Pints With Aquinas - Matt Speaks to His 6th Favorite Person in the World, Dr. Peter Kreeft

Episode Date: April 21, 2024

Peter Kreeft, Ph.D., is a professor of philosophy at Boston College. He has written over 100 Books. He is a convert to Catholicism from Calvinism. He is an extremely sought after speaker. He joins Matt to talk about a wide range of topics. Support the Show:  https://mattfradd.locals.com Show Sponsors: https://hallow.com/mattfradd https://strive21.com/matt https://peterkreeft.com An Ocean Full of Angels: https://www.amazon.com/Ocean-Full-Angels-Autobiograph-Adam/dp/1587315904  

And we're live. Are we live? We are. Are you sure? I mean, this brings up Descartes. I think therefore I am. Here's a question. Why doesn't he say, I think, I think, therefore I think I am.

I think. Oh, I got to think about that. I got to think about that. Here's a question for you. How can we be sure that our memories are in any way reliable? Because memories are a strange thing. In the same way that we can be sure that the world is real and not a hypnotic dream but from the devil. There's no formal proof. It's not logically inconsistent to say we're really a brain and a vat dreaming that we're in a world. But we

all know by common sense that that's insane. Well that's funny you say that because as soon as you say we all know, apparently we don't all know. Well maybe we pretend not to know. All non-philosophers know it. Yes, there you go. You need a PhD. These are really interesting questions I think, because I think sometimes Christians are afraid they don't have the level of certitude they think they ought to have about the existence of God and they were therefore they feel bad about that. They haven't read Aquinas then. Well, real quick, if you read Hume or Kant or others, you start to realize or you might start to doubt yourself, right? to realize or you might start to doubt yourself, right? You find out that there are very many

extremely intelligent people, much smarter than you, who lack common sense. So Thomas Reed, who was a contemporary of Hume, tried to accept Hume's empiricistic premises without his radical skeptical conclusions. And the only way you could do it was by giving common sense a kind of authority over reason rather than vice versa. Okay. But why why think common sense is anything worth understanding? Because there's no alternative because that's where we all start.

That's the foundation our feet are on no matter where we run or fly to. But we learn things as we grow and some things that we learn are counterintuitive or contradict those things we once believed. So why can't that be true the whole way down? Maybe common sense is just for those ignorant peasants, but the more we learn, we might come to understand that the world

is a much more bizarre place. Maybe the external world doesn't, maybe you don't exist. I think there's a paradox here. This doesn't really answer your question, but ignorant peasants are really more reliable than super intelligent philosophers. Reliable how though? They speak the truth. They know the truth. They live the truth. They're not riddled with doubt. They don't take very seriously the brain of the bat hypothesis. But I'm playing devil's advocate here, of course. But I mean, maybe when you but that

kind of begs the question, though, doesn't it? You say they live by the truth. They know the truth. But maybe they don't. Maybe what they think is the truth is just their ignorance. On the one hand, Descartes is extremely commonsensical in starting with I think, therefore I am. That's psychologically indubitable. On the other hand, he's trying to do what cannot be done, namely justify reason. The justification by reason, by reason, excuse me,

the justification of reason by reason, obviously commits the fallacy of begging the question. You're using the very instrument that you're trying to explore and validate. What instrument do you use to validate it? Think of all the thoughts you've ever had as a thousand people and Descartes wants to put them all on trial and justify reason itself. Right.

Who's there with the judge there? Is it somebody who's not an act of reason? Something subhuman like animal instinct? Or is it going to be something superior to reason like mystical experience or divine revelation? He doesn't want that. So it has to be an act of reason. So one of those prisoners has to jump out of the dock and assume the judge's robe and declare himself and all the other 999 prisoners

not guilty. That's not fair. There's no alternative to that. I've come to admire William James much more than before. Pragmatism is not an ethics. It's not even a philosophy, it's a method. You learn by doing something first and then you think about it and what we do is to think and thus we begin with

trust in our thought. Our thought must be about something. It can't be about nothing. It might be false. But to say that all thoughts are false is self-contradictory, because then it says that that thought, that all thoughts are false, can't be false. It reminds me of health, you know, I know what it feels like to be healthy, and I know what it feels like to be sick. And therefore, if I'm eating food that people say is either

healthy or bad for you, I can tell based on how my body reacts to that thing. Likewise, when I have in the past tried to convince myself that things like fornication, lying, stealing from my parents was justifiable, I felt sick in a way. When I started to listen to the church, even if I wasn't 100% convinced why she taught the things that she did, I found myself more free, more healthy spiritually. That's true but tricky because there are deceptive feelings and the line between feelings that are reliable and feelings that are deceptive is not a bright, hard, clear line. I think the false assumption in the argument we're having is that you need certainty. Maybe you don't. Yeah, and that kind of gets us back to where we began. And that's why I was saying I think

people feel guilty for not having whatever it means to say 100% epistemic certainty. But we don't have that about most things, or maybe that's the wrong way of even phrasing it. I think you exist. I know you exist, but I have no access to your inner life and there's no way I could have access to it. You might be a sophisticated cyborg. We know very many things without being able to prove them. Yeah. And another example would be if you said to me, is your wife a Russian spy? I would say, don't be silly. And you would say, well, I mean, she might be. And if she was a very good one, it would make sense that you wouldn't suspect her.

And I would say, that's silly. And if we kept talking for a while, you might wear me down such that I would say, well, okay, maybe it's possible, I suppose. But I got no good reason to think that. And if I was to suspect her of that, that would actually ruin my relationship with her. Likewise, if you were to ask me about God's existence, my relationship with Christ, you might get me down to the point where I

say, well, perhaps it'll always a bloody illusion. Maybe I am just terrified of death and I'm looking for something to make me feel better. But I don't actually have any good reasons to think God doesn't exist. I know people have proposed them, and sometimes I feel the weight of them emotionally, but I don't feel myself convinced by them. So I'm going to go on believing what seems obvious to me, even if I don't know how to answer you. On a strictly rational level, that makes sense. The fact that there are literally dozens of arguments for the existence of God, I think

they're variously persuasive. Some of them are very good, some of them are not. And only one really good argument against the existence of God, that's the problem of evil. Well, that's 25 to one. Converging clues are sort of like a nautical rope, woven of many little strands, but then when you put 25 of them together,

you get not just 25 threads, but a rope that can pull a boat. Yeah, it is interesting, you know, in Aquinas' Dei Marlo, he'll come up with as many as something, I think if memory serves, 24 objections to the points he wants to make. And you've pointed this out that in the Summa, he comes up with two objections for God's existence, and one of them isn't even an argument against God. That's right. That's right. And explain why.

Well, the second one is the argument from science. Science can explain things satisfactorily without God. Nature is the cause of everything natural, and the human will is the cause of everything artificial or voluntary. And that suffices. So why add a third hypothesis? And the answer is simply because you're asking a different question. Where did that all come from? Account for nature itself, account for the human will itself. So if you're not asking an ultimate question, you don't need an ultimate answer and you don't need God. Am I also right in thinking though if you say well, there is no need for the God hypothesis because all can be explained naturally. Well, even if all can be explained naturally, it wouldn't follow that God doesn't follow that God doesn't exist. No, many things don't are not needed oysters.

For instance, God could have created a world without oysters It's probably a real good reason oysters exist that we don't know about maybe I think in Louisiana They know the reason they're fried oysters the best of the world But let's let's think more about your yeah, imagine scenario suppose Suppose a policeman came into the studio and said dr. Krafft. I Suppose a policeman came into the studio and said, Dr. Crave, I said, yes, that's me. He said, please come home back to Boston because your wife is in jail. I said, in jail? Why?

