Pints With Aquinas - LIVE TALK: St Thomas Aquinas on the Unnatural Law, Dr. Scott Hahn

Episode Date: October 28, 2021

LIVE Small-Room Talk by Dr. Scott Hahn. 📃 Hand out for the talk: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1azS42Z1cj6TFzFYKtyADgYJ57xIpCzYQ/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=100652684762328536563&rtpof=true&sd=true 🥃 Want to attend in person next time? Become a Patron! https://www.patreon.com/mattfradd 📚 Dr. Hahn's Book! https://stpaulcenter.com/product/scripture-matters-essays-on-reading-the-bible-from-the-heart-of-the-church/ 📘 *MY* New Book on How to be Happy According to Aquinas! 😁 https://stpaulcenter.com/product/how-to-be-happy-saint-thomas-secret-to-a-good-life/ 📕 Dr. Hahn's Newest Book "It Is Right and Just: Why the Future of Civilization Depends on True Religion" https://stpaulcenter.com/product/it-is-right-and-just-why-the-future-of-civilization-depends-on-true-religion/ 🏛️ New Polity! Ever want to shoot an Amazon drone? https://newpolity.com/blog/shoot-a-drone 

Are you live? All right, here we go. Dr Scott Hahn is the Father Michael Scanlon Professor of Biblical Theology and the New Evangelization at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. He is the founder and president of the St Paul Center, an apostolate dedicated to teaching Catholics to read scripture from the heart of the church. Dr Hahn has been married to Kimberly for 42 years. They have six kids and 21 grandkids. They also have one son ordained to the Diocese of Steubenville, Father Jeremiah Hahn. As the author and editor of over 40 popular and academic books, Dr. Hahn's works include best-selling titles, Rome Sweet Home, yeah, good rep, The Lamb's Supper and Hail Holy Queen.

His most recent releases are titled Hope to Die, the Christian Meaning of Death and the Resurrection of the Body, and It is Right and Just, Why the Future of Civilization Depends on the True Religion, now available at St Paul's Centre and of course we'll be selling them tonight. On a personal note, I just want to say that Dr. Hahn is the real deal, having lived here for a year and have brought every prospective convert to his doorstep.

He just loves meeting with people and he's just got such a love for our Lord and the scriptures, he's a real inspiration to me and so I'm so happy he's here today. So please welcome Dr. Hahn. Well thank you Matt and it's great to be with all of you frad-trads. And I need to warn you in advance that I have not been traveling over the weekends for the last two weekends. So for over two months in a row,

I was traveling every weekend. The last weekend and this weekend I'm not. Plus we just had midterms and you don't lecture during the midterms. And so it's a lot like a backed up sink or something, you know, and it's gonna come out even more intense than it normally does, which is already excessive. I also wanted to mention, besides the 42 years of marriage, it's been 45 years at least with St. Thomas Aquinas.

I had been mentored back in the early 70s in high school in the greater Pittsburgh area by Dr. R.C. Sproul, who was that evangelical Calvinist Thomist. And then in 76 I had a course in medieval philosophy at Grove City where I read about 500 pages mostly from De Potencia as well as parts of the Summa, not knowing at all that he ever had commented on Scripture. And so that discovery came after I entered the church 35 years ago. I'm not gonna bore you with any more of those details, but I'm suffice to say that in a little book

full of essays that I did back in the 90s, entitled Scripture Matters, Reading the Bible from the Heart of the Church, there are two essays that I'm going to be sort of echoing if you've read them before. One is the Angelic Doctor and the Good Book, and subtitled, Or Should Old Aquinas Be Forgot? And then the other one is reading the Old Testament

with Jesus, John, and St. Thomas Aquinas. And what I want to do tonight with you is to focus on what Thomas has taught me. But because he's still teaching me, I don't want to come off as though I'm an expert. I have taught various graduate courses over the years on readings in the theology of St. Thomas, but only as a reader.

You know, I've had professors in the graduate programs that were the real deal, whereas I'm an amateur. But since an amateur comes from amour, French meaning is one who loves, not necessarily one who's paid for it. I love what St. Thomas has done in opening in the scriptures and I love what the scriptures have done in opening up the depths of St. Thomas. Now when you have enough time to prepare you don't give some you know you don't give a group of people four pages right that's what you do when you don't have enough time to prepare and you know that you're not

going to have enough time to present all of the material here. But my hope is that you will take this and use this as a resource. What I'd like to do first off is to announce the title of my talk. It's St. Thomas Aquinas on the Un law. All right, so what I want to do is to do something that is almost entirely novel, but not entirely. I have one essay written by Mark Johnson at Marquette University entitled St. Thomas and the Law of Sin, and I recommend it although it's very obscure and it's 21 years old, but very few articles have been done by Thomistic scholars on the sixth and final type of law. So what I'd like to do is to look at the first handout with you.

