. So there is a cornucopia. I've used that word more than once today. There is a lot of things available to y'all if you, if you want to kind of grow in your faith life and hello is one way to do that. Hello.com slash Matt Fradd, hello.com

slash Matt Fradd. And also they have a charity component where they'll donate $1 to Cross Catholic Outreach for each of the first 100,000 participants in the Pray Forty challenges, hashtag Pray Forty challenge. The $100,000 in funds will go towards building 24 wells to provide a lifetime of clean water to 4,000 people. Their goal is to get 150,000 people praying this year for land. So hello.com slash Matt Fradd. Just play around with it. You said you asked what it is, you're familiar. I know. And in the world.

Yeah. So then in the world. And this is not a planned thing. Like we didn't put this bit in. But then at the level of banter, while I'm looking at it, doesn't it look just beautiful? No, it's like it was very well. It's very well put together. The guy used to be into Buddhism and New Age stuff and would

and centering prayer and became a sort of Catholic after that. And so the apps he used to meditate before that he realized were problematic, he decided to create one for Catholics. It's unbelievable. Wow. This is really- And I actually use sleep stories for my kids at night

on that. Yep. Matt has one too. I have one too. So if you wanna, if you wanna never sleep again, you can listen to me whisper to you the song of songs. And here's all. But your neck is like I just I just I just play that in the background

to get my wife in the mood. Your neck is like an eye at the Tower of David. Man, this is this is good. So before we get into the weighty stuff, y'all. Y'all. I mean, I'm a huge supporter of the second person plural. Is that, that's not. My wife is from Texas.

When I first moved to America, I moved to Texas. So I guess she says it, her family says it. So I've just adopted that. Did you have in Australia a second person plural? No, I don't think so. That's a you. Just, yeah, you guys. You guys, okay. I don't think so. That's a you. Just yeah, you guys. You guys. OK.

I don't see. Would you use use? No, no. Do you? No, I technically around here, you know, yin's would be the thing to say, right? Yeah, I've heard of that. Yeah, as I say, yeah, because they'll refer to people from Pittsburgh as a yinzers. And it's a strange Scott Cyrus thing of you ones is what it's it's kind of contracting. No, we didn't grow up with that.

And, you know, the teachers were always, you know, don't don't say that. So all of you is what I do. You know, my wife's family is all Yens. All y'all. Oh, yeah. It's like, oh, you're really all of you. I just see really. Oh, man. Fantastic. Oh, and one more thing before we get going to those who are watching live. Hey, we just hit over 200000. And even today, we are over 201,000 subscribers.

So that's an extra what? One thousand at least crazy. So thank you for subscribing if you haven't already. If you want to. Now's your chance. I mean, there will come a day where YouTube will turn on all of us Christians. Now's your chance to subscribe. You may not get another chance. Before we leave the topic of y'all, I recently

noticed myself sending in a message, y'all all something. Y'all all. Y'all all. Yeah, it was just along the same lines of that. All y'all, ah. And just to get nerdy about it, I think it's really interesting to have that,

like you said, the second person, like collective distinct from just, Yes. The technicals, you're supposed to say you for a group. Yeah, exactly. No, I think it's, as a translator, I run into it of course all the time, right? In French and Latin, it's still there.

You have a plural of your second person of you all. And so in a sense, the good culture that I, you know, they tried to get us out of our redneck culture where I grew up was really ruining me. I should have been taught Jens. Jens is more cultured. So it's like tip of the hat. You're a super bright guy who obviously

is very academically leaning. What do you do for fun other than this stuff? Well, I've already mentioned the one this time of year is like skiing. Yeah, that was my dear old grandfather who used it as his self-treatment for rheumatoid arthritis. Unreal. He is, I mean, that's where like I inherited it.

I would have thought that cold would help. Yeah, but he just, he was very active. He had played like pickup basketball and then his late forties, early 50s, he was diagnosed. So he had to stop doing max was too hard on his joints. So what else do you do? Skiing, what else? But so anyway, yeah, sorry.

He's such a cool guy, like that fact, sorry. I'll just go down there. No, it's okay. I don't care about him. Keep going on. I care about him because I owe out of a debt of filial piety to Joe Joriga, pray for him, people. Anyway, no, so what else do I do?

I love doing house projects. Yeah, really, I've had to become quite handy. My wife would be jealous of your wife. The past year has been miserable stuff in my crawl space because I had termite damage. I mean, I had to have professionals do some of it, but all these sorts of things. We've torn up floors and all that sort of thing.

That's your downtime, that's what you do. After my stepfather died, I built a new counter, butcher block thing and all that sort of thing. That's your downtime, that's what you do. Yeah, after my stepfather died, I built a new counter, butcher block thing and all this. I had to have a little bit of help. It makes sense if you're up in your head all the time thinking about these things, you wanna use something. And I said that I had to do this to just kinda keep myself busy

after all the stress of the end of his life and caring for him to have something to do. Gardening, I run. We do a bit of kayaking, but it's not intense, it's more like fishing kayaking. Nice. So yeah, all these sorts of things. Very cool. It is not, it's not all, yeah,

it's not all intellectual stuff all the time. Good. That's terrible for the soul. You go insane, yeah. So we have a ton of questions from our gorgeous and intelligent supporters on Patreon and Locals that I wanna get to in a second. How about your non-gorgeous supporters?

No, all of them become gorgeous when they start giving. It's actually a really great way to get in shape and for your skin to clear up. So please go to patreon.com. Slash Matt Fred or locals. Yeah. All right. So I want to ask those questions, but I want to remind people too, that this Thursday we are I'm hosting a debate. This is the debate I'm actually this is probably the second debate as far as what I'm excited about.

When we had Trent Horn debating that English atheist dude, cosmic skeptic, I was really excited about that. But I'm really excited about this debate on young Earth creationism between two Catholics. Also, it looks like we have a debate coming up on the SSPX. Oh, one of them is arguing they're schismatic. I don't I don't think But I look forward to hearing. So I don't hold them to be schismatic, but sometimes in my wryness, I refer to the FSSP as the SSPX unates.

Which is a kind of, so for those of you who don't know, unate is sort of a negative term that often the Orthodox use for Eastern Catholics. They went back into union. But there's also SSP5, who are legit, instead of a context. So maybe the SSPX are the uniates. Ah, where they were first is the problem. You need to have the away and then back.

Yeah, yeah. I see, that's what you mean. So anyway, so that debate is on Thursday. So I'm really looking forward to it. People should subscribe, check that stuff out. Hey, let's talk about something far less lofty. What are they called? The three what of the moral act?

The intention, the justice. Oh, the three sources of the moral act? The intention resources of the resources, the moral act. Let's let's talk about this because it is fascinating. It comes up all the yeah, it comes up all the time. It's like funny. You read the catechism, right? It's like it's like reading right out of the treatise on human acts and so Thomas. That's the Dominicans who helped pen that. Right. So you have let's do this. You have the object.

You have the circumstances into which the moral act is placed, if you want. And you have the intention of the acting subject. All right. So that's the object, which is the act, the will chooses, the circumstances surrounding the act, and the intention of the actor, of the acting subject. Correct me if I'm wrong at any point. But if at any three, if a moral act is to be considered good, all three sources must be good. Right. So an example I like to use is if I don't like to use it all the time, but here's one.

Suppose you and I went and got coffee after this because we've only had 800 espressos this morning and we see a homeless man on the side of the road and I give him money. That's a good object. And if the circumstances are good, that is to say he eats that day, doesn't use them for- That you can foresee. Yeah, that I can foresee, that's right.

But suppose my primary intention is for you to think I'm a swell guy. Yeah. Right, it comes out of pride. I think most people would say, that's not good what you did. Yeah, exactly. Right, so we-

And then let's flip it. So that's an evil. That's an evil intention. Let's do an evil circumstance. Well, let's do an evil object first, because this is this is where you can. That's what we're going to get to. That's going to be the bulk of the discussion. Yeah, it is. So can we quickly go through. No, no, it's fine. I'm just I am watching my mind because I do this a little bit differently than Thomas. But good Thomas say I'm safe, but I have to be careful. So yeah, evil circumstances. Is that okay? No, please, please.