Well, the lady next door was found with her head decapitated and your wife's fingerprints were found on the axe. So we think that she must be guilty. Furthermore, we have an eyewitness who swears that he saw her do it. I would laugh at him. I would say impossible. I know what you don't know. I know who she is.

I mean, she's capable of many things as we all are, but not that. Maybe killing me, but not the next one. Exactly. Exactly. not that. Maybe killing me, but not the next one. Exactly, exactly. Actually, when we got married, our favorite movie was Divorce Italian Style, which was a comedy in the 60s where, since there was no divorce allowed in Italy at the time, for any reason, the only way you could get a divorce was by murdering your spouse. So this guy hires a mafia hitman to murder his spouse, and he succeeds in murdering many women,

but none of them is his spouse. She's the one that survives. We thought it was funny, not just because of that, but because we thought that murder is much more reasonable than divorce. So as long as we don't have weapons of mass destruction in our house, we're safe, and it worked. Well, that's good.

Well, what I would say to the cop, would you laugh at him? And he would say, why do you laugh? We have evidence. I said, no, that's good. Well, what I would say to the cop, would you laugh at him? And he would say, why do you laugh? We have evidence. I said, no, you don't. You have apparent evidence. I have knowledge that you don't have. And that's the kind of knowledge which can't be quantified and can't be quite put into a syllogism, but it's genuine knowledge. I know that I'm talking to a human being now and not a robot.

Isn't it possible that they could make a robot that that deceives us into believing there's a human being? They're pretty close to doing that now. Yes, it's possible. How then do I know that I'm talking to you, that there's another mind there, that you're not just artificial intelligence? I don't know how I know it. Yeah, I don't know. How do I know that my wife is incapable of being an axe-murderer? I don't know, but I know it. Knowing about knowing is the bugbear of early modern philosophers. How can you be certain? How can you trust reason itself?

That's an unanswerable question. We don't have to answer that question. We don't have to answer that question. So with Descartes, for those at home who aren't familiar, right? So Descartes is aware that his senses have deceived him in the past. He's aware that he's believed things that he now knows to be false. He wants to be much more modest in what he knows and so decides to doubt everything he can doubt. And so he tries to kind of build the tower up again. I'll let you speak to that in a second. But I thought to myself, why not begin with universal doubt? And I don't know of an answer except if I try to apply that in a relationship context.

You know, like if a young Thursday out there meets a woman and they go on a date, and he decides, I've been fooled in the past and it hurt, therefore I'm not going to accept anything about this person unless I know it's true. Well, he would ruin the relationship with her. Yes. And I think likewise, to begin with universal doubt about the things that you encounter in reality, yes, you kind of you ruin life or you in your interaction with reality. What do you think? I totally agree with that. I don't think they cartwood because he wants the kind of certainty that he can get only by. By the coaches or go some he can't he can't say I just petted this horse this morning and I know that that is a live horse.

Well the story about Descartes riding his horse back to Paris and the horse goes blind and Descartes gets off, it's a joke, it's a joke. He gets off the horse and the horse doesn't know where to go. So, he has to lead the horse and he comes home and his friend said, Descartes, you're the world's greatest philosopher. I see that you're living in fallacy. What's the fallacy? The fallacy of putting Descartes before the horse. Very good. And that's not just a joke. That's a philosophical analogy. Self-knowledge can't come before knowledge of a horse or the world or whatever.

Aquinas says the first thing we know is that something is. Something's out there. Woody Allen in one of his books, he's something of a philosopher, you know, says that New Yorkers can't follow Descartes because Descartes starts by doubting whether anything exists. Every New Yorker, this was back in the 50s, is awakened every morning at about seven o'clock by the garbage trucks. Now if that isn't real, why does it wake me up? Yeah, that's good.

But it feels like there's this kind of impulse towards doubt or towards acceptance. And I can accept and be mistaken But if I begin with doubt, I don't know it maybe explained to me more where they can't go wrong It's fooled in two different ways You can believe too much and you can believe too little. Okay, and they can't it seems to me is Unduly worried about believing too much. I said not worried enough about believing too little. You can be conned and you pay a price. You lose your money to a con man or you can be so afraid of that that you don't invest your money in something that will make you a millionaire. That's the point of Pascal's Wager.

What can you lose? What can you gain? What can you lose by unbelief? Everything. What can you gain by belief? Everything. Can you prove either one? No. There are doubts either way. And if we, as a thought experiment, would say, okay, Christianity might be true. Well, let's say even more broadly, like life after death and a God might be true or atheism might be true. What's interesting is after death, if the atheist is right,

he'll never know it. He's not the Christian. Yeah. Uh, and well, so yeah. So you, if God doesn't exist, nobody wins anything. Never gets to say, haha, told you so. So the only chance anybody ever has of winning is making Pascal's wager. Yeah. And William James, who is a lifelong agnostic, thought the wager was perfectly good. I do too, when it's phrased correctly, when it's put well, you know, I think you have to begin with Christianity on one hand, atheism on the other, which might go more than what he's saying. It's not, I don't know and there's a thousand options before me.

It's like, no, if there are two options before me and I have evidence to believe both and I can't decide and the evidence seems equal. I think that's when the- Yeah, yeah. We've been trying to take this very abstract argument of Descartes and bring it down to common sense. And I think we've been partially successful. But I must confess, I very easily get annoyed and bored with abstract arguments.

Most philosophers are very good at that. Abstract? Yeah. Okay. Divorced from concrete life. And as I get older and closer to the end, I'm more interested in concrete things like horses and less in abstract arguments like Descartes' cojito. Was there a point in your life where you were kind of gripped?

Oh, yeah. By the abstract. Oh, yeah. When when you first get your PhD, when you first start teaching, when you become a teenager, you think you know it all. Gee, look where I used to be. I was this dumb bunny that took everything for granted, and now I can think, and I know what makes an argument right or wrong. And that's genuine progress, but it always comes at a price. And the price is you almost always exaggerate your wisdom.

Which is why Sakri is so remarkable. He's the smartest guy in the world but he knows that he's not smart. He knows that you begin with not so much doubt as ignorance. There's a difference. Doubt is a demand. Ignorance is a confession. Doubt is it? Say that again and why? Doubt is a demand that again and why doubt is a demand you you you doubt this and you demand proof for it you demand certainty yeah I think Descartes has a kind of a hidden arrogance at the beginning of his philosophy even though it sounds man for certainty but let's not talk about Descartes let's talk about the horse okay or the rest of the world yeah we can do that what's your favorite country that you ever visited?

Norway, most beautiful. Spectacular. Have you ever read Sigrid Undset? Tried. Me too. It's like a Russian novel, so many foreign names, so many characters, so complex. I'll tell you this, and I'm sure the problem,

the fault is mine. Mine too, so complex. I'll tell you this, and I'm sure the problem, the fault is mine. Mine too, mine too. We just started reading Olaf, oh. Olaf Stapleton? I think that's it. And my wife and I were reading, and we were very much enjoying it.

It was quite beautiful and simple and lovely. No, no, that's not Olaf Stapleton. Oh. Olaf Stapleton is a wild fantasist and what let's see I'm gonna find this now Sigrid the star maker on set books here you go all of Ordinson is what we read oh the time that's the title of a book I was talking about an author yes no I see no not the author all of Ordinson vowels youows, you know. So we started to-

I'm lazy. And I recognize that Christian Lavazarder is a masterpiece, but I'm too lazy to expand the effort. Well, so here's what I was gonna say. We've got halfway through it. And then I just got so fed up with trying to track which name belonged to who, and who the hell's that again, and where are they, that I just was like,

oh, to hell with it. And I went and read something much simpler. Again, I know the hell's that again and where are they that I just was like I hope to hell with it and I went and read something much simpler again I know the problems one find that in Tolstoy or dusty I don't and I'm not a smart I'm not a smart fella but I love characters the main themes very well yeah so you think the problem might be with Sigrid he wouldn't go so far maybe I don't know her well enough to say that but when we just saying though the older you, the more honest you get. Yeah. Yeah. So I think you should I think you should pontificate about Sigrun says the terrible writer. But you don't believe that.