Take that out and look with me at this and see this is from the Summa Theologiae naturally and it's from the Prima Secundae question 91. And I want to go through this before I indicate exactly where I'm heading. And so if you're just weary, you can feel free to tune out. If you're semi interested but not entirely, you can just kind of stick with me but check your mail, your Facebook or whatever. But I want to make this pledge that I'm going to try my best to make this worth your while. Alright? And for those live streaming too, I mean you can grab dinner. Anyway. Question 91, the various kinds of law, proceeds in six articles, the first five of which

are utterly expected, and that is, is there an eternal law? Well, yes, it is evident, granted that the world is ruled by divine providence, that the whole community of the universe is governed by divine reason. And that's what Thomas means by the eternal law. The governance of all creation and individual creatures each tour their end. Then the second one is perhaps the most famous. Is there a natural law?

And here, he of course affirms that, but he does so on the basis of Paul in Romans 2. Pay attention to that, because time and again, he's gonna take his cue more from Paul than Aristotle, to be sure, even in the treatise on law, especially in the treatise on law, and even on the article that deals with the natural law. So in Romans 2, 14, Paul writes,

when the Gentiles who have not the law do by nature those things that are of the law. And so he cites the gloss ordinaria there. And then he explains what the natural law is. That is, it is our rational participation in the eternal law. So natural law is not the same for Thomas as the laws of nature.

There is profound confusion and clear equivocation. Natural law is a classical notion rooted in antiquity. You can find it in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, Seneca, and Cicero, and others, in various forms. But the laws of nature, that's pretty much of an enlightenment concept because the laws of nature apply to planets as much as persons, right? So gravity and electricity and all of those things are the laws of nature, whereas the natural law applies only to humans.

It can't be applied to animals because animals can't rationally participate in the eternal law because they achieve their perfection by instinct. It might be a rather sophisticated, instinctual life, but it's not rational. Angels don't have the natural law because they don't need it. They can't use it because at the moment they're created, they have this vast intelligence whereby, with their intellect that knows all of the relevant truth and with their will, they choose to serve or not serve.

And it's fixed and it's irrevocable. Only humans, half animal, half angel, have the natural law, need the natural law, and can be perfected through the natural law if in fact natural fulfillment was all that they're, all that God had planned. Now the third type of law, whether there's a human law, and of course there are human laws, but what are human laws? Well, you might say that natural law is the theory of which human law is the practice. And so, from the truths of the natural moral law, we have specifications that are practically

applied such as driving on the right side of the road or paying your taxes by April 15th. Those are pretty lame examples, but you get the point. Article 4, whether there's any need for a divine law. You know, at this point a light should be going off, a divine law. Well, I thought everything up until now was divine law. What is divine law if it's more than the eternal law, whereby God governs all of the universe? Well, there's a need for divine law because we were made for a supernatural end, namely

divine beatitude. If all we had was human nature, natural reason applied to the natural order would generate natural theology and we would recognize that God exists. We could prove his existence I suppose you could say. We know what kind of God exists, his existence and his attributes, and I suppose through natural theology we could even arrive at the notion of providence, that he governs all of the universe, including us. But what if God has in store for us something that mind, eye has not seen, ear has not heard, it's never entered into the mind of humans

what God has created us for? Namely, not just to love God with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength in a truly human way, that would be natural beatitude. But to love God as only God loves God, that's what we mean by supernatural beatitude. That's not hypothetical, that's real. That's not plan B, that's plan A. That is the only thing for which we were actually made in concrete human history. And so that's why there's a need for the divine law because we wouldn't even know there was a possibility

of divine beatitude unless God revealed it, but if only he did was reveal it, we wouldn't know anything except, wow, it's a kind of hypothetical, logical possibility, but it's still unattainable. It's unknowable, it's not even desirable, and yet the divine law gives us the reality, the truth, that we could enter into this with His grace, and then the means by which we do that through His gracious activities in the Incarnation, the Paschal mystery, and all of that.