All right, so here's an example. You can tell me if you can think of a better example. Well, you can tweak circumstances in all kinds of fun ways. Yeah, let's say a man makes love to his wife. This is a good object, and he does so out of love for her, but he does so perhaps unbeknownst to him when it's medically dangerous. The unbeknownst to him is a problem.

That is a problem. But see, I don't know how to make the intention good if he knows it's medically dangerous. So maybe you give us an example, then. Yeah. So we stay on that. It's stay on that example, which is probably best. Right. It's always better not to venture too, too far off. You don't don't have something immediately shared.

So, yeah, it could be all other things. All other things equal. We've been fine. Let's let's say, he even that he knew that would be there's a potential effect. That's fine, because the effect is a circumstance. Yeah. So because all the circumstances.

So to be clear for those who kind of get like mystified by this, it's just a non-essential aspect of the act. Right. The object of the act is not so much the thing that you're choosing, it's what is essential. Ultimately, it's actually gonna describe an act of a given virtue, right? Is this, you know, whatever virtue this is. I mean, I'm making up a name,

but Aristotle says there are many unnamed virtues. You know, sexual love in a spousal way, you know, right? That's our object that we're looking for here. One of the effects of this act, which is not essential to that, but it's an effect that's- A consequence would be another example, another name for that.

Exactly, exactly, consequence or effect, exactly. Is that you put her at significant risk. So let's say that you've had multiple caesarian sections and you've just had another child. And so, you know, maybe the doctors are a little bit conservative here. We've had this experience, my wife and I, where you feel like they're telling you to wait forever

because every doctor, it's like even if they're Catholic, thinks everyone's contracepting. But let's say within bounds, you know that you should be following your doctor a couple weeks after, no, a couple weeks, but whatever. Certain period after, and you could put your wife at risk. There was a great deal of danger in the, in the last operation. But the doctor said it was a fluke, but you need to really recover before you

decide to have another child, you know, cause it's going to be another caesarian. So because of how traumatic this one was, you need to wait. So yeah, I'm not sure if this is going to work with that thrown in. Cause what I'm trying, what I'm trying to show Intention can be a kind of spousal love like it doesn't come out of a loss. All right, really? It doesn't have to come out of a kind of lustful as your intention Okay So the point is the circumstances surrounding this lovemaking could make the act something less than good It changes the object it makes it it's not just less good If you put your wife at risk, all of a sudden.

Well, that's why I was concerned that you're changing the intention. You're not changing, let's say the intention, let's leave the intention at the level of- No one knows what we're doing right now. I'm sorry. No, this is hard. So, okay, what you're sensing is the fact that actually,

the circumstances are hard to define because circumstances sometimes are actually reflective of a property of the object of the act. And sometimes you look at a circumstance and you realize, oh, the object of the act. And sometimes you look at a circumstance and you realize, oh, the object of that act was actually, you know, sexually, you know, immeasured or like unchaste sexuality of a kind.

It's not necessarily a matter of a lust, but it's unchaste in the sense that sexuality should be ensconced within relationships, one of which is not putting my wife in danger. It doesn't have to be about a roaring lust. But that perverts the intention. However you do it. Ah, you've done what I wanna lust. But that perverts the intention, however you do it. You've done what I wanna do.

You see, this is why, because no, this is why this way of presenting this is not how I present it. Okay. You gotta be very- Well, let me ask you real quick before, and then I'll let you go. That's okay.

But give us an example of a human act. Here, here, okay. In which the object is good, the intentions are good, but the circumstances are evil. Yeah, you're probably gonna say the same thing, and it's great In which the object is good, the intentions are good, but the circumstances are evil. Yeah, you're probably gonna say the same thing and it's great because it makes the point, it makes me feel like I can sink down into this essay I just wrote for this consciousness book.

Oh yeah, all right, good. And I'm like, okay, all that I've been doing for years that's been seen as quirky is correct. It's paying off. And it's correct in a sense. So let's think of generosity, not merely to someone on the street, but like you you know,

you know, friends who, you know, young couple that could use some money. And you get, you know, I mean, somewhat unthinkingly, you know, you just intend to help them out. And this is really not coming out of at least premeditated intention, you know, that you didn't set out thinking this. I want to make sure that like, either everyone sees me giving to them, or which is akin to what you said before, or even I want to set sure that like either everyone sees me giving to them or which

is akin to what you said before, or even I want to set out and be like, you know, and just be flipping about where I give it to them. I don't care how shamed they are. You don't set out like you're just, I'm going to help them out. Right. But in the course of whatever your interactions with them, you know, you're, you're in public with other friends and you do it in a way that in the actual execution of the act, the act you do in a way that in the actual execution of the act Yes, yes, yes You do in a way that's culpable like you should have known better because that's what's key here, right? If you actually did it was a kind of just Absent mindedness that really was not met malicious. It gets harder and harder to figure out whether or not you're culpable

I just go to confession with that and just confess it and say Yeah, voluntary or involuntary sin is an Easterner. Yeah. But, you know, okay, you give it to them in a way that is kind of embarrassing. You give it to them, someone sees it, you know, who shouldn't have seen them receiving the money, because it's embarrassing. They're trying to do it.

That's the problem, though, right? You infringe their, you infringe their, so no, no, no, because. What I'm upset about and what your point, and I'm going to prove your point, you're going to feel terrific again, is that you're messing with the intention again. Yeah, because you know why you're doing this.

So everything is downstream of the intention. Because if you so when you were at Holy Apostles, so we got to be real careful here, because we're going to get in the weeds, folks. So those of you who are like, we were in the heights. Now we're in the weeds. All right. But I would I joke with some people, but did you do the 12 steps of a good act? No, yeah, there's this chart that goes around It kind of hardened in the later Thomas and it became a real normal way to teach Thomas's moral psychology

How does practical reason how does prudence get to its activity? So right? There's a distinction between this is good stuff. This is correct stuff But you can if you're worried about relativism, just let me know and I'll explain. Okay. But moral truth is different than speculative truth and truth just about things, because like when we want to say how the world is,

how reality is, you know, for everything from metaphysics to biology to mathematics to physics, right? It's just about, is my, are my judgments matching up with reality, either directly or through reasoning. But moral truth, practical truth, prudential truth is about whether or not did I, with all of my character, live up to virtuous ends. You can't understand the practice of prudence This is very important actually

People tend to think of of moral reasoning prudence and conscience whatever we want to call it as though there are the moral rules There are the moral laws. Sometimes you might call them. Sorry. That's right. Sometimes you might call them virtues. Yeah But I got to kind of like apply that in my circumstances Yeah, like, you know the the this is how sometimes people then mess with it. Well, the ideal can't really apply is how then the, the, the laxist will say here. Just like contraception. Exactly. Well, contraception, yes, there's a moral norm against it,

but in my circumstances, it doesn't apply. Well, okay, that's a bad, that's a horrible use of this, this idea of a kind of universal law, particular actions. You know, look within, this is very touchy Splendor language from it to look for the perspective of the the acting subject the acting agent and consider what it is like to get to a choice and As you know prudence choice choices of means how remember means is means does not mean What are the means to like I kind of have a goal and I want to get there.

The choosing and doing of the means of a moral action is making my own this moral action. It's a it's a real conquest of morality. But you can't talk about means unless you have. What is the cause of the being of the means? I meant to be that abstract. The end you need ends Even if it's just incipient even if you're just developing your your character you have to have some intention Yes, you have to have some beginning of the act where you're seeking to do so

We're gonna use let's stick with this example because it's abstract And just just to be clear and Aquinas would say that a moral act and a human act us Well, he would use those terms or we would use those terms synonymously. Yeah. So if there is no intention such as me snoring while I'm asleep, this isn't a human or moral act. Yeah. So even if I scratch instinctively, this isn't a moral act. I have to be intending something for it.