No. But Norway is a beautiful country. Yes. I'm in Austria right now. I love a beautiful country. And it's remarkable how close all of these countries are together. And it's remarkable what happens when human beings stay in one place and don't have a lot of contact with people outside of that place. What culture emerges? Not one of diversion, inclusivity and equality.

It doesn't seem so, unless we might be getting there. But yeah. Diversity, yes. Real diversity. true diversity. Isn't it interesting that the people that want diversity really don't? They want uniformity, they want equality, sameness. You see, I mean, again, I don't know

if you can talk about this, but Boston College, you're seeing that? Is that being pushed on you? Well, Boston College is a good place to work because it's at least barely Catholic, BC, and you can get a good Catholic education there. So I love Boston College. But there was a Boston Globe reporter

who about 10 years ago, I think, came to BC and interviewed some people there. This was after an election, I think it was a presidential election, and the question was how many of your faculty and administrators donated either time or money for free to either of the two political parties? And they asked that question of all the Ivy League colleges and, oh I don't know, about 10 or 20 more, and they found out to their surprise that Harvard, which is spectacularly liberal, had

only something like 89% of Democrats and there were 11% this was way back in Harvey Manziel's day were Republican. Princeton was 97% Democrat, 3% Republican. There was only one college that was 100% Democrat, not a single Republican, Boston College. So the reporter came into the BC and interviewed one of the theologians in the theology department and informed him of that poll

and the results thereof and said, what is your reaction to it? And the theologian said, and I remember this word for word, I am very proud of our university. We believe in diversity. 100% percent. We believe in diversity. Yeah. And if you are a Republican, you might be fired

because of diversity. Yeah. What's your favorite animal and why? Cats. Why? Always had them. Yeah. They're beautiful.

All cats are women. All dogs are men. As a kid, I believe that. And I'm quite heterosexual, so I love cats. And they're very affectionate. You're also independent. And they drive you crazy sometimes. So do women.

They're wonderful. How many cats do you have? One right now. My daughter has seven. Oh, wow. I like cats, but I'm allergic to them, which makes me not like them. What a pity. I like dogs too.

We've always had basset hounds. Yeah. We're now a little too old to be responsible for a dog. So we just have a cat and, and my daughter who worked in a pet store has two birds and a guinea pig. And I once made the mistake of buying a ferret. Oh, they're fun. They smell, but they're fun. Yeah.

I grew up, why was it a mistake? Well, because it was psychotic. I don't know. I guess I didn't want a cat and a dog was too much trouble. So I thought I'd get a ferret, but it was, oh yeah, it smells and it was gross. I didn't. You needed a ferret psychologist. Yeah. Well, what would he have said?

I don't know. I'm not a ferret psychologist. I had little dogs growing up, Fox terriers. This is that you know what they are? They look like Jack Russell's, a little smaller. My wife does not like small dogs. So now we have a black Russian terrier, which is a very, very large dog, even though the word terrier is within it.

One of the mistakes Thomas Aquinas made was he thought there were no animals in heaven. That was quite inexcusable. I think God miraculously gave him a brain clamp that day. I was talking to Jimmy Aiken about this and I liked his point because Aquinas doesn't give any theological arguments for that, just philosophical arguments about the only rational soul surviving death. So Jimmy's with you thinking that animals would survive death. Well, I don't think their individual souls survive death, but I think that God creates

no animals in heaven that are replicas of the ones on earth. Replicas. So the cat in heaven that you'll meet will be essentially not the same as the cat you have in your house right now, but... Well, can there be identical twins? I think so. If every single molecule in the heavenly cat's body matches a molecule in the earthly cat's body, and every cat experience in the life of each cat matches, how do you distinguish them? But why not just say sensitive souls can survive death? And Aquinas was wrong. Because all the arguments for the human soul surviving death don't apply to sensitive souls.

So I guess you could say, I don't agree with the arguments for why the rational soul survives death, but I believe it. I just think those arguments don't agree with the arguments for why the rational soul survives death, but I believe it I just think those arguments don't work. Well, sensitive souls don't have free will so they can't accept or reject God. Mm-hmm, but neither do seriously mentally handicapped. They have the potentiality for it and God can actualize that potentiality. But I think animals are in heaven for the same reason plants are. Heaven's not like the moon, dead. It's full of life. I do get that sense when I read Aquinas. It seems like he thinks it's plantless, animal-less. I'd like to hunt in heaven. The standard view and the reports, supposed reports of heaven, almost always include things like flowers and butterflies and the sun and stars.

But they don't say anything about animals. What about mosquitoes? Well, I think heaven for mosquitoes and a hell for men could be properly combined. God must love mosquitoes. Abraham Lincoln said God must love ordinary people. He made so many of them. So that must be true of mosquitoes too. I remember Father Clark at Fordham telling us, look at a mosquito under a microscope once. New York, like New Jersey, is plagued with mosquitoes. And he said, just take a purely contemplative attitude towards that. The engineering that must have gone into designing that body is at least very unusual and worthy of study. And there's something ontologically good about a mosquito, but you have to take that contemplative attitude. That's very funny. Hell, a mosquito is going to be profitably combined. Have you said that before?

Or do you just talk like I think that's impressive. I think that's a plagiarism from CS Lewis. Most of what I say is he lives in the back of my mind somewhere. Do you still read him? Oh, of course. He's, he rewards repeated rereading amazingly. It's like a, like a, like a cow gives you fresh milk every morning. Like a cow gives you fresh milk every morning. Did he say that? I'm writing a book now on Until We Have Faces, which I think is a masterpiece. I must have read that through maybe six or eight, maybe even ten times and now reading it through again

in preparation for making a secondary source about it. I see so many things I missed. It's got layers. I think I like him and I think people like him because he doesn't talk down at them. Yeah. Yeah. Even in his scholarly stuff, it's clear. Yeah. Yeah. And kind of like our blessed Lord, C.S. Lewis would speak harshly about people, but it was those who would obfuscate

or think they were better than others or those who were arrogant. Yeah. Yeah, even as an atheist, he had no patience for baloney. I was looking at your, only if I'm not mistaken, work of fiction. I didn't buy it, should I? Well, it's like single malt scotch. If you like it, you'll like it a lot, but not too many people like it. An author is the

last person in the world to evaluate his own works, but I like it a lot because I put more blood, sweat and tears into it than any other book I've ever written. Could you tell me the title of it? Because I forget and an ocean full of angels. It's a great name. Did you come up with that? Is that from something? Oh, no, I thought a long time about the title. In fact, I thought a long time about the book. It took me about 20 years to finish it. Yeah. And it taught me more than I taught it. The characters kept changing, the plot kept emerging. And the book that emerged in the end is almost nothing like the book that began.

Do you mean that you were writing chapters and then they took a different turn or that you then had to go back and rewrite the beginning? No, they took different turns. And most of the stuff was extraneous. Eventually I had about 900 pages, which I had to cut down to 300. They told you? Of course. Well why? Okay, so Ignatius, is that the who? So, all right, so what if, are you able to publish the 900 pages?

Philosophers? No. Well, I cannibalized it. You can talk to it. What? I took the philosophical passages out because philosophers are not usually good at writing simple stories. They philosophize too much. I see. And they were distractions. I see.