Okay, but that sort of begs the question that Article 5 addresses. Is there just one divine law? Well, yes, there's one, but we need to distinguish the divine law in terms of the old and the new. So Old Testament, New Testament, we hear. Old law and new law is what he says. You know, potato, patato, it's really the same thing. But I want you to recognize something that Thomas just sort of assumed, and that is the Old Testament and the New is more than BC and AD. It's more than a literary arrangement of Genesis through Malachi and Matthew through the Apocalypse. The Old Testament and the New is a kind of two-fold way of discovering the divine law.

And so we can't go into that, although it's my favorite part, and we just press pause for a moment to indicate that once you get out of question 96 and you begin to move into the divine law, you discover that almost every single modern translation of the treatise on law by Aquinas is not only abridged, but basically decapitated. Why?

Because three-fourths of the treatise on law is a treatment of the divine law. And most of the divine law is focusing on the Old Testament law, and most of the treatment of the Old Testament law is looking at the ceremonial precepts, where there are more questions, there are more objections, and there are responses and replies to the objections that are more extensive. This is the single most uncommented upon material in the Summa, even in the Dominican commentorial tradition. One commentator says better contemplated than commentated. And yet for Thomas it

seemed to have been something front and center, the main event. And so our preference for the natural law for him would be majoring on the minors. Our preference for the new as distinct from the old would be lunging for what is right beyond our reach. So we'll go into this perhaps a little bit more later on, but if in fact the divine law reveals plan A that there never was a natural state of being human apart from supernatural grace and that supernatural grace was for our first parents nothing less than what we call sanctifying grace the mysterious presence of the indwelling trinity

within the souls of our first parents and this is why thomas's treatment of law is so closely to related to his treatment of original sin and concupiscence in the preceding questions. Because when the Lord God says, in Genesis two verse seven, he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and so man became a living being, Thomas follows Augustine who follows Paul to show that it's not just oxygen

that first father is breathing, it's the breath of God, it's the spirit of God, it's the life of God, It's supernatural, not just natural. And so 10 verses later, when the stern warning comes, the day you eat of it, you'll surely die, and you turn the page and the serpent says you won't, and so they do, and then they don't die. He could have said, you'll deserve to die,

you'll be sentenced to die, you'll begin to die, but he said, the day you eat of it, you'll surely die. Well, you'll begin to die, but he said the day you eat of it you will surely die. Well if in fact what they did was to commit a mortal sin, they committed spiritual suicide. And so the multiple literal sense that we can talk about in the Q&A period it might apply here because it's not just talking about the rational principle of the soul that is the result of God's breath, it's also the supernatural life that makes him a child of God and not just the loftiest servant of God on the planet. So this sets in the motion something that most people

wouldn't really imagine or deem important and yet for Thomas, it's not only the main event, it's the only reality of human history. And that's why he spends so much time on it, and that's why we spend so little. This is also another time for a parenthetical aside that is aka tangent. I pointed out in this book that my discovery of Thomas Aquinas's scripture commentaries came mostly as a result of reading

a Protestant and his doctoral dissertation at Drew University entitled An Interpretation of Thomas Aquinas as a Biblical Theologian with Special Reference to his Systematizing of the Economy of Salvation History by Frank Powell Haggard. I read it through, I reread it, I've been in touch with the writer now for decades. And what he basically shows is that what Thomas Aquinas does is not what systematic theologians do in systematizing doctrine strictly on logical terms.

He is chronological every bit as much as he is logical. And perhaps you might have heard this through the revival in Thomas as a master of the sacred page. I mean, almost single-handedly, my friend Dr. Matthew Levering has launched this revival in Thomistic biblical scholarship to show why, if you had asked Aquinas as he was going into class, what is your job here at the

University of Paris, he would have said a master of the sacred page, a magistra, the sacrapagina. There's no proof that he ever lectured through the Summa theologiae. What he lectured through was Romans or John or other books of the Bible just basically like Bonaventure did because sacrapagina and sacra doctrina were practically interchangeable. They were mutually reinforcing. And so scripture was a huge part of all that he did. Haggard says, biblical theology, if we may use this term to describe the primary result of Thomas' exegesis, is the attempt to grasp as far as possible the intelligible word of God as it is expressed by the inspired authors and then to show how the conclusions of the word of God lead to the doctrinal teaching of the Catholic Church.