So now let's, because of what you're feeling here, you're absolutely right. Absolutely right. So let's like, but let's, before we then kind of pull the chart apart and explain the steps right here, what you're feeling is, though, intention, object circumstances, we laid these out as like these neat little things. Yeah. You can't talk about an object without talking about what intention lays behind it or what fail because I can do a good thing. The object can be good, but I can be committing evil.

Yeah. And the whole act, you know, and really the way to see it is this is where I think it gets people in trouble. So the object could look good, like where I'm just giving the giving the money. I'm giving alms out of pride is a normal example. We already sort of like how we were talking about with the guy on the street. I'm giving alms out of out of a kind of pride. I don't like describing it like that through and through. You know what the object of that act is? Pride just happens to be that was giving of alms

because the object of the act is what you did. Do you see how people tend to mistreat this? Now, there's a real danger that's going to be the object in that circumstance that isn't giving alms. Exactly, because the object derives its moral character. Like the circumstance. Exactly. Giving arms is the circumstance. What's essential now?

We're going to have to be real careful, like at the end of this, for technical reasons, the danger of this presentation is you put so much on the intention that people who are too like drunken sailors with it will justify evil choices by good. They'll say just to your conscience doesn't matter. So let's let's just remember that. But let's okay. We'll we'll come back to that to make sure that we could we need to address it

because I'm going to lean into the intention with very good backing on this. The Cajetan makes the point and Thomas basically does too. It is text, but you don't see it as clearly that the intention is the like is the primary source of the more morality of the actress even so much so because it's weird. If you look at the the primary source of the morality of the act. Interesting. Even so much so because it's weird. If you look at the the old charts of the the circumstances, OK, the end is a circumstance. OK, but it's weird because it's a separate source of morality. So the Thomas, so Kajitin writes his commentary, very close commentary

in the 15th, 16th century on the suma. And he's like scratches his head like, well, why is it? He doesn't actually scratch his head. He sort of is. He says, here's why it is. But he asked the question, why is, why is the end listed among the circumstances? But also is the separate. It's the intention, right? Well, it's because that end is, is particularly powerful in, in giving the object

attack its actual character. Like the, it's the most important of the circumstances. So much so that it sometimes does things, circumstances, it very often does things, circumstances don't do. Because when you define, this is a father being cares, of course, in a sense is really driving, driving this home in certain texts of his. When you, when you describe the object of an act,

you really want to ask yourself, this is what I teach my students all the time, what virtue or vice is it reflecting? And as as you do that the virtues and vices drive the first steps of moral reasoning intention so we've got four things on our little chart and this is important even though it's gonna seem like a lot of details sometimes when we reason about things even things when when you're like watching a movie for example and you see something like like wow that's inspiring like that you know you you get a you're like watching a movie, for example, and you see something like, wow, that's inspiring. Like that, you know, you get a moral truth while watching a movie. You know, you really appreciate it.

There's a kind of judgment we can have there and a kind of willing we can take. We can like rejoice in something that's really good, you know. Stories do this for us. We see this in examples of other people who we take to be good. This is called by St. Thomas at least simple willing, because it's not really about what I'm gonna do right now. It's just a kind of good pleasure in a good that's not to be accomplished. Sometimes people present this as though it's a kind of like, it would be nice if I could live forever,

but it's so much deeper than that. It's like the source of our moral life. If you can't see the intrinsic goodness of something, at least in a teeny, teeny, teeny bit, like with a weak little bit, you've not converted yourself to the virtue. But then, of course, the next step is, in my circumstances, so think of the friend to give money to,

in my circumstances, broadly speaking, I've decided, like, yeah, I should help them. You know, it's fine. I've got the flexibility. They said something to me recently. I have a real sense. They're not getting a lot of help. I should do that. So I have set myself in a kind of very abstract way I've not even thought that the details yet to help them I don't even know if it's gonna be through money or if it's gonna be through offering to help them when the kid comes along Or whatever, you know, but I have I've made I've started to internalize. I've made my own that end of the moral virtue

Sometimes this is very difficult if you're not very strong in it. You know, maybe your spiritual father told you, you need to do this because you got to grow in that virtue. But that intention is necessary in order to now have the next step of then choosing or doing the act. And so you reflect, so now we're on like the second major part of the table, which is where you have to choose

what you're going to do. So we're still far away from giving the money. We reflect on it, we ask others, maybe some of those hard choices, you know, you have to talk to people, you have to choose what you're gonna do. So we're still far away from giving the money. We reflect on it, we ask others maybe, some of those hard choices, you know, you have to talk to people, you have to be docile to your spiritual father, to your relatives, to people who know you, to people who just, you know, people you trust.

So like at the end of my stepfather's life, we had a real, it ended up being clear, thank God, but a real hard end of life nutrition, hydration question, because part of it was the doctor was like the doctor was leaning thinking I was like every other American who wanted to try everything and I try I had to really try and see what is his State because I don't want to you know I don't want to not give him nutrition and hydration when is appropriate So I called all sorts of folks that I know I'm very blessed that I can call it's like it's like you know lay theologians, lay philosophers,

monks, nuns, I mean, all like free, it's all across the board. You do that. That's the stage of what we call deliberation or counsel. You know, you deliberate within yourself, you consider the circumstances, you in general consider all the various paths you can take. And you have to have a good character, right?

Because if you're not virtuous, we're right now in the virtue of prudence This is where prudence is working if you lack prudence or some of those virtues that help prudence along There's a big I have a huge chart that I have of this Thomas has all these ones broken out. It's huge They're like 15 20 virtues attached to prudence If you you know just too flippantly don't listen to other people or you're too quick and you're just like I'll just do this And then you know, they don't really need money. They need help, you know watching their kids afterwards. That's really all they need You fail in your counseling, you know

Consiluary tardy, you know take take counsel slowly, but then you eventually of course have to Get off the pot. Yep, right and you have to judge what you're going to do. So judgment and choice brings this stage to an end. Yeah. But that's not the whole story of prudence then. Right. So up to this point, actually, we're constituting, we're making the object of our act

descend down into the particularities of our circumstances. That's what's happening. Right. Liberality, generosity is vitally descending. down into the particularities of our circumstances. That's what's happening, right? Liberality generosity is vitally descending because I have the character to not mess up because I could have messed up up to this point. So let's let's mess it up first and then get to our our case because our case is way at the end. I

could decide that I'm going to you know, like said I'm gonna I'm gonna help them with their kids and they actually do need money for things. So then I make the choice, you know, because I precisely just was not even thinking about them enough, it was really culpable. I mean, I could have thought it through. I then go and offer this to them. You could say the object of the act is offering them help, but flippantly, and so it's like a kind of like circumstance

that makes it bad, so there you go, right, you see? But you know what, you're itch that like, you're like something, you messed up the intention. Yeah. Making the wrong decision, giving them the help that they don't need precisely because you didn't think it through and consider your friend well enough. It's a way of failing in a good intention.

The good intention, the ver it's like the virtue begins, the virtue wants to flower in an act. It has to do it through the exercise of prudence, so the end has to come into being, and then it fails, and guess what? You emit. They always say this in Latin, you do. It comes forth from you.

An act that's actually opposed to the virtue, it's an act of a vice, at least the beginning of a vice. Is it opposed to it, or? Yeah, it's opposed to it. Or sort of parallel and not. No, it's not merely an imperfection, sorry, go on. No, no, yeah, well, I suppose to it or yeah, it's opposed to it or sort of parallel and not No, it's not merely an imperfection. Sorry going. Yeah. Well, I'm just thinking if my friend needs help and I choose to Help him with his kids instead of giving money. I'm still doing a good that he appreciates it may just not be

What he needs if it's something doesn't need and it's and it's quite flipping on your part This is where you do this is where spiritual father helps you distinguish between And it's quite flippant on your part. This is where you do. This is where spiritual father helps you distinguish between and merely imperfect act, which you do have to be very careful about. An imperfect act is just a lesser good. They go right. And you really don't want you don't want to confuse a lesser good with an evil. There's a beautiful chapter on this.