So I took them out and made separate books out of them. Ah. The three surfing books, for instance, that I wrote come from there. Flannery O'Connor says that an author must respect his or her characters enough to not make them his or her mouthpiece. Exactly. They teach you, you don't teach them. So what's the book about? It's a God's eye view of the connection between dead Vikings, Jesus Christ, Muhammad, the crisis in Catholic universities, pro-life work, the rights of the handicapped, the end of the world, mad Russian prophets, two and a half popes in a year, the joys of

the sea, the demon Huracano. Well, that oversimplifies it much too much. But there's a simple narrative that runs through it or? Oh, yeah, yeah. It's a fictional autobiography written by an idealized amalgam of students that I've had, a philosophical Muslim who at the end trembles on the brink of conversion, but meanwhile has a lot to teach the other people. And one of the books that spun off from that was a series of dialogues between Muslims and Christians entitled, What Christians Can Learn From Muslims. Yeah, you know, there is a lot. There really is. I mean, I think Muhammad's a false prophet.

Obviously, he may have been a lunatic, he may have been demon possessed. So you're going to do the tri-lamma with Christ, you have to do something similar with someone who says they're here with God. I think it's three things. I think there was something of divine inspiration there, which got badly misinterpreted and interfered with by demonic forces. But I don't think he's simply a fake, who is a liar. Personally, quite apart from his teaching, I would trust Muhammad more than I would trust Donald Trump.

You would trust, here we go, good. You would trust Muhammad more than Donald Trump. Not with theology, of course, but personally, I think he was, well, well if all that was simply his own doing, then the Quran represents the highest peak purely natural theology without divine revelation has ever attained. Because its picture of God is strikingly similar to the picture of God in the Old and New Testaments. It lacks the incarnation, of course, and it lacks even... And it perverts the Gospels. He seems to be drawing from apocryphal Gospels.

Oh yeah, he had a lot of sources. He seems to misunderstands the Trinity, the Blessed Virgin Mary. He was living at a time and place where there were a lot of Jews and Christians of various stripes coming through, and he assimilated a lot of of it and I think misunderstood a lot of it. But the concept of God that is there, the 99 names of Allah in the Quran are all in the Bible too. Of course there's a couple of names missing, notably Father. names missing, notably Father. What's spectacularly missing is that intimacy, that love relationship that both Jews and Christians have. But the Sufis have it. And I'm fascinated by the fact that most Muslims respect the Sufis very much, even though they consider them heretics.

I was in Houston at a hotel and there was a big Muslim conference there and to see their dedication to praying Oh, yeah, I just thought there's a lot we could learn and to see their dedication to fasting They make us look like wimps. We really have we can learn a lot You know why they make us look like wimps because God uses prophets outside of Israel to remind us that we are wimps. Yeah How do we get onto Islam? What was your question? How do we get onto Islam? We were talking about your book. Oh my book, yeah. Yeah. But it's a sprawling novel. If there was a model in the back of my mind for a novel, it was CSO's That Hideous Strength, which is a messily written book and

got all sorts of stuff. It helps me to read it, but it's fun. Okay. I didn't like the first one of the trilogy. You mean out of the silent planet? Yeah. It's not great. It's a good science fiction.

I mean, it's a million times better than anything I could ever do. Yeah. But it just felt kind of two dimensional. And I felt like I had my elbows up against a looming allegory I was just waiting for these things to represent the angels and it's not allegorical, but it is rather simplistic Yeah, maybe that's it. Yeah, you know when you go from Tolkien to that It's difficult to transition. The rings took a lifetime that book probably took a couple of months What book have did you remember writing where you

thought I really hope people like this? Cause you just, Jesus shock. Was that a speech before it was a book? No, no. Cause I remember hearing your speech. It was very similar to that. But so maybe you wrote the book and then gave a speech based on it. Not only do I forget most of the content of my book, but I forget all my speeches. But that's about the visceral reaction that people in Jesus' day had to him when they met him and my asking people today to be open to that kind of reaction.

The radical claims of Christ. Yeah, I remember hearing that speech you gave and it really stirred me. It was excellent. Matthew Kelly picked up that book and published thousands of copies of cheap versions of it because he thought it was so useful. No, that's if I've written over 100 books and if I could pick one that everybody in the world ought to read That would be it. Yeah

Yeah, it's just I was reading the Gospels the other day as one should and it occurred to me We take for granted the very simple things we've read a thousand times before But suppose someone showed up in Steubenville and started healing people. Mm-hmm And we probably have some skepticism, but if you were sick and hurting, you'd give it a shot and then he heals you. And then everyone who comes gets healed. The blind, the dead are raised. The turmoil, the uproar that would take place.

There's a novel, I forget the author and I forget the title, but it's in print now, Ignatius Press published it with exactly, almost exactly that plot. There's this little boy who has a gift of healing and restoring people to life. And the world can't take it. Yeah. I mean, you, cause you read like they, they all, they came to visit him all the crowds were, and you're like, well, of course they were that we'd do that today. Please. You were just, and then.

Not just to get healing. Suppose there were a doctor who was the best doctor in the world. Yeah. There would be crowds approaching him too. But they wouldn't be that radical, that fanatical, that they wouldn't confuse him with God. Even if Jesus isn't God, but a charlatan,

the fact that people are looking for God, not just for healings, I mean, they're looking for healings too, and some of them are shallow enough to just want to be in on the business, you know, the loaves and fishes people. But when there's a rumor, whether true or false, and many of them are false, of new appearances of the Blessed Virgin Mary, thousands of people come, even though there may be scant evidence and nothing remarkable. But here, heaven breaks through to earth, and nothing on earth can rival that. I suppose most of the people who were those crowds that thronged around Jesus were rather skeptical. I mean who's not going to be skeptical about somebody like that? Yeah, I'm thinking

of when he says she's asleep, you know, stop your morning. She's only asleep and they made fun of him. And yet they were, they, they crowded around him. Yeah. Even though it apparently was impossible and crazy yet the outside chance that that could be not just the greatest prophet and the Messiah, but something even more than that. They must have heard some of his outrageous claims. And you had to be either,

either his fanatical friend or his fanatical enemy. Because if that was a fake, that's the biggest fake in history. And you need to oppose it with all your heart. And if it's true, that's the biggest fake in history. And you need to oppose it with all your heart. And if it's true, it's the biggest truth in history. And you need to give them your whole heart. Nothing in between. One thing I find difficult grappling with, I think a lot of people do when they approach it from a philosophical angle is, is the problem of hell. Of course. How is it that a loving God,

if you don't have a problem, there's something wrong with you. Yeah, good. And then because there's a fellow called David Bentley Hart, Orthodox Christian prickly fella, who wrote a book on why we all are saved, you know. And the point, one of the points he makes is the kind of duration of hell, you know, for you're there forever. This, this is unjust. There's nothing that you could have possibly done to merit that kind of punishment. And that we try to get around that by saying something like, well, it's the dignity of God that we offend and things like this. And that's not a good answer.

But I feel like we have to, we have to like feel the objection before responding to it. Sometimes we don't things like this. That's not a good answer. But I feel like we have to like feel the objection before responding to it. Sometimes we don't take. We do. But I immediately see a mistake in the objection thinking that heaven and hell are like earth and that the time there is like the time here.

Time itself changes. And it's not that God keeps a careful set of books and says, OK, this sin merits unending punishment, and this sin merits only ending punishment. It's rather that the soul is intrinsically immortal. So whether it's in heaven or hell, souls don't die. They can't die. They're not the kind of things that can die. And if in the next world the kind of opportunity for change that we have in this world

is gone. Why though? That's what I don't get. I don't fully get that either. I mean Aquinas says that and all the tomists assure me it's the case and I don't know if it has to do with our embodiment. I don't think anybody understands that. Yeah. We understand so little about the next world. But like God, we understand some of the things that it can't possibly be. We have a good negative theology. God can't be an abstraction or an idea or a galaxy or a good human being or...