All right, end of tangent. Back to Article 6. This is the buildup because what item does not belong? When you look at these various kinds of law, there is sort of like in that lineup somebody you could easily point to and say he doesn't belong. Number six, is there a law of sin? Well, of course not. How could there be a law of sin if the natural law is a rational participation in the eternal

law and the divine law is this supernatural participation in divine life. But what if in giving us the divine law and entrusting his own life to our first parents who then disgraced themselves and then us by transmitting human life that was devoid of the divine life that they forfeited, what if there is no such thing as pure nature? What if in fact what we get from our parents as a result of original sin is not nature and not even ungraced nature, but disgraced nature? Because that's what Thomas is teaching from question 30 all the way through 60 up until here, 91.

For Catholics, original sin is not the same as it is for Calvinists. For a Calvinist, original sin is being born depraved. Whereas for the Catholics following Aquinas, it means being born deprived of the divine life that our first parents had and then forfeit it. That's why original sin does not leave us guilty of any actual sin, but in fact, it cannot, I mean, even if you follow Augustine, if you follow the church on this in Aquinas, you know, the most that can happen for a child

who is contracting original sin, but never committing actual sin but then dying is natural beatitude. It's the loss of the glory of supernatural grace. Perhaps later on, but nothing more on that because I want to just dive now into Article 6, whether there's a law of sin, a law in the FOMES, which is the Latin term that's kind of tough to translate, but it's tender, it's kindling. In other words, it's there in the soul, and that's what so

easily lights us up, you know, with lust, with greed, with whatever else. So it would seem that there is no law of the Fomes or kindling of sin, for Isidore says in the etymologies that law is based on reason, but the Fomes of sin is not based on reason, but deviates from it. Therefore the fomas has not the nature of a law. Second, every law is binding so that those who do not obey it are called transgressors, but man is not called a transgressor from not following the instigation of the fomas, but rather from following them. So you're not trans, you're not a transgressor if you're, you know, the law of sin, you transgress that? It doesn't make you a transgressor.

You should not keep the law of sin. This is just a confusion. So the Fomaz has not the nature of a law. Objection three, further the law is ordained to the common good as stated above but the FOMAS inclines us not to the common good but to our own private good. Therefore again the FOMAS has not the nature of sin. It almost seems obvious. And then the said contra the Apostle says, Roman 723, I see another law in my members fighting against the law of my mind. And if you've been tracking the lectionary these last few days, all week

we've been reading from Romans, but the last two days we've been reading from Romans 6 and 7, moving into 8, which is the theodrama that Paul is expounding that Aquinas is citing. But you might say, well, that's just a proof text. So what if Paul says there is a law of sin in my members? That doesn't rise to the level of eternal law, natural law, human law, divine law, old law or new law. It's just an equivocation, but what if it's not? So again, you can see how much more than Aristotle, Aquinas' thought is shaped and defined by sacred scripture, the sacrapagina. He's not primarily teaching metaphysics.

In fact, there's no clear proof that he ever taught the metaphysics of Aristotle in the University of Paris. So, the said contrara, now we have his respondio. The, well, let's do the answer first. So, as stated above, the law as to its essence resides in him that rules and measures, but by way of participation in that which is ruled and measured, so that every inclination or ordination which may be found and think subject to the law

is called a law by participation, as stated above. Now those who are subject to a law may receive a two-fold inclination from the lawgiver. First insofar as he directly inclines his subjects to something, sometimes indeed different subjects to different acts, in this way we may say that there is a military law on the one hand and a mercantile law on the other. So you can be in the army or you can be a merchant. Accordingly under the divine lawgiver, wait, second, indirectly, thus by the very fact that a lawgiver deprives a subject of some dignity, the latter passes into another order

so as to be under another law as it were. Thus if a soldier be turned out of the army, he becomes a subject of rural or of mercantile legislation, a mere merchant which isn't much for Aquinas. Accordingly, under the divine lawgiver, various creatures have various natural inclinations. So that what is, as it were, a law for one is against the law for another. That I might say that fierceness is in a way the law of a dog, but against the law of a sheep or in any other meek animal, and so the law of man, which by the divine ordinances is allotted to him according to his proper natural condition, is that he should act in

accordance with reason. That's the law of man. And this law was so effective in the primitive state that nothing either beside or against reason could take man unawares. So by supernatural grace, the composite nature of man, soul and body, the supernatural grace that dwelt within him would empower his soul to govern the body with all of its passions and appetites, emotions, and the intellect would be empowered by that grace to guide the will to the highest truths that God had revealed. But when man turned his back on God he fell under the influence of essential impulses. We wouldn't know what that refers to. In fact this happens to each one individually the more he deviates