And I think that's a great way to go insane. It is. It's a way to become scrupulous. It is a way to become insanely scrupulous because virtue is not achieved all at once. So, you know, this is the whole world that some of the theologians call a remiss act. Just so we can back up for my own edification here. You're basically saying when we look at the three sources of a moral act, you can't have a good object unless you have a good intention.

So it's not possible to do an act in which I have good object evil circumstances Evil intention now sometimes yeah, and sometimes people have intention is they understand that is like what you tell yourself you're doing Hmm, so just just we'll talk about that and we talk we deal with the Intending something good but doing something evil we'll talk about that there But you can't you can't really have a good object unless your intention is good. And the object is best described as the flowering of the virtue that is the source of the intention.

Say that line again. Yep, the object of the act, because it's what you did. It's in a sense most important because it's what you did. The best description of it is not merely, so giving money, because people tend to say give alms,

but alms already is kind of good. Giving money is not a very rich moral description, right? But, liberality, an act of liberality toward your friend, the best description came from the virtue, which comes from the intention that was the source of that action, because you can't have the means, prudence, without the end.

Of course, we have the unfinished prudence, though, because let's just presume that we've chosen to do the right thing for our friend. The actual perfection of prudence is not merely choosing to do it, it is doing it. Prudence comes to the- Oh, I see, not choosing to do it, but actually acting. Too many Thomists sometimes talk

as though the choice is where it all ends, but Thomas himself is clear on this, and best Thomas are very clear to command is the primary Act of prudence because you have to actually do it there if I decide to give money to my friend I could just not do it. I mean, there's a sense in which when you go to confess it It's a lesser evil because at least you chose to do it, you know I mean, I know you know all things equal that seems maybe a little bit light-hearted But you know, it's not as bad as being so selfish that you didn't do it. You know what I mean, I know, you know, all things equal. That seems maybe a little bit lighthearted, but, you know, it's not as bad as being so selfish that you didn't do it. You know what I mean?

But you have to do it. Choose to do something and not do it. One of them just be choosing not to do it. No, but if I actually choose to say, let's say you need twenty dollars or else you're going to get kicked out of your your apartment and I choose to do it, I mean that I'm going to do it, but I don't actually do it because I forgot or I'm choose to do it. I mean that I'm going to do it, but I don't actually do it because I forgot or I'm. Yeah, I mean, I culpably forgot. Like you just let yourself, you let stuff, let yourself get distracted.

Other things that were less important supersede that. Yeah. I mean, there may be some secondary act that's back in there of you then choosing to not pay attention, you know, to dither about on the internet when you know that it's going to make you forget, you know, or something. But that act that we're describing, like this idea of being, being a good friend who pays attention to another friend's needs and in these circumstances giving it you all of a sudden, I would go to confession for that. I'd go to confession for that.

I wouldn't be scruple, let's hand it over. It's a minor sentence of venial, but like hand it over. I mean, all things based on that example, I presume would be venial. So this is, and so like, or like when you go to, I'm so sorry, Matt. No, no, you're fine, mate. I talk over people all the time, but this is like, like when you go to... I'm so sorry Matt. I talk over people all the time, but this is like I get really excited about this

and I've got this really technical book coming out on it. So, because as you're doing the act too, you still have to like avoid certain evils. Like you choose to do it, but there's still like the moral ability. Anyone who has like family filled with the people who don't believe, for example, knows like you're always trying to know how to have the right turn of phrase to not, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, to not lead people into a kind of scandal

or something else, right? Or you don't know the details of what it's gonna be like when you give the money. And let's just say all things equal up to this point, it just made sense. You don't see them all that often. You only see them once a week or something and it's in public.

So you're gonna have to do it in that venue, right? You still have to have an eye, this is actually why Thomas says there's special virtues in this step, caution, foresight, which is weird, because you think foresight's earlier. There's a kind of foresight you have when you're counseling, but even as you're doing something, you're like, oh, I shouldn't do that

because that's gonna be really, that's gonna be insulting to them or something. I can see how that would be insulting. That's actually something that helps you when you're executing the act. So the command has to kind of spread out. So then you give the money to them. And I mean, you're, maybe it's, I don't,

I don't know, you're out with friends, you go out to eat and you're at the bar and you have a couple of drinks. And you know that you're just a bit tipsy, presume you're getting an Uber and you know, you just you know that you're a bit you're just a bit tipsy. Presumably getting an Uber and you're also not drunk. So we're not introducing new other problems into this into this moral act. And you should know better. Okay, I really better make sure that I just get pulled them aside to give them this money. And then in the kind of the gregarious bigness of a personality like mine, you just do it. I mean, you're

not thinking you're not intending to be like, I don't care how they get it. I just, you know, I'm going to give it to them publicly, whatever. You just kind of failed while you did it. You know, you did it in a way that's insulting to them. I really would. I would say that you have room there. To consider it a sinful act because of a circumstance, you really do.

Because if it's, you know, if it know, if it's significantly hard to them, like there's at least room there. And I mean, I don't think you have to become scrupulous about this and think that it's some mortal sin, right? Because this is so minor, you know, there's all the good intention that makes it better, or less bad, I should say, makes it less bad. There's all the choice that makes it less bad,

but it's a flippin' act of giving. I don't know, that's what I wanna less bad, but it's a flip and active of giving. I don't know. That's what I'm gonna call it because that's a way of opposing it to the virtue of liberality. I'm saying that, you know, I set out to do the good that I want to do and I do evil instead. I did something that was opposed to the virtue because the virtue really requires all the circumstances to be right. You know, earlier when I talked about liberality, I was very much echoing how Aristotle even says, to give money out of your excess to others in a way that is appropriate

and the circumstances that are appropriate, he says it like that, because it's, you failed then if you didn't do all that. You failed. You failed at the very tail end. You failed in the order of command. This is where all the distinctions really help. You know.

Okay, sum up for me then, how my going about this was less than perfect. Yep, so we started with the intention. Yep. So we started with the judgment that, hey, it's good to be generous to friends. And now the intention judgment and intention of my will to do an act of liberality,

because my friend needs it. I descended from the order of intention to prudence. Conscience is now operative. I decided after very careful and what seems to be enough on my own self-reflection, I sufficiently considered what I could do and I chose to do it. So it's as much as I could do, I'm not guilty for not considering other things.

I chose a, at this point, I've chosen a good act to do. But then when I do it, in the midst of the actual circumstances in a way that I am culpable for, I don't just fly. I have done an act. I've chosen to do something that's, that's really an embarrassment to them. That I should have known that I should have made sense to me and therefore you know I that object is is in my mind you don't call that object anything more than something that's opposed to the vice the object itself is bad in that case yes I see that

yourself that's right and then because then object and circumstance becomes very useful because first of all object is what you chose so it does distinguish it from the intention, so you do need to keep it as two separate things, two separate stages, but the object is what is most essential, and what is most essential here, because it's what you're gonna go to confession for, is that I flippantly gave money, you know, whatever.

It's a, sometimes I do this, it's like, poor priest I go to, I'll say, sinned against the virtue of liberality. You know, it's whatever we call it. I fell short of the virtue of liberality Then the circumstances come in as you know, for instance, you know how embarrassing it was to them What was the amount of money what's your relationship to them? You know, that's the kind of stuff we all do when we start to be like, well, it's not that bad It wasn't that embarrassing but you keep telling yourself, but I really want I feel in my heart. And maybe I'm maybe I'm being scrupulous, maybe not.

This is the mystery of it. This is where it's hard to reflect on your conscience. But, you know, I do really think that I was wrong, essentially, because the object of the act was illiberality of a sort. But the circumstances mitigate it and make it less bags. It wasn't really that embarrassing, but it was. And I should just go to, you know, I should confess it among my venial sins. So then you see how the circumstances

then tweak the goodness and badness of the object. Always though, the circumstances either make a good object more or less good or an evil object more or less evil. So the intention is intertwined with the object in a way that the circumstances aren't. Correct. Okay. Yes, correct. Okay. Well, yes, correct. Yeah. Yeah.