Cup of tea. Anything like that. So most of the misunderstandings about heaven and hell I think come from projecting our earthly life onto the next life. I think it's going to be much, much more different than we can imagine. Yeah. You know, how does the Bible describe it? Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man, the things God has prepared for those who love him. Like birth. Imagine you're in the womb,

and you're imagining life outside the womb. Is there life after birth? Well, if so, what's it like? Well, it's a bigger and better womb. Well, no. There are strange things in it, like Peter Crave and Matt Fratt and points with Aquinas. How could a fetus ever have guessed that I love that so much

I remember hearing you say that once upon a time has really helped me you imagine two fetuses or feti whatever the plural is in A womb debating the existence of the afterlife. What do you think it's like? Yeah It is funny that we do that isn't it? Because I remember as a child. I just thought heaven had something to do with clouds, maybe that we do that, isn't it? Because I remember as a child, I just thought heaven had something to do with clouds, maybe. But these were the kind of clouds you could sink into or something. And then, of course, on the other end of the spectrum, you've got Dante's Inferno, which is a very fun read, but maybe unhelpful when trying to understand the reality of hell. Yeah. Best thing I've ever read about hell is C.S. Lewis's chapter in The Problem of Pain. is C.S. Lewis's chapter in the problem of pain. It's not a concrete picture of hell, like Dante's,

but it's simple and clear and reasonable and indisputable, I think. There must be hell. We don't know anything about the population of it, but the possibility must exist simply because the soul is immortal and the will is free. Scratch the doctrine of free will and you get hell underneath necessarily. I mean God is not the Godfather. He doesn't make you an offer you can't refuse. He's God the Father. He makes you an offer you can refuse. Yeah. I have to think about that more. I want to agree with it just because I've said it before and I've also used it in arguments with atheists. Just seems to me though, I know the kind of the basic understanding of the angels was that there was a period in which they chose and they weren't in the beatific vision because to be before the beatific vision would be to not be able to choose a lesser good or to reject that good and so there was a choice there

Yeah, fair enough. It just seems to me that I don't know God could win us over somehow without Without manipulating us or without forcing our will but maybe I'm wrong. I guess I am wrong Well as with heaven we know so little about hell that we're going to be shocked and we're gonna have to change a lot Of opinions that we have now no matter who we are. Yeah. I've been reading St Catherine of Siena on dialogues on Purgatory and I've come to a very different view of Purgatory. Because of those readings?

Because of those readings. And St. Alphonsus Liguori says pretty much the same thing. Purgatory is not only full of the worst suffering, but also the greatest joy. Why the greatest joy? Because you can't sin there. Impossible to sin. You don't have the kind of free choice you have anymore. There's change, but the change is given to you by God and

He knows that you're going to cooperate with it. And you want it. You want those sufferings. It's like a, like a woman in labor. She doesn't want the sufferings as such, but that's the way to get the baby born. And that counts more than everything else in the world. So you say what you're supposed to say here, but don't do very well here. Namely your will be done with the be done with the whole of my being. And if you need to probe me with surgical instruments, and this is the only way you can make me in your

image perfect, please do it. Do it as much as possible right now. There's a good image of that in one of Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, the Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I think it's Eustace Stubbs, the nasty little boy who turns into a dragon and then Aslan comes and de-dragons him and it hurts that dragon skin coming off, but he wants it more than anything else in the world. Yeah, I remember once falling on my knees and just begging the Lord, please save me,

no matter what it takes, destroy my life, make it as painful as it has to be. Now I knew as I was saying that, that I would change my mind if things got painful. So I said to the Lord, but don't listen to that, Matt Fradd, listen to this one. Exactly. Aquinas says God gives us passions for a good reason. They're fallen and they're not

subject to reason, so they often lead to sin. But if we didn't have passions, we couldn't really make the kind of choices that we do. We have to love and want the good, not just think about it, and not even just make a free choice about it. Angels have reason and free choice too, but no passions. And we're not angels. So we need... Teacher van Hildegraat is very good about this in his book called The Heart. We need not only reason and free will, we need enlightened passions, ordered passions, new hearts, as well as new wills and new minds. And when you say passions, just explain that a bit more.

So when thinking of the will, we need to want it and to want it rightly, to want it. Emotions, feelings, non-rational desires. The will is a kind of rational desire, but we have a lot of non-rational desires. Some of them we share with the animals, like hunger. Some of them are not capable of being in animals, like gratitude or guilt or repentance or wonder and they they are part of our being and they need to not only cooperate in our salvation they need to be saved too. They feel like unruly horses pulling us in every which way direction don't they sometimes? Yes but horses are wonderful. Yeah and they need to be broken and tamed.

And if you don't have cars, you need horses to get anywhere. Yeah, I guess the other thing with hell too is, if I'm wrong and I've been telling everybody that hell exists and you can go there, I can hardly be blamed given a prima facie reading of the gospels. Well, duh, if hell doesn't exist and Jesus is a nut and not or yeah, or a liar or at least he seems to talk in a way that's incredibly misleading, you know, incredibly misleading. he talks about Gehenna and the sheep and the goats. Suppose he would say, no, listen, if you had have interpreted differently and you go, oh, okay, well, fair enough, you're God, I'm not, but no offense, Lord, but do you see why maybe I thought this was what you were teaching?

He must have known the reaction that people would have to his teachings about hell, and he didn't correct them. I think in John six, almost everybody said, well, he's going to correct his exaggeration about the Eucharist. He didn't. He's a good psychologist. How so? He knows what people will get out of what he says. Yeah, oh, I see.

And he knows that his teachings about hell would be taken very seriously and it would scare the hell out of people. And that's exactly the strategy. That's good. Yeah, he knows how it'll be taken. It's not like he's from heaven the way I'm from Australia. And sometimes I speak in such a way that people don't understand. He was fully aware of how we would take him. Of course. So I don't see how you can deny the existence of hell and still say that Jesus is God incarnate and infallible and knows

the human heart better than anybody else. You're not open to the possibility that you're just misinterpreting those verses on hell. Well, that's like saying, it might be that you're a robot, and it might be that Thomas Aquinas is the devil in disguise, and it might be that you're a robot and it might be that Thomas Aquinas is the devil in disguise and it might be that I'm a brain into that, but I can't believe that. You could do might this, might that all day long. Well, to hell with hell. Let's talk about something more pleasant. What would you like to talk about?

Heaven. Okay. Well, the hell with hell. Let's talk about something more pleasant. What would you like to talk about? Heaven. Okay. I'll lead into this discussion with something you've said that I thought was excellent. Don't ask me to give a lecture. I won't. But you said this asking, will there be sex in heaven? Is like a child upon first learning about sex asking her parents when I do have sex one day will I be able to eat candy and the parent says oh darling you

won't want to eat candy. I love that. I think that's from somewhere in CS Lewis too. Oh really? Yes. I won't tell him. Yeah. But it's so good. That's how Jesus taught by analogies. Yeah. That's what a parable is. That's that practicality you were just mentioning, being bored with the abstract and very right. And on the concrete. And you have to take that seriously. Of course, you don't take it literally, but you take it seriously.

I don't look forward to heaven. What? Because I'm an idiot. Well, you are, if you don't look for heaven. I look forward to it in the same way that I look forward to being, I don't know, something I never think about. Like I believe in heaven in an abstract way, in an intellectual way. When I think about it, I hope that I'll go there and be with God, but I don't have a longing for heaven the way I have a longing for coffee in the morning.