from the path of reason so that after a fashion he is likened to the beasts that are led by the impulse of sensuality. According to Psalm 48 man, when he was in honor did not understand he hath been compared to senseless beasts and made like to them. So then this very inclination of sensuality which is called the FOM, in other animals has simply the nature of a law, yet only in so far as a law may be said to be in such things by reason of a direct inclination. But in man it has not the nature of law in this way, rather is it a deviation from the

law of reason, but since by the just sentence of God man is destitute of original justice in his reason thus bereft of its vigor This impulse of sensuality whereby he is led in so far as it is a penalty following them following from the divine law Depriving man of his proper dignity. This has the nature of law You can think of a priest who is defrocked and now as far as the church is canon law What should govern his life not the law as the church's canon law, what should govern his life? Not the law of the clergy, but the law of the laity. So likewise, when I was busted back when I was 13 and a half, almost 14, I was placed

on probation. So the law basically redefined my freedom and restricted it. So for six months, you know, I had a curfew and all other kinds of conditions placed upon me to avoid being sentenced for a year and a half to a detention center. So it is that this law is a kind of probationary discipline imposed upon us, but that doesn't make it morally neutral. That doesn't make it strictly rehabilitative either,

as we'll see, because St. Paul refers in 2 Corinthians 4 to the God of this world, to the father of lies, to the prince who has dominion over this world. And so what we have to factor in, but we don't have time to do justice to is the idea that the law of sin is precisely what Paul was alluding to in Romans 6 where he is talking about how we don't yield our members to the dominion of death and death is not just like a natural force it is a personification of evil again more on

that later but my love for Aquinas is exceeded by my love for Saint Paul, and I think that we discover in Thomas's doctrine so much more practical, penetrating insight into what Saint Paul's really getting at. When I was working on my commentary on Romans, I found this over and over again. Maybe two or three, I'm not even sure if there were two times where I really deviated from Aquinas' commentary on Romans, which is also up here. So I'm not going to go through the replies to the objections, one, two, and three. You can take a look at that on your own. What I want to do on the

next page is to look at what St. Thomas is teaching earlier in the Prima Secundae, question 30 on concupiscence, because concupiscence and the law of sin, the fomus picati, the kindling of sin, these are practically interchangeable terms. I'm not quite ready to argue that they are synonymous, but in the summa and in the commentaries, they're practically interchangeable. Now, I can just sense the need to take a sidebar here for a moment because I've been referring again and again to Romans 7. So, as you know, I'm going to just kind of do a fly-by, a flyover. In Romans 5, 12 to 21, we have the Locus Classicus on original sin. It's really the only place you find where the church has developed its doctrine of original sin.

There are other texts, maybe five or six, but they don't add up to half as much as Romans 5, 12 to 11. And what what Paul is saying in Romans 5 is misunderstood, I think, by 99 out of 100 Pauline scholars. And that is in 12, verse 12, therefore as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men with the result that all men sinned. Notice it's not that sin spread with the result that all men died. Paul has it bass-ackwards. He says, death spread to all men with the result that all men sinned. The F-O there in the Greek is almost certainly best translated

with the result that all sinned. No, sin spread with the result that all died. Unless he's not talking about physical death. The day you eat of it, you'll surely die. They ate, committed mortal sin, spiritual suicide. They kept living naturally but they died supernaturally, which is not a metaphorical death. It's far more of a death because it involves the loss of much more life. So this is why the catechism quoting Trent, paraphrasing Aquinas, who is drawing from Augustine, all interpreting Paul on Romans 5, 12 to 14, would say that the death that Paul is talking about is the death of the soul.

That is, when we are conceived and God creates the soul out of nothing and thereby the rational principle of our own personhood in potencia, the rational principle of our own personhood in potencia, that soul does not possess the supernatural grace of divine life. And so it is naturally alive but supernaturally dead, which is why Paul then goes on to say in Romans six in talking about baptism, he doesn't describe it

as wiping away the stain of original sin, as helpful as that metaphor might be for kids in catechists. It wouldn't fit what Paul is saying because if in fact original sin in five is the death of the soul, then baptism in Romans 6 is what? It is a resurrection. More than Lazarus who got his physical body back after four days, we get the divine life back through the new Adam that the first father failed to retain and failed to transmit to us. In which case we have baptism wiping out original sin. But if that's the case empirically, why don't we feel completely freed from original sin?

Well, we are because original sin is not being depraved. It's not depravity. It's being deprived of divine life. So as newborn children, we are raised back to the divine life of the eternal Trinity, but we still live in mortal bodies. And what are these mortal bodies? They're afflicted with the fomez, with the kindling, with the sensitive appetites that so overrule the reason.