Sometimes you can get into a world where we should not go here. I assure you. No, really, we shouldn't. The circumstances can generate secondary descriptions of the act. Okay. And this is where like the scholastics will say that you can have more than one moral species for an act because this is the weird thing. Like an act can have multiple Essential descriptions gotcha, but we just let's not get it. Yeah now let's let's use an example though where we have a good intention

This you use contraception. Yeah, right so We have to presuppose the the basics of the argument whether whether based on apostolic tradition or upon natural law for Contraception and I think on the whole, your audience is at least gonna be there. And if you're an interlocutor who just comes for the sake of arguing, we're taking this as a given, the objective evil of contraception.

It's like in a sense, any vice is objectively evil, right? Now the question becomes, okay, well, what do those acts look like? Well, so let's stay for now too, at the level of condoms or the use of oral contraceptives. OK, right. Because, you know, then there's that whole harried issue of like, can you use NFP in a contraceptive manner? It's just not. Yeah. Just bracket that.

It's like we have. But yeah, it's like bracket, bracket, bracket. So it is it is a virtuous thing in the case of, for instance, the wife who could be a physical danger to space birds in a way that doesn't, you know, cause her to become pregnant and have her innards spill out, you know. So there's a what is the expression that I think Pius the 12th even uses it in that midwives address and then also Paul the sixth, something like Paul VI, something like virtuous parenthood, it's not that, but you know, virtuous sexuality, virtuous spacing is part of chaste sexuality. It's part of it.

So, you know, I intend the health of the, I don't merely intend the health of my wife, right? That's another thing too, let's back up for a second. Let's imagine a perverse world of how to misunderstand the point we're about to make. I intend the health of my wife, but I chose to have sex to put her in danger. Like everything else that's equal,

we don't even contracept here at this point. I mean, you're not having sexual relations with your wife for her health, right? It's like you're telling yourself, that's not how you should think about intention. Like it's so weird. Like when you do the act, the intention of that act is not the health of your wife the

intention is Sexual intercourse of some sort right okay now though. Let's back up So I intend in a very general sense though that informs many of my acts that I will not put my wife's health at danger for instance among our sexual acts so Then that intention floating around in the back of my moral agency, which is a good character trait that should be there. And it's not merely a self-deceived story that I tell myself, at least not yet. Then comes into conflict here with this case, you know.

You've had a couple kids, men to men, you know. You're now like five months into after pregnancy and you can't have relations with your wife for number of people is to be difficult and so you decide well, I'm just going to I'm going to use a condom but I Intend the health of my spouse and that intention for the health of my spouse is really like, you know The kind of whatever it's called in the papal documents. This is wrong, but this is what someone's trying to convince themselves of, you know, chased sexual intercourse, because I'm not intending this for the whole of our sexual life, you know,

and I'm trying to space the birds in a way that doesn't put her health in danger. So I'm going to choose contracept to perform contraceptive sexual intercourse. That's the act you're choosing to do. Right. So the story some people would want to tell there is, OK, yeah, Intercepted sexual intercourse. That's the act you're choosing to do right? so the story some people would want to tell there is okay. Yeah, but the you see the I'm thinking of how I've seen that they teach this still among people the Gregorianum the Transcendental norm is a kind of chaste love of my spouse, but my categorical norm is, it's such washed over contianism,

is the contraceptive act. But I haven't, I haven't, I haven't spurned, I haven't spurned the church's teaching of contraception. And I haven't, you know, I'm bearing in mind the moral law to recognize in my sexuality, my wife's health, right? Her safety. You do have to ask yourself at a certain point, though, what did you do?

This is where, when people insist on the object being central, they're right, because the object is going to tell you the very act you did. But the deep story that's there, you started out with intending something to the health of your spouse, and this is what we've been doing

for multiple months, et cetera. And that's sort of been the background intention. But then some point where we could call it the proximate intention, like right when the evening that you're going to have intercourse, you intended that same chaste sexuality, but almost immediately you made this choice that is out of line with it.

And so no longer does that, that intention doesn't hold in that object. Cause if you think of the intention as the deep moral source, what did it emanate from that act emanated from it came forth from ultimately a kind of incipient unchastity, right? That this, this is an act of unchastity So, you know, no matter what you may tell yourself maybe on some level. So this is where When some people talk about the intention it becomes a kind of sir It becomes a kind of circumstance to the act actually they can make it less bad. I Wasn't doing this because I was just utterly lustful. I mean I was doing it out of a kind of fear for my wife's safety. That's how most people think of the word intention, right?

I intended her safety. Well, that does, in a sense, make it less bad than all other things equal and that's just pure lust. But there's in that very tight analysis of how did this act happen? Whatever I might have intended very, very early on about chase sexuality, very quickly it fell apart. And that's not what I'm intending now. And really in a sense you probably even didn't make much of a choice.

As soon as you made that choice, your intention changed pretty early on. I'm just intending to have sex. But it's in this way that uses a condom. Yes, temporarily. That's a, the adverb words, those are good for a circumstance of quality, is what I tell my students. Quickly, any adverb word.

It's usually when you're describing, quickly, readily, happily, speedily, et cetera. All of those are in quality, the quality of the act. So temporarily I'm contraceptive. Okay, well that makes it less bad. But the act structure, what does it come forth from? What does it ultimately come forth from by a kind of moral failing? It comes forth from the vice. But here, notice how we're at some, your viewers only partially can see this.

I've got like the three sections here. We're very high in the chart. The intention structure falls apart very quickly. Whereas that example of our friends, it all kind of fell apart at the end. The intention was there. I chose the intention is still there. I'm doing it. The intention is still there. And then all of a sudden I failed.

And then, you know, it's kind of like, it's a much weaker failure, but here you're pretty high up. I mean, you have decided pretty quickly and to just intend non-chase sexuality. And so you see how, how the intention in that strict sense is, is actually bad, but it kind of remote intention, the intention you tell yourself,

if you maybe remember this from your courses, if some some professors really focus on this, the Venus operantis, the the end that you've told yourself is your end, but not the end of your act. The end of your act is what the end of your act is contraceptive, contraceptive,-chaste sexual intercourse. But the story you tell yourself, which is not unimportant as a kind of circumstance, makes it less bad, makes it less evil. Yeah.

So, just to, I guess, point of clarification to ask about. So, you're saying that this inherent evil, essentially, if I'm understanding right, it basically won't happen unless the original intent is perverse in the first place, right? Well, no, because like, for instance, think about that example from The Friends. That inherent evil came at the very last minute when you had to ask about what was the act of giving the money?

It was a kind of illiberality. So the intention was actually to be liberal, to be generous. The intention was like that for a long time. Like really, like my soul was animated by that virtue as I deliberated about what I should do, very carefully considering them, as I chose what to do to give them whatever funds.

And then in the midst of the execution of the act all the sudden I just fail in that intention and there you see that It's like it's more like a failure of the intention when it's that late in the process Like I gave money in a way that's not liberal It doesn't matter how generous it might look the moral character of that act is a sin Because I did it in a way that is unbecoming. Now you have to discern this so you don't become some scrupulous mess. But you see, do you see how like there the intention, it's more like this is maybe the weakness of my position.

You've almost stepped outside of the intention at the very last minute. You failed the intention that has gone this far. And so it's like, what is the real object? This is where you don't even pay much attention to the intention anymore you just say what's the object of the act it's illiberality but that ultimately comes from a kind of vice that your end became at the last minute your end switched from being liberality to illiberality so you the person intended illiberality no it's more like it's they it's you failed at that liberal intention.

And so now at the at the best, I mean, it's it's the it was liberality was involved the whole time. But the object of the act in the end was not liberal. So the intention failed. And so the end the end of the act itself, which is mostly reflected in the object, is illiberality. So you see how like, I mean, I'm not I'm saying the intention is really important here. But in these cases, especially in in execution, the very last sorts of steps of the doing of the act, which is quite important, though.