Yes, you do. Do I? Everything that you love in your morning coffee will be in heaven and much more. In fact, the coffee will be coffee-er, just as you will be more you. You don't connect with Lewis's joy, Zane'szow, that mysterious longing then. Oh, I know what that feels like. Oh, well then. I know what it feels like to hurt,

because I long too much. Well then, then you do understand about heaven. You don't have a positive image of it, none of us do. But why do you not want to think about heaven? Well, maybe I'm not thinking about it the right way. not want to think about heaven. Well, maybe I'm not thinking about it the right way. If I see, when I say goodbye to you after this, there'll be like a little pain there.

I like you and it's sad that you're going. Or if I'm with my wife and I, even if we have a beautiful time together and it's the most intimate of times, there's still a longing for something that I know is far superior to this. So and that that the I know what the pain of beauty is like. I know all about that. It hurts like hell. I hate it.

And I love it. So if that means longing for heaven, of course, then that I get. But as far as just, oh, I can't wait to go to heaven in the same way. I can't wait to go back to Austria. I don't think of heaven that way. Oh, no, neither do I. OK. How do you think about heaven? How do you long for heaven? If my life has any meaning at all, God must be my creator, my father, my redeemer, my joy. And He, unlike I, knows what makes for my joy, which is why I learn, as we all do, from suffering. None of us like suffering. And afterwards, it makes us wiser,

and the wiser we are, the more joy we can get. So we see little glimpses of the fact that God uses even bad things for good results. And that bad thing that is our present inability to conceive heaven and the hurt that we get out of beauty and the very insufficiency of all the joys on Earth. Yeah. Out of that pain, he will make a greater joy than if that pain had not been there. I trust him.

So my question was, how do you think and long for heaven? And what does that mean? The pain you experience, the insufficiency of the joys? Are these all reminders of what's to come when you take delight in what you don't yet know? Well, heaven's relative to God. God's not relative to heaven. So whatever's in heaven, we don't know much about that. It's God's invention. And God's the greatest inventor. He's the greatest artist. He's the greatest lover. He's the greatest artist is the greatest lover is the greatest everything. Sometimes while I'm existing, which is all the time that I can remember. Are you sure? Quite.

I think to myself, what a bizarre thing reality is. It's almost like I have the perspective of absolute nothingness. And then the next split second, I take everything in like this thing called a table and this strange person could be the crazed and mosquitoes and all that and I think what a bloody bizarre place this is and I feel the contingency argument at its full you know why does this weird thing exist well that's what God said to job at the end he didn't he didn't say look at these arguments for my existence, or look at all the evidence that I'm good. He said, look at monsters, look at behemoth and Leviathan. Wild. Weird. Mason. So I still, maybe I didn't understand you, but how do you think and hope and long

for heaven then? Do you, or is it that you hope and long for the fulfillment of all your desires which you know can only be found in God or trust? Dr. Kline. I know that my desires are stupid, shallow and fallen. So I don't long for the fulfillment of all my desires. I long for the purification of my desires. I see in myself two different kinds of desires, wise and foolish. Most of them are foolish. Really? Still? Oh yeah. After all this time. Oh yeah, yeah. I want my own way. I have no hope. You know, I want to orchestrate my own symphony and I know that's stupid and when I let him do the orchestrating, it's not stupid. It's very simple. You have to become a little child.

It's very simple. You have to become a little child. You just have to trust your daddy. Yeah, that is exactly it. Fiat Volontas Tour. If I if I really believe that, then I would just sort of. Well, you do. But also there's a lot of ignorance and disordered passion and and and. We're a mess.

That's good. I like that you said that. It's not that you don't believe it, it's that you do, but you're also an idiot. It's Lord, I believe, help my unbelief. Exactly, that's one of my favorite prayers. But if you're not an idiot in this idiotic world, you're insane. If you're not an idiot in this idiotic world,

you're insane. If you have not an idiot in this idiotic world, you're insane. If you have a roadmap and everything is on that roadmap, it is perfectly clear and perfectly accurate, and that's your philosophy of life. You're nuts. You've got to have monsters. One of the greatest works of art in history, the Gothic cathedrals. What is present in Gothic cathedrals? Gargoyles. And they're not just extras. They're not just somebody that you call in to keep the robbers away. They're part of the whole picture.

When was the happiest time of your life? And don't say something clever like right now. That wouldn't be clever, it would just be false. You're a good interviewer, you're not that good. You're my favourite interviewer, but you're not God. When my wife said yes to my marriage proposal. I don't remember if I asked you that, but how did you propose? We were on the Staten Island ferry, which is one of my favorite places. And her mother was very skeptical about staying out late.

And we did a little restate out late. I said, don't worry, your mother's not going to get mad. Of course she did, until she heard why. And then I was so nervous that when I gave her the ring, we hit a wave and it almost went overboard. Not quite. I'm very clumsy. Were there people around? Did they see?

No, no, it was dark. Yeah. That's good. I wouldn't have, being an introvert, I would have been awkward to have to propose in front of other people. Yeah. What about a time from your marriage or family life?

Do you look back with fondness on a particular time? Yes, when my daughter, who at the age of five was diagnosed as having a malignant brain tumor and given six to twelve months to live, due to what apparently was a miracle, was instantly cured and the brain tumor changed overnight from one kind of tumor to another kind of tumor and she's fine now she's 50 years old she's a practicing psychologist in Virginia we got a miracle and the surgeon who was an atheist wrote in his report I have no explanation of this none at all oh yeah that's strange to go have no explanation of this, none at all. Oh yeah, that's strange to go from one type of tumour to another.

Well, what showed up on the CAT scan was a medulla blastoma, which is fatal, and what showed up in the operation was a juvenile astrocytoma, which is benign and totally removed. Was there a specific, um, I'm sure you were praying for her constantly. Many people were. In fact, uh, one of the most amazing experiences was how many people were praying and contacted us. You never know how many friends you have. Yeah. But that's interesting though, that I say, can you think of a time where,

yeah, well, I suppose it wasn't the pain you went through. The time before that was probably the worst time of my life when they told me she had six months to live. I said, God, you've got to make a mistake. I'm not even courageous, much less a saint. I'm not going to be able to handle this. I felt like I had an iron ball in the pit of my stomach that I couldn't disgorge and couldn't digest. It's really difficult when you know you're meant to apparently surrender to God, but you don't know how and then someone says something clever like, well, surrender that you can't surrender. He like, Oh, all right. But that's true. I'm sure it's true. It's not adequate, but it's true. No, eventually you have to just do it. Methods are ways of making a difficult thing easy. There's a light in this room because we have electrical energy and we just push a button.

And if we didn't have electricity, it would be difficult. You'd have to build a fire and whatnot. So there are spiritual methods, but there's no method for trust. And there's no method for love. You just do it. Yeah, there's nothing higher than love that can make it. You give yourself over to it like a bicycle. That's how you learn to ride it.

You just have to. You couldn't sit down and read a book about how to ride a bike. You just have to get on it and do that thing. All right. You couldn't sit down and read a book about how to ride a bike. You just have to get on it and do that thing. All right. Okay, so I have a weird thought experiment and whenever I share it with people, they look at me like I'm crazy, but I think you might like it. I'm not sure you don't have to. I'm sure you'll tell me. Sometimes I am laying with my son or my daughter, let's say or something else. And maybe I feel agitated and want to leave and I try to appreciate the moment

Okay, and so I have this thought I think what if in the future they've created a time machine and I can go back to any time in the past But the only problem with the time machine or the side effect is when I'm there I won't know that I went back and it'll be as if this was the first time I was there. And so then I lay there with my son or my daughter and I think maybe this is one of those times. Yes. Which is just a complicated way of asking where's the good in this? What what what what should I love about this that I'm not yet seeing? Well it makes you appreciate uh what you have.

