Pints With Aquinas - How Serious Should a Christian Be? | Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P.

Episode Date: May 5, 2024

In this Episode Father talks about whether Christians can have fun. If human life is serious, and we have a serious task is fun nonsensical indulgence? 🟣 Join Us on Locals (before we get banned on YT): https://mattfradd.locals.com/ 📖 Fr. Pine's Book: https://bit.ly/3lEsP8F 🖥️ Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ 🟢 Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/pintswithaquinas 👕 Merch: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com 🚫 FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ 🔵 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd  

Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine and I'm a Dominican friar in the province of St. Joseph. I teach at the Dominican House of Studies and I work for the Thomistic Institute. And this is Pines for the Aquinas. In this episode, I'd like to talk about whether Christians can have fun. Now obviously, that's like a little bit silly as far as questions go because clearly, Christians do have fun and many Christians feel no hesitation or conflict about the fact that they have fun. But I think there are a few people out there who do feel some hesitation or do feel some conflict. And they might think along these lines.

So here's the thing. Human life is a very serious business. And yeah, we're called to a very serious task. And so we should undertake it seriously. And if we're out here having fun or getting all like stirred up with fun having, then we're going to be distracted from that goal or dispersed from that goal. And yeah, we shouldn't indulge in that type of nonsense. Or if we do, we should feel guilty about it and regret it. So I think that there's like a little bit of truth there, but there's a lot of bit of falsity. And I think that that falsity hinges on how we understand human life, and specifically

understand what human life is for. So let's talk about that a little as we appreciate the place of fun in human flourishing. Okay, so at the outset, I think that we need to assign an appropriate place to seriousness. Because you know, those folks are right We as human beings are in debt are endowed with a great dignity with an immense dignity And we are fixed on a very noble goal I mean the most noble of goals that is to say the vision of God in heaven the life with God in heaven Which lasts unto ages of ages and the Lord entrusts us with our life as stewards of our life.

He places our lives in our hand, which is wild. And we profess, you know, 1 Timothy 2, 4 says, God desires that all be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. But God wills that that come about through our exercise of free will. So we should be serious in the task of Christian conversion. We should be serious when it comes to exercising a kind of custody over those for whom we have care. That's a real thing. Like we shouldn't be flipping about it or we shouldn't delay or be dilatory in undertaking what remains for us to do while here on the surface of the earth because we know neither the day nor the hour. But I think there's a sense in which we're called to do it as human beings and we, as human beings, are just a little bit silly.

And here I don't mean to poke fun at human nature or I don't mean myself to be flippant, but I think that we have to recognize this because I think that gives us a kind of appreciation for who we are and what we're for. Like when you think about it, we are the only creatures who have a spiritual nature called to union with God and a bodily nature. That is to say, an animal nature. So we are, says the Christian tradition, the kind of horizon of creation wherein spiritual and bodily meet. And so we experience this in our humanity, a kind of infinite aspiration for union with God and a kind of strange proclivity for things that like taste good and are shiny and attract our otherwise feckless attention.

And that creates in us like a lot of strange and otherwise silly tensions. And I think that we just need to be cool with that and be all right with that. Like we as human beings are just complex and or complicated. And so when we notice those tensions or when we notice a kind of incongruity in our experience or a kind of silliness in the way in which things line up, I think it's fine to enjoy that, to kind of take delight in that, to revel in the fact that while we are called to a serious task, trained on a serious goal, we ourselves aren't too terribly serious. Now, does that mean that we should become attached to a joie de vivre as we define it, and then resist maturation over the

course of our life because we don't want to grow into the seriousness which awaits us? No, no, I don't think that. But I do think that this is part of what it means to be childlike. This is part of what it means to cultivate the dispositions of mind and heart, which our Lord encourages in the gospel. Like to look to Him for everything, to rely on Him in His providence, in His goodness, to supply for our needs, and like to not act as if it were all on us, to not act as if it were our dread responsibility for which we can expect no help. So I think that within this setting we can understand play or fun or enjoyment as a kind

of integral feature of human life. Is it the most important thing in the world? No. But is it important? Yes. So, for instance, when St. Thomas Aquinas talks about the virtuous life, he lists all kinds of different virtues. And you're thinking of the big ones like faith, hope, charity, prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance. Okay cool. But he also lists other virtues which are associated with those big ticket virtues.

So like for instance when he talks about justice he's like,, what about religion and piety and obedience or observance? And like, what about truth telling and what about, you know, dot dot dot. So he's got a lot of things in mind. But when he talks about the virtue of temperance, he'll talk about those kind of big ticket temperances. So he says with respect to food and drink, you've got like abstinence and sobriety. With respect to sexual intercourse, you've got like chastity and purity. And he says these are the most vehement attractions that we as human beings experience all right so it's going to require from us certain virtues that are equipped for that really intense

task but he says there are other goods that we're attracted to that don't require from us the same type of engagement right or they don't require from us the same type of moderation because they're like not as necessary or not as natural and as a result of which they don't produce a response in us that's quite as urgent. So we'll talk about like, listen, we need to temper, we need to soften our response in anger. Okay, so we'll talk about meekness and clemency. But he also says like, hey, there are gonna be certain goods that attract us that we need to order or that we need to discipline. And I'm just gonna put these all

under the category of modesty. So we talk about humility as like ordering our desire for excellence, or we'll talk about studiousness as ordering our desire for knowledge. But then he gets to a certain virtue which we might call like decency, and he includes in it a consideration about play.