Um, it's more you need to think of it more like i'm stepping outside of the intention. Whereas the example we used to the couple is probably you you you really could describe the act of that couple as After some deliberation you kind of start back over and you really did intend You intended on chase sexual intercourse No matter what you may tell yourself about you you intended You know to that so I guess Two parts to the question now then the first one would be Two parts to the question now then. The first one would be.

It's a sign. It's a good for me. It seems to me that there's a kind of, you can have more than one intention behind, like in the giving examples specifically. The way that I would understand that is I would say that the person intended to be generous and a little unhelpful.

And then the person, to be, you know, generous and helpful and helpful. Yep. And then the person, you know, in the heat of the moment, they have an added intention of just, you know, some, some carelessness or some lack of consideration about a situation. And so because they're doing that, there's the action and object of that too. But then the whole action now isn't branded as this, you know, it's either stamp of approval or stamp of, um, you know, it's either stamp of approval or stamp of You know sure sin I guess yeah It could be that the action of the giving it has twofold a twofold part to it

One of them is that they gave money and then the sin is that the circumstance was I mean Yeah, and you could yeah, and it's there actually these intentions are quite nested I mean, this is like the whole point of Elizabeth Anscombe's book on intention is it's always these multiple nestings like this. And so what you're doing is just sort of like a complex act. Like I'm, I'm leaving it in sort of a kind of simple act. We just have intention means act, but really you have an intention, which with inside itself in its doing has another intention with its act, which is often very true. Um,

I might just be more of a rigorous in my analysis. I'm like, is that really, though? I mean, you know, is it what I really want to call that an act of liberality? It is you would say it'd be a liberality, but also carelessness of some sort, which and that. I mean, I think that you you could recast the process in that way. But then because then what you have is this is an example of how I how I would look at it,

that seeing it has it has it has a kind of intention that's in there is completely fine. That circumstance adds a moral species. So, OK, yeah, it is still a pretty much generous act, but it adds the moral species, the moral description of carelessness as well. So I've got one, I've got, you know, I've got one act that has two different descriptors in the end, which is sort of what you're getting at. Well, I would just call it two acts with two separate descriptors. OK. And I mean, one might do that.

I mean, this is like kind of this is where the pin of the needle a little bit here. How many angels on it? And I'm not saying you're wrong to ask it actually, I just wanna make sure that I'm not pushing too much. And then to go back to the original example, I guess the, basically I'm trying to connect here in my mind the idea of inherent evil acts. Yep.

And then it seemed like when you gave the example that you said this inherently evil act happened and then because this was in here, then the intention is bad. So my question I guess would be could you have a situation like that without that inherent evil where at the last minute there's a switch and a motivation of unchastity? In what way is that inherent evil linked to the intention or is it... The vocabulary of like moral goodness and evil

is much more in the moral virtues and theological virtues, too. But the moral virtues are not so much prudence, which is also moral virtue as well as an intellectual virtue, because that's all the rich place of like I can describe a virtue or a vice. Right. So if you want to describe something that's inherently evil, you're going to always be backing up against something that is a Is a vice Rape stealing

Lying does not go down the lying path though, because I don't want to get in trouble with certain people The you know Contracepting etc. Right you're talking about kind of vice language. So it's up in the world of the ends of virtues or vices. So you're trying to describe. There are certain acts that have that where they happen. They have intrinsic evilness. So, you know, murder is like this, right? It's kind of we would say it's kind of easy to say, yeah,

murder is intrinsically evil, right? But then we do find ourselves in this problematic place because killing's not the same thing as murder because then you're gonna have to deal with the self-defense and also go into war thing, right? So I tend to ask, when someone says about intrinsic evils, I'm like, okay, you have to keep asking yourself, what was the virtue that that object came from?

Like in the end, because that's like where the oomph of the moral vocabulary comes from. So like pornography, it's like you have to explain. We'll do it in more detail, though. You have to be able to articulate why pornography is unchaste. You could also argue why pornography is an injustice to the people. You know, it's part of a structure of injustices in a way that's essentially part of its nature.

So it's OK now, come back. Yeah, because the problem here is basically I would say is contraception wrong because it's inherently evil or is it wrong because it has this intention inherent to it? Well it's wrong because it's inherently evil but contraception is not merely the slapping and I'm not being dismissive it's more for the lightness is not merely the slapping of a condom on someone's penis or whatever this pill as well Actually the pill would work with the example and I give It's not merely that it's not even merely the taking of the pill because you've got the problems of like people who have for example Menorrhagia and they bleed too much and all things equal considering that they're not going to be tempted to fall into

Lust in their teenage years. They start taking contraception for a while as young women they start taking It's like notice what we have to watch our vocabulary. They take cycle changing drugs for the sake of them not bleeding all cycle, you know, being anemic and whatnot, right? But in order to call that act contraceptive in the way that we Catholics use it, it's an act that has the structure of not considering an essential component of sexuality to be the openness to life.

And hence, in my mind, that's a kind of unchastity. It's a sin against the very nature of chastity. So it comes from the domain of the moral virtues or vices in this case. And then in some way, it's reflected in the order of intention, even if it's only that you failed along the way, you failed in a chaste intention. It's harder to do it in that case. But, you know, you pull out at the last minute, I guess, you know, or something like that.

That's an example of you failed in your chastity all of a sudden at the at the very end. You know, the husband and spouse are, you know, they's an example of you failed in your chastity all of a sudden at the, at the very end, you know, the, the husband and spouse are, you know, they really are trying to be care. They're trying to be, it doesn't make any sense actually. Nevermind. Cause the problem is if you've already started the act, you're already on your way there, right? It put your wife at danger.

Yeah. But, you know, so some acts and their objects are so obvious. Like when you look at the object of the act, that it's just the objects intrinsically wrong that you tend to just be like, yeah, because that chosen object is wrong. So it's like rape. It is like, I can't really imagine circumstances in which I look at, you know,

that sort of thing happening and saying, well, you've got to understand that if you actually look at the act, you could figure out a way to see that this was some other intention in this. No, it's just like always that object is an injustice toward some person. I don't wanna bog down.

Yeah, I'm sorry, this is very technical. With my confusion, but it seems to me that you're just, all these things that I've heard explained as inherent evils, you're just saying they're inherently evil intentions. So I would just say that the evil of like rape is the, that rape would be an intent. Well, yeah.

Well, and it comes from this. But this again is why we have to distinguish object and intention that they are kind of accordion into one term. Yes, correct. Yeah, because the it's the object of rape gets all of its evil from the vice that is the intention that then lives in the object of the act. Because the object of the act is not The like I happen to let's choose a different example for the sake of anyone who might have certain sensitivities that are quite understandable

Just that that's such a malicious act the the object of the act is not merely The all the details about how I stole it's just what's the essential thing that happened here and the essential thing was not It's just what's the essential thing that happened here and the essential thing was not merely Take because if the morality comes primarily as the catechism says then st Thomas as well the morality of the act comes essentially from its object. That's because it's what you did That's why it's essentially in the object. Well, what you did is just taking things. That's a neutral Notion so, you know, that's like I my novice master they had to steal from a garden They did take from a garden while they were fleeing from the Nazis. Right? Well, you know, all things equal. They, you know, there was not a stealing

because the universal destination of goods, right? It was not stealing in that sense. So the descriptor stealing has to come from somewhere. So you can say it comes from the vices. So it doesn't always mean there's an intention up behind it, but it's a failure of the intention of virtue. And hence, it's a kind of like implicitly it's in the or it's the the the vice coming forward and the vice is coming from the ends of our actions into the object, though, in this case. But, you know, it's you do have to always ask yourself.