Whether this is the first time or the second time and and whether you're remembering it or not, it's good. And that's much more important than whether it's the first time or not, and whether you remember it or not. It's good. Here's another thought experiment which intrigues me. Robert Nozak is a contemporary philosopher who's famous for an article entitled the experience machine he says imagine the invented a machine which was both physical and mental and it was a sophisticated artificial intelligence and it had direct access to everything in your body especially your brain and

it could give you the experience of anything and the pleasure of anything that you could possibly dream of. And there was no bad side effects. And it would give you perfect happiness and unending joy without boredom, without pain, without anything bad. Would you step into that machine and live there forever? No Now I'd kick the shit out of it and ruin it. Yes, and he assumes that people would give that answer. And the vast majority of his students did. Today, that machine has been not made,

but the thought experiment has been given to students now. And approximately 60% of them say, I would not walk into the machine. About 40% now say yes, almost nobody did it. Because we're close to close to doing it. Yeah. Right. I mean, have you seen those Apple goggles now that you can start to see an interface

in front of you, we can just live in the matrix and that's the scariest movie of all time. That's worse than the Exorcist. I don't know. The Exorcist is pretty bloody scary. That's a good movie. The Exorcist. That that I think that literally scared the hell out of a lot of people. It did. I remember falling on my knees and praying sincerely after watching that movie. I hear I'm not sure if this is just anecdotal, but I hear that that one person actually got

a heart attack and died watching The Exorcist. All its imitators, not competitive. Interesting, isn't it? It's because it was based on a fact. They changed the details and they put a lot of special effects in, but it's, it's true. Yeah. Nefarious is pretty good too. Nefarious was excellent. That was an excellent movie. Yes. Were you shocked to find it so good? I was. Yes. Yes. Most religious movies are crap. Preach. Yep. His acting was second to none.

Yeah. If people haven't seen Nefarious yet, please go watch Nefarious. Yeah. The only thing that was weird about that was the ending. That ending sucked. Yeah. With Glenn Beck, did he fund the movie? Is that why he was in it? What happened? Most movies mess up the ending. Even the Lord of the Rings. The return to the Shire. Well, maybe they would have had, maybe they would have had to make it another movie though, to incorporate the raising of the Shire. Well, you know, Peter Jackson asked why the scouring of the Shire was not in there.

Why when the hobbits return, they don't find devastation everywhere. Said, well, we didn't have the money. All they have to do is destroy the set. The reason they didn't do it is that that chapter which Tolkien said was integral and necessary to the whole work Was the one political chapter that was an attack on state socialism? Which is why it was religion. So you don't expect Hollywood to insult their own religion. Uh-huh Yeah, I need to read that book again, I'm convinced and again and again, yeah the more I read new books I think you know what? I'm just gonna stick to the two or three again. I'm convinced. And again and again. Yeah, the more I read new books I think, you know what, I'm just going to stick to the two or three forever until I'm dead. Maybe a few more than two or three. Maybe. I tried. I'm starting another book

now. What's it called? Maltese Falcon. Have you read the book? I think it's not Chandler. Who's the fella? And it was kind of a noir detective type. Do you what's the least impressive thing you're reading right now? Most least impressive thing I'm reading. Yeah, I don't want some about the synod for synodality. That's what that's the least impressive thing. It has all the sociological and psychological cliches. And there you go. The Maltese Falcon. Samuel. Yeah, Hammett. Okay.

Oh, Dachel Hammett. Yeah. It's a terrible... What are your thoughts on this? Oh, you're asking for a book. Yeah, fair enough. I don't know. Yeah. Are you reading a novel right now? Let me see. Am I? No. I'm waiting for Michael O'Brien's next one to come out. I love all of his novels.

I love that you love them. I'm currently reading Father Elijah again. And I have to say, and I mean no disrespect because that man's incredibly talented and I highly recommend all of his books and he's one of the most beautiful iconographers. Yes. And the fact that the icons that he writes, paints us are somehow modern, but ancient. Right.

They're stunning. Right. But I don't know if I'm just so disillusioned with the state of the church right now that it's hard to read a book about a superhero pope. You know, you remember father, the very best time to read about a superhero poem. We don't have one anymore. We had two superhero popes. We did. We were spoiled. We were spoiled.

Now we all have whiplash. Try The Lighthouse, which is the shortest novel he ever wrote. You know what I think? Did I read that? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if I find him too preachy or if I find him. He's a beautiful writer. Again, it's my fault.

It's like if someone says I don't like Aquinas. Okay, well, you're an idiot. I'm sure it's my fault. But he is a beautiful writer. That's for sure. It feels like a contemplative experience when you read it. His style is not remarkable, but it's very good. It doesn't get in the way. Oh, I like that. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes I'll try to read just for fun.

I'll be at an airport and I'll buy the latest Stephen King novel or some something else. And I, I can never get through many chapters. Cormac McCarthy. He's fantastic. Great style. I love very dark, but the road is terrifying. I wept my eyes out when I finished that book. Yeah. Did you ever read The Sunset Limited? No, but you told me when we were in Atlanta, the first time you were on my show, we were driving back stuck in traffic. I remember that I was so impressed with you

because I was sure we were going to be late for your flight. I don't know if you remember this, we were stuck in traffic. I felt really terrible about it. You were just very calm and casual about it. Anyway, I was asking you for some movie suggestions and you said The Sunset Limited. Not only is the script perfect and not only did the movie follow the script word for word, but you have two of the best actors, Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel Jackson doing it. Mason Hickman It's an excellent movie. Yeah. So it's followed the script of the book.

So to have watched the movie is essentially to have heard the book. Okay. David Eichmann Amazing. Very few people do that. Squasey did it in silence. Mason Hickman Well, I mean mean the reason they don't do it is a lot of the movie portrayals of books aren't dialogue heavy the way that. Yeah.

Yeah. You have to incorporate a feel and a mood to the, don't you? Yeah, but you try to come as close as you can. Yeah. Do you know it was last year, I think last year, I started watching my first Hitchcock movie. Really? Yeah.

Which one? Rope. Don't know that one. It's quite interesting. It's very Dostoevsky in the sense that they, I'm not giving it away but they they kill a person and put them in a big what do you say a piece of furniture and then celebrate a dinner party and invite friends over. Who that sounds very dark yeah and the camera doesn't cut from scene to scene it follows them around the entire time. One take there it is wrote so you can tell it breaks and there's your fella there's your man. Could you zoom in on that fella's face Jimmy Stewart's in it you haven't seen it no you're there you go.

More pleasure awaits you since you're Jimmy Stewart fan you've seen vertigo. Yeah yeah I don't know why but. Yeah, that's fascinating. I don't know why, but you share his obsession, I guess. So I have an ignorance, right? This is, you know, don't you talk about like modern arrogance where you think that the past is just not as good? You know, you've you've talked about this, right? And we know, well, I had that and then I watched this and I started thinking, oh, he's unsurpassed. The old movies have characters that are complex, real, and you can identify with them. Themes that are genuinely thoughtful. They just don't have the updated technology, the special effects.

Which meant they had to rely on dialogue, which is in my estimation the most interesting bit. And most movies today are exactly the opposite. The special effects are always excellent, and the themes, the characters characters and the plot is shallow. All right. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to get a full list of movies that we're all going to watch cause you're going to tell us. So I'm not joking. Here we go. Mel Gibson's Hamlet. Really? Okay. I haven't seen that.