He'll say like, we as human beings are responsible for how we act in the world because we as human beings have bodies, right, which have a kind of place in the world, or which take up a kind of place in the world. And so we're responsible for a kind of courtesy or decency or politeness, like interact with people in a way that sets them at ease, or interact with people in a way that, yeah, like makes them comfortable and engages them in conversation and dot dot dot. Okay, you get all that.

But in the context of this conversation, he talks about play. He talks about enjoyment. And he'll say like, listen, human life is difficult, all right? And the point of human life isn't to like get us to the breaking point, right? It isn't to push us just to the limit of burnout and then pull us back so that we can stay just barely below that line for the whole duration of our days. just to the limit of burnout and then pull us back so that we can stay just barely below that line for the whole duration of our days. Because the point of human life isn't to like produce a product.

The point of human life isn't to like make something, right? The point of human life is God. All right. And the way that we get God to speak somewhat crassly is by exercising our virtuous agency well, right? It's like by living our lives, our human lives, with a kind of freedom, with a kind of abandon, with a kind of entrustment to the Most High God. And we seek to cultivate virtues so as to be better self-possessed that we can make

of ourselves a better gift. And when it comes to play, he'll say, okay, the body gets tired. It just does. And as a result of which, the soul experiences a kind of fatigue and or weariness. Now, the soul isn't a body, so it's different. But like, the soul still acts through the body, the soul still relies upon the body, the soul is still composed with the body. And so we can experience a kind of intellectual or mental fatigue which can be draining for

us. And he says, yeah, like as sleep and exercise are for the refreshment of the body, so play is for the refreshment of the soul, for the refreshment of the spirit, which I find to be especially beautiful. Okay, so like listen, we need to recognize the fact that we as human beings are limited. And the point isn't to like reject those limitations and to push up against those limitations just as well as we can so as to try to live an angelic life whilst dragging a corpse behind us. That's not the point.

The fact that we have a body indicates about, like it indicates something about who we are and what we're for. We're meant to live an embodied life. And bodies experience fatigue, they experience weariness, they take time, they take patience, and we are meant to cultivate a certain virtuous disposition with respect to those facts and with respect to those realities so that we can live our human lives well. Okay, so we need rest and we need refreshment. We can't work continuously, alright? And when it comes to the soul, the soul's rest just is pleasure, right?

The soul is meant to unburden itself of pain and of sorrow by the experience of pleasure. So we should engage with delightful things which fit and which animate and which encourage and which unburden, all right? He cites this story, St. Thomas cites this story, it's taken from the conferences of St. John Cashin where one of the monks is recounting a story about St. John the Evangelist. And apparently like somebody walks in on St. John the Evangelist spending time with some of his friends and he's scandalized at the fact that they're engaged in a kind of game. And St. John the Evangelist, in order to illustrate the principle, he'll say, okay, you know, like you've

strung a bow before and you've notched arrows or knocked arrows and then loose them from the shaft, whatever. And the guy's like, yeah, I know stuff about bows and arrows. And he says, okay, are you able to like continually string the bow and loosen arrow and always have the same type of elasticity from the bow? He's like, no, if you keep stringing it, I mean, if like you keep pulling arrows continuously, then you're going to lose some of that elasticity and then the bow is eventually going to break. And he says, so too with the human spirit. You need to unstring the bow. You need to kind of give the human spirit a certain rest, a certain refreshment, lest from overuse, lest from, yeah, overburdening it, you ruin it, right? You can break it.

So I think like, yeah, we're not supposed to seek pleasure in indecent things or in, you know, hurtful things. We're not supposed to lose an appropriate sense of seriousness, a kind of gravity of soul that commits us to the task. You know, we shouldn't lose sense of the different persons involved, the appropriate time and place for these things like decency and courtesy. But like, we got to recognize that the place... it's part of human life, all right? I think like St. Thomas will talk about gravity here, but he also uses a similar language when talking about human sadness. There's a way in which like an inordinate sense of gravity can actually plunge us into the pits of sadness. He'll use this word aggravation to describe progressive stages of sadness, and it's most acute as a kind of paralytic depression,

whereby you become so convinced of the gravity of life that you can't see over it or under it or around it or behind it and you just get oppressed by it and that itself is terribly terribly sad so we need some levity in life we need some you know we need some rest we need some refreshment we need the levity of laughter right we need the levity of play because otherwise human life proves insupportable and human life proves him supportable and human life proves inhuman and that's the basic point that this is a human good fit for human persons who are like destined for a genuinely human salvation. Well in that line from St. Thomas's treatment he says play is like a condiment all right you're

supposed to put it on life you know flavor it in such a way as to draw the actual native flavor of life itself, right? It's meant to enhance life, not to cover it up like you don't want to put so much salt on the thing that you only taste salt, right? You're supposed to pull out the flavor, you know, to preserve the flavor, to accentuate the flavor, and ultimately to access the flavor, which is to say in this case, the flavor of life. So I hope that's helpful for you.

Yeah, this is Pines for the Quinus. If you haven't yet, please do subscribe to the channel, push the bell, and get sweet updates when other things come out. Yeah, this is Pines for the Aquinas. If you haven't yet, please do subscribe to the channel, push the bell and get sweet updates when other things come out. Also, we've had conversations apropos of leisure on the podcast God's Planning, which is a podcast which I contribute with four of the Dominican friars. I think our second episode was about leisure, which is like almost five years ago, which is wild. And then, yeah, I wrote a book. It's called Prudence. Choose confidently, live boldly. If you haven't yet read it, you might enjoy it. Check it out.

All right, know of my prayers for you. Please pray for me, and I'll look forward to chatting with you next time on Pines with Aquinas.