It's like, you know, sort of the caveat here then, because the danger here then, because the danger here is such leaning on intentions that if someone who's dangerous will justify evil acts based on good intentions, but you have to always ask yourself what you did. So the object has to be described morally. And if what you did is evil, that's it,

that part's evil, you're just gonna say, that reflects a vice. I don't care if you call it some failure of intention or not. That act in its character reflects a vice and hence it's evil. So then the descriptions of intrinsic evils then become descriptions of certain vices. There are certain things that when they occur are always evil. Hence, you know, I'll jump into the pit. Lying is always evil. But, you know, there are circumstances in which like banter and joking where, you know, I'll jump into the pit. Lying is always

evil. But you know, there are circumstances in which like banter and joking where, you know, is that actually lying? Because are you giving people a truth that is owed to them in that case? You know, okay, no. But if it was a case where you owed to someone else truthfulness, lying is intrinsically evil. So you're not you're not in line with Aquinas then on this. Wow, interesting. So here, I'll get myself in a lot of trouble.

I think I agree with how Martin Ronheimer talks about this one, Father Martin Ronheimer, yeah. If you get a chance, listen to the debate I hosted on my channel between Father Gregory Pine and Janet Smith. So you're on the Smith, you're on her side? Yes, I'm probably closer to Janet Smith, yeah. People should check that out. That was the greatest debate that's ever taken place

on this channel, and it doesn't get enough credit. It was incredible. Yeah, I saw it on there, because I thought I had got to watch that, because I check that out. That was the greatest debate that's ever taken place on this channel. It doesn't get enough credit Oh, okay. Yeah, I saw it on there cuz I thought I'd gotta watch that cuz I'm being curious and then I have this I have this fear of being always viewed like, you know, a scant by the Thomist establishment. So it's like me keeping away I don't want father pine. I don't want to know that father pine would hate me if you knew me Yeah, but now that I've outed myself I can feel comfortable. Yeah saying that okay. Hey, I want to ask you before we get to these questions Give us I can feel comfortable. Yeah, saying that. OK. So hey, I want to ask you before we get to these questions. Give us and let's try to do this quickly. Give me several virtues that we don't even know anymore.

We don't even use the terms anymore. And how that sort of reflects on modern society. You Xaureus would be it would be one. But you use some others. Um, yeah, chastity is obviously one. Oh, yeah, sorry. Yeah, chastity. I mean, so like the belt. Yeah. So thinkity is obviously one. Oh, yeah. Sorry, you're a bellow. Yeah, chastity. I mean, so like. Yeah. So think about if you're like making just a natural argument for chastity. Yeah. Right.

It's like there are certain sexual things that are just inappropriate at certain times. Like that should be everyone should be able to agree with that. Yeah. And yet there's just our culture is so deeply like there's no real rule to our chastity. You don't know. You don't know me, you don't know my circumstances. But it's like, can't you see that the person who just is consumed by not measuring their sexuality is living a subhuman life? But boy, our culture just doesn't want to get in there.

Here's why I think that's the case. And it has to do with the understanding of freedom as freedom from constraint and freedom for perfection. So it seems to me that the things our society becomes very upset about, and rightly so, whenever one person infringes upon another person in the sense of constraining them. But as soon as you begin talking about a freedom for something, as soon as you begin talking about the teleology of moral acts, they don't know what you're talking about. Yeah.

Well, they don't, but they live differently. So if you want to talk about sexual morality, well, they don't, but they live differently. If you want to talk about sexual morality, then rape imposes negatively upon another person's freedom. Yeah, exactly. So the only things that should be considered immoral in the sexual realm are those that are infringed upon somebody else.

Someone else's freedom, yeah, exactly. And so you don't even, so it's a kind of, it's basically what that is, is like, all there is is justice, but it's a very thin justice It's only about not imposing upon the freedom right of others, right? Whereas you know you you could do the same thing as regards You drink right sobriety is called a virtue not sobriety in the sense of not not drinking at all We're just not day drinkers here at pines for Aquinas. So hence we don't have the pint out

We can't get one still you just say the word I will Neil will go and get it. No, because you apparently don't have the pint out right now. You just say the word. I will. Neil will go and get it. No, because you apparently don't. I'm not going to be the only one here. I'm going to the slav who comes on is the only one. OK, so sobriety. But once again, we all have the idea of a guy who does have it in my family. It's like, listen, whatever would cause my mother to be like that was like

there was potential moral failing there. Right. We see we would think about, you know, well, courage includes a say patience. Right. Like, you know, patience is a virtue. No, but it really is. It really is. It's being able to suffer small things in a way that doesn't cause you to overreact. I mean, I'm a choleric temperament. Like I need to inculcate. I want to go through some of these some quickly.

So you have chastity. What's another kind of virtue that sort of we don't use anymore? And what does that say about our society? Oh, yeah. And I don't do the social critique enough. So I don't know what you're trying to. What about me? Well, I mean, just any virtue that has gone out of vogue, like meekness. Oh, yeah. Meekness is true. In a modern comedy or something.

Yeah, I guess I'm sort of like I hope in the I hope in the goodness of people a little bit more. You know, do we do we really understand liberality is what is liberal, this kind of generosity that should be like our lives? Why use liberality instead of generosity? I'm sorry, because I'm Aristotelian, because I just it's. How do you distinguish the two? They're the same. OK, they're the same for our purposes, at least. Yeah, it I'm Aristotelian, because I just, it's the books. Well, how do you distinguish the two? They're the same. Okay.

They're the same for our purposes, at least. Yeah. It's the Aristotelian in me. So I go skiing and it's like, I don't want to judge any of my co-skiers, but it's like, it is a world of people who strut about in expensive clothes and in space, expensive skis, et cetera.

So you can be modest in 30 degree temperature. So it's double sense. So how often do we talk about modesty there? You know, so we tend to think of modesty like I went over to St. Peter's and their little sign, you know, cover your L. Yeah. No shorts and cover your cover your shoulders. That's what everyone thinks. But if I came dressed like this to a soup kitchen,

yeah, to a soup kitchen, or even if I came dressed like this to like the house, unless I was passing through town or whatever, but all things equal to the woman I dedicated the book to, very down to earth, salt of the earth woman. You know, you just don't want to make someone uncomfortable. It's not really the mark of like, you know, you're genteel that you know how to make people feel good. It's a mark of morality that you know how to use dress

in a way that is appropriate. Flip side that drives me crazy about my my fellow professors They made me cut this out of the book actually Because they said you don't want to be it seems to too much like a professor Complaining about his fellow professors and who cares about that among our general readership, but like professors are Slob so often like that's unbefitting to your office of communicating truth to the next generation. Like when you're teaching at least, like try to have something that's fitting. I get it.

You know, I work partially for the church and academia is about as bad. You're not getting paid a ton, but like try to find a way to get like to just on occasion dress to match your station in I think everybody can basically understand. Yesterday, I was learning about the the sanctions that Biden has put on Russia and they interviewed different generals talking about the war that the invasion of Ukraine. And I thought to myself, if this old fellow here was wearing like a I don't know, like a bass fishing t-shirt or something,

I wouldn't take him seriously at all. Yeah. And I'd be right to, because there's a sense in which as you, yeah, you're dressed should be fit what you're trying to do. And that's a modesty. And there's lots of ways to be modest. Same thing with a doctor. I mean, imagine if you were getting a heart transplant

and you go in and the guy doesn't know how to button his shirt correctly. Correct. Or, I need another doctor. Or vice versa. I remember the, my wife's former OB, he'd always just wear a polo shirt because he knew that his clientele would, you know, it would be, it would make them uncomfortable because we live in a very poor county, you know. So whereas

the thing I had to fight against was what I got at Catholic U, we were, philosophy was by far the most conservative, even more than the theologians at CU, the students at CU, although that's been changing, right, but the culture has been very conservative for a long time, so all the graduate students always have their ties and bow ties on, you know, and you have to get to a place where you're not sort of playing the professor, like you had in your old time,

too, that's all modesty, and that's also gonna fall under like all the strutting and printing of the people on the slopes. So you back me into that guy instead of like what I was thinking of is the immense amount of money that gets spent. I'm fine with recreation, use your paleo. The good recreation is actually another virtue.

How often do we talk about? Now you got me going. Okay, here. Just one second. I'm gonna change subjects real quickly and then I want you to do this. OK, sorry. There is a car alarm going off.