And so throughout Romans 6, what he's talking about is the war within us in terms of the flesh and the spirit. This is not Manichean. It's not dualistic, but it's utterly realistic because this is the struggle. With our minds, we strive to fulfill the law, but with the members, as he describes it, we submit to death.

We end up being not yielding our members to sanctification, but yielding our members to sin. And so by the time you come to Romans seven, Aquinas recognizes what a climax this is and especially when Paul states in Romans 723 I see in my members Another war another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin so because Paul

sin. So because Paul uses nomos in the Greek lex in the Latin with regard to sin, Paul does, Aquinas does not feel like he really has much choice. There must be a law of sin and there must be a way to render this coherent. And so if in fact original sin is the result of our first parents' transgression, but it is something that we contract but we don't commit, then it is wiped out in baptism because the Holy Trinity is put within our souls really and truly and metaphysically. But in that case, concupiscence remains. And what is concupiscence? Well, I'm going to read, but to summarize, concupiscence is the result of original sin. It's the cause of actual sin,

but it is not sin. It is not sinful. This is the parting of the ways, because this is precisely where Martin Luther said the Catholics have it wrong. Because the concupiscence in my members, Paul calls sin the law of sin, therefore concupiscence is not just the result of actuals of original sin, it's not just what causes me to commit actual sin,

it is sinfulness, it is depravity. And so as a result, well, for us, it is weakness. It's a darkened intellect, it's a weakened will. Disordered appetites, unruly passions, and all of the things that we know because the sensitive appetites are so unruly and yet capable of overturning what the reason desires and chooses. So that is why he can say, I delight in the law of God and my inmost self, but I see in my members another lot,

work with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am, who would deliver me from this body of death, thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord, so then I have myself served the law of God with my mind, but my flesh I served the law of sin the interior war now 99 out of a hundred commentators and Romans today say Paul isn't talking about his life as a Christian, but his life as a Jew

All right. I beg to differ I You know I am clearly in the minority except when you recognize that democracy is the, right, that tradition is the democracy of the dead. So I have Aquinas on my side, I've got Augustine on my side, and you know, and many others, the whole tradition, practically speaking, which doesn't make me right, but at least it might extend, you might want to extend a line of credit that way. And I think it makes total sense out of why Romans 8 is not just about assurance of salvation,

but most especially why the Holy Spirit mentioned 18 times in Romans 8 more than all of the other chapters put together is the means by which to redemptive suffering in charity we are able to win the war against our members in the law of sin. Okay, but Aquinas does all of this in such a succinct manner that it's easy to miss unless you know what you're looking for.

And even then, I only know part of what I'm looking for, so I come back again and again to his commentaries and discover he was almost always seeing more than what I saw, or even more than I was looking for. All right, so handout number two, question 30, on concupiscence. And once again, we've got multiple articles, in this case four.

And I'm not going to go through all of these, but I suspect that if you've been kind of keeping up with Pines with Aquinas, and by now, gallons with Han, you realize that there is a sort of dialectic in the form. So I have to cut out all of the objections, and so I just cut to the said contra. And other people who abridge Aquinas do that as well. But what the first article shows is that concupiscence is really in the sensitive

appetite only, primarily. And it's a specific passion, but it's caused by love and tends to pleasure both of which are passions, that is Article 2 now, both of which are passions of the concupiscible faculty. So I don't have the time to go into the Latin etymology, but suffice it to say that concupiscence and covetousness are cousins. They're interrelated. So when Paul speaks about coveting in Romans 7, that's why it's so natural to identify what Paul's talking

about as concupiscence. A darkened intellect, we still know the truth, but we prefer lower truths to higher truths because they're more easily attained, they're more interesting to us, especially if we're suffering from this aversio adeo, this aversion from God. So a darkened intellect weakened will, we still choose the good, but again we prefer the low-hanging fruit, the lower goods to the higher ones that are so much harder. And then the disordered appetites and passions and affections, this is really what fuels

the sensitive appetites and this thing we call concupiscence. So it's sort of like a punishment that fits the crime, because if you prefer the finite to the infinite, God would say to our first parents, you will lose the infinite, you will get the finite and discover that the finite is also mortal and it's also transitory. And so if you're absolutizing what is relative and relativizing what is absolute, later that's going to become what we would call idolatry. But here it's called concupiscence. And it pertains to not only human persons,

all of us, baptized or not, but it also pertains to human society, which is something I want to get to because Thomas does as well.