Whenever I hear a car alarm, I get incredibly anxious. Who the hell would know what their car alarm sounds like? It could be your car. It could be my car. Do you have a car alarm? I'm not sure. Yeah. What am I to do now?

Now it's in my head that my car alarm is going off. And how would I know anyway? Listen. It could be someone breaking into my car. It's like my head that my car alarm is going off and how would I know anyway? Listen? Maybe it's already into my car. It's like my laptop bag is there So it's a result against modern vehicles and their stupid bells and whistles. I'm gonna let it keep going. It might be mine I don't know. Oh, yeah, and he's the only thing whenever you've heard a car alarm You've never thought someone's cars getting broken into no truthfully. I'm never Press that button. Yeah. All right you should failure. Yeah, I'm like, man, that's annoying. Figure it out. Press that button. Yeah.

All right. You should failure. Yeah, like good. Or ishness and what for was it's a this is what I was talking about. Yeah. But it's to have a mean between the extreme of boarishness and super not super. No, no, no. I mean, it would be I turn the car alarm off.

So part of the problem is, you know, when teaching in a Greek Greek seminary, if I teach this stuff, I usually don't use the Thomas vocabulary because you don't want them to know that you're using it right. But the uterpale is also a good recreation as well. It's not merely just the there's like boars in the sense you and I have how to like relax in a way that's appropriate. But the you know, I would just say the excess,

let's describe the excess as whatever we wanna apply to them. That you can be far too flippant and be obsessed with sets of sports and things, you know. Let's even, as a skier, so not even so much because people who are watching sports aren't really doing anything sports wise. It's just their enjoyment is, their enjoyment is the wasted time of watching games.

But I can become I can become so obsessed with skiing. This could happen. I said to my wife, if I weren't married, I forgot until I moved back how much I could have been a ski bum. I can obsess over to the point that I'm I'm putting at risk my marriage. Yeah. Putting at risk my prayer life,

just putting it with being a normal adult because I'm just spending every day on the slopes outside of, you know, outside of work or whatever. And that's just bad. Like even if I'm not, see contemporary people want to say, listen, as long as you're not hurting someone, as long as it's not hurting your work. Exactly, it's who are you hurting?

No, you're living in a way that's less than human. I mean, this is a good kind of natural law way to talk about it. As opposed to, you know, the other side, someone who doesn't know how to take recreation. So when my stepfather was dying, all the COVID stuff, I could only see him very limited hours and I just, you couldn't get in otherwise.

And it was right in the middle of while we were having a lot of housework done as well like jacking up of sections of our house for all these termite damage and and so I had the carpenters in the day and that stuff as well as my wife was away so I had evenings to myself and you're just living in the my debt my father is in a state he was not well enough to even take phone calls or anything. So my father is just alone. And of course you want to, yes, be prayerful, et cetera, but we're human.

And it would have been a real failure probably because it would have, you know, it would have had downstream effects if I hadn't found a way to blow off some of that stress. So I spent the evenings, you know, could go to the slopes just for, even if it would just be for two hours, you know, it's a kind of like virtuous use

of recreation to keep your psyche together. And also too, just because sometimes it's the way to relate to other people. Like you should have not just a kind of, oh, I don't like sports, because sometimes that's the only thing they can start a relationship with other people, it's the only thing you can relate to. And I'm not thinking of anything explicit here,

but like to your in-laws or something is only through that. But generosity, one other example, there couldn't even get to rail against what I was gonna say there. There's also those who will spend immense amounts on their pleasures, like, you know, be it skiing or anything else,

that don't see that, you know, at a certain point, you need to stop getting things because you really do owe it just in strict justice to your community to be generous. You don't need a bigger house. I mean, there's a lot of room. Some people, cars, whatever. I mean, but you better have discerned. I would love, I would love as a retired man, maybe when I don't have to worry about the kids and having dad vehicles to own a nice Mercedes sedan. I think it probably in my case would be probably sinful. It just it would not be right. I

mean it'd be wrong because of the community I live in, it'd be a waste of my finances because then you're gonna have to make the payment and I think of children being in there. You presumably might be uptight around your children being in your beautiful car. Yeah exactly. And then also to, I'm saying after I retire, I mean, my grandchildren. Right, no, but you were saying now it would be sinful. And that's one of the reasons. Oh, now, but even later I'm saying it would be

because it would also be, you know, it would strap, I'm a professor, I mean, it would strap the finances in a way that then I couldn't just be spontaneously generous to people, right? Like, whatever it is, you have to discern what this looks like. So hence I'm not coming up with universal prescriptions, but at a certain point, you actually are being unjust by,

by not seeing that ultimately, you know, what you have is, is so that you can, you can come back to the theological virtues. Ultimately, that should be the soul of all these acts. You can be as generous as God. That doesn't mean that you have to live, you know, without any thought for the future and whatnot But you you should be able to you know as your circumstances permit have a kind of generosity It can be as simple as like the the the poor old, you know Members of like my parish who just they make the baked goods for the sales, right?

That's a kind of generosity of time. You know, I mean slavs, you know that pierogies I'm sure you've had progies, of course, right? There's a sense in which pierogies, which many people in your listeners may not know of, which are just noodles filled with cheese and potatoes with then butter and onions on top of it. Great example of like, all we have is our work. We have nothing else, right?

You know, but our work has gone into this, you know? So whatever your liberality looks like, I mean, it's it's actually unjust to be so caught up in in your own pleasures that you you don't even think about how how you should be generous to others. Like imagine if you're a good skier and you know, you never think that like someone who knows kids could take could use some lesson. That's a sin against. The. This is let me just kind of end.

I'm sorry. I end on this one and then we'll then we'll then we'll kind of move on. And I want to. This is my progressive. But it's like it, but it does. It is a commentary on modern society as you examine each of these as to where we are, where we are. Like, I mean, the fact that no one talks of vanity so much anymore why boob jobs are acceptable, which is clearly not an acceptable thing.

All things being equal, you know, reduction surgery and things for health. I mean, this is this is atrocious. And the idea that we wink and nodded is if this is good. You are just trying to be the best version. You know, the same thing like, you know, Botox treatments for people who are relatively young, like butt implants. I didn't know they were a thing until I was in Miami last week.

And my wife told me about them. And then I was like, honey, you realize now I'm just looking at everyone's butt. I'm like, is that a butt implant? She's like, no, I don't think that's a butt implant. At least it happened that way. And it wasn't like you were looking at them and your wife said to you, you know, those are just implants.

Oh, no. So at least you were being virtuous. And it just happened that your wife told you. So well, maybe we can spend an hour examining that later just in case. But hey, I want to begin to wrap up because I want to do a whole nother video for our supporters. Sure. But before we do, tell us where people can learn about you. We've referenced your book several times, which is an excellent book. So you can get a big purchase. Purchase the book at ascensionpress.com ascensionpress.com slash Catholic morality

slash Catholic morality made by God, made for God. You can find more information on my text You can just slip it out, yeah. in general at also They can't be not happy with this. Come on, this is great. I think they did a great job.

I know they really did do a good job. Brighten, you know, although it's kind of Jesuit like, right? It looks like the Jesuit seal a little bit, which is like. It could look like a Dominican with his. That's the black and white. Yeah, I think it's true. That's how we should look at it. So, so you could go to ascensionpress.com

slash Catholic morality. And then for kind of a general overview of the other books, I just can't remember if it's slash books, but philosophicalcatholic.com. If you go in there to the profile, philosophicalcatholic.com, the profile has then on the right side books It also has lots of my academic stuff

You make it scared away by that those things but the various translations and things that I've done are there as well Awesome. So well, thank you for being on the show. This is great. Yeah, it was real fun. Yeah, I appreciate it very much We're gonna go over and do another recording now for our supporters on locals or patreon You can go to pints with Aquinas comm slash give to support there and you'll get all of this extra content. And you'll become beautiful and immediately will have the look of somebody with appropriate but implants. All right. See you later guys. God bless you.