The best Hamlet. Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Yeah. Which is almost like a liturgy more than a movie, bloody. I remember going into The Passion with a bunch of people and wondering how on earth they brought popcorn and drinks in. And I remember seeing them leave with no popcorn, no drinks. A Man for All Seasons, the most perfect movie ever made. Yep. Must have seen it 15 times.

A great movie. Yeah. You mentioned Harvey. Is that what it was called? Yeah. Harvey. I haven't seen that yet. I can't wait. But this is what I want. I want the older movies. Oh, not the new one. Black and white. Give me something. Mark Bergman.

There's wild strawberries. There's winter light. There's these are different movies made by a particular director or something. Ingmar Bergman. Oh, see, I mean, thank you. His best one is, oh, come on. What's the name of it? What happened in it? We'll have Thursday. Look it up. Just got a brain cramp. What about death? That's how I live. I live with brain cramp. So welcome to my life. So do so to so to the current New England Patriots in Boston. Red Sox. All right, Harvey. Now I watched Casablanca.

The seventh seal. The seventh seal. What's this? OK. By Bergman. OK. Yeah. There was an excellent movie called Wait Until Dark. There's a couple of fairly recent movies that are quite good. Gladiator, for instance. The first one. Yeah, I think they're working on a second one. That's why I said the first one.

Oh, great. Yeah. Audrey Hepburn was in Wait Until Dark, and it's a wonderful movie, and I promise you, you'll love it. She's blind, and her husband's out on a trip, and there's a couple of fellas canvassing the house to rob her. And they try to... This is a Hitchcock movie? No, I don't think so.

It's considered horror. I'm not sure who wrote it or who... But I'd really recommend that. There are great movies. Sometimes you get so exhausted by bad movies that you think... Yeah. You know, it's a very good movie. It's extremely simple.

The Old Man and the Sea. The Old Man and the Sea. Anyway, yeah, I haven't read that. Terrence Young and Mel Ferrer. I think there are two versions of it. Oh, The Old Man and the Sea. Yeah. All right.

Let's see what else. to see? Yeah. All right. Let's see what else. There's just so much crap today. Yeah. And you know, we've become so desensitized to pornography that pornography has just made its way into modern movies. A lot of them. Yeah. And it's a kind of dark pornography. It's not, there's nothing romantic about it. I don't want to watch another superhero movie ever. Why does it have to be so, so violent and negative?

Oh, I think I know. Let's see. Let's see if I know. I don't know if I do. If I gave you a bowl of soup, because you're at a restaurant and I'm your waiter, and it's cold, you might say, hey listen, this isn't good, it's cold. And I come back and it's cold again. You might get frustrated with me, not the soup. But there's something about sex. If I believe that sex will fulfill my deepest desires and it doesn't, then the other is to blame, perhaps. Maybe I blame the other. Maybe I hate the other. Maybe I want to punish the other. I wonder if it's something like that.

I think the other is unconsciously here, God. Why? Because he won't let me have what I want in this thing. Yeah. Our desires are so stupid. When we get what we want, we're never satisfied. Not just because we want the next step, but because we're angry that that didn't do it. Yeah. But you know what? What do you think about that? I'm just thinking that through right now, but it seems to me like an inanimate thing. You don't get angry with that. You might throw it on the ground, but if it's the person who's not satisfying, I disagree. I hate computers. They're inanimate things, but I want to throw them to the ground because

they frustrate me because I cannot learn their language. So yeah, this, you're, you're kind of known now for being terrible technology, because you talk about it all the time. How bad are you? Let's Well, let me give you an example. When we got our first advanced technological reproduction machine at the Boston College Philosophy Department about 40 years ago, it was a large machine that stood off the ground for about a foot. And it was all glass. You could see the wheels and stuff moving inside. And every time I would do anything there, I would jam the machine.

Nobody else in the department would jam the machine. I would have to have somebody run the thing. And it was not just one button. Push start, the paper would jam. I'd clear the paper, jam, push start, it would jam again. The secretary of another department who was a good friend of ours came in and saw this happening and said, Peter, this can't be happening. No one is this good at screwing up. I'm going to make an experiment.

I'm going to crawl under that machine, there's about a foot of space, and I'm going to watch what the machine does when you push it, and I'm going to watch what the machine does when somebody else pushes it. Let's use exactly the same paper and push the button. So I think six or seven times in a row I pushed the button and it jammed. Another person pushed the button and it didn't jam and she didn't see anything. And she said try it one more time and I said why? We've done it six times already. She said just try it one more time. And I said, why? We've done it six times already. She said, just try it one more time. So I tried it one more time.

I pushed the button and the machine spat ink out on her who was lying under the machine, ruined her blouse. She had bought us an expensive silk blouse at Bloomingdale's that morning for a faculty party that evening. So I had to buy her a new blouse for $100. Why did you have to buy her a new blouse? It wasn't your fault. My wife said I should. You should have said I told

you so. I'm a social idiot. Anyway, the repairman came in the next day and we told him what happened and he said, this cannot happen. This machine is incapable of leaking ink. What really happened? We all said it really happened. Yeah, there are eyewitnesses. Yes Okay, then but then okay then then the analogy still works because why do you get angry at machinery? Frustration. Yeah, and why are you frustrated because it's supposed to do something. It doesn't do it's supposed to be my servant and it is my master It's eating my soul. It's dragon. Oh, go. Then extend that to sex. If I view the other as a machinery that's meant to do what I do, it ought to be my servant. I totally agree. Maybe that's why it gets so dark. The objectification of it and the objectification of your own body.

Body, give me total pleasure. Obey me. You're not me. You're somebody else. You're no, you're not. You're me. Yeah. I think you learn that only when you get old and wrinkled and ugly, and have arthritis. It teaches you. Teaches you. Your, your imperfection. You're inevitable. You grow towards imperfection. Yeah. You grow towards accepting your imperfections, hopefully living with them.

Because what if you don't have no alternative? No, you have an alternative just to get angrier. Wouldn't that be the difference? Acceptance or frustration with your own body? the angrier. Wouldn't that be the difference? Acceptance or frustration with your own body? Yeah, but you can't you can't really realistically conceive an alternative. You can't get young again. And you can hear some diseases and you can raise your health a bit and whatnot. But yeah, inevitably, you're going to be a skeleton. And it's very difficult to realize that here.

I've got an old wrinkled hand and I look at it and I say, someday this hand will not move. It will be the hand of a skeleton. It will be bones without flesh. Hard to picture that, hard to believe that. It is hard to believe it. It's almost like a fairy tale. Like, no, it won't happen.

I'm going to live forever. I remember somebody once saying that it was a sobering thought to realize the first question people will ask at my funeral after the service is, where's the potato salad? The pittilessness of death. Yeah, I thought about I actually I have this thing I do when people. Sorry, you go. Do you know what was the funniest TV show of all time?

According to the polls. No. In the Mary Tyler Moore show, Chuckles the Clown, her funeral. Chuckles the Clown was crushed to death by an elephant. OK, so Mary Tyler Moore and all the other new staff go to the funeral and they can't stifle their laughter because there's chuckles and then they realize that that is exactly what chuckles would want because that's his business to be a clown once they realize that they get very serious and they weep oh I can't tell if that's moving or funny both

hmm both now was chuckles the clown was it an open casket? Probably not since Chuckles was trampled. Right. Right. Yeah. Death. It's hard to believe it's going to happen. I don't mind death.

I mind dying. That's harder. Yeah. Yeah. If I knew for certain that I'd die in my sleep. Well, no, if I knew that for certain, maybe I'd just be terrified to go to sleep. But thinking of purgatory the way St. Catherine does helps you to cope with dying. It's a beginning of purgatory.

I don't know if it was Catherine. Since you're reading it, you might know, but I believe some saints said that the greatest pains in purgatory exceed the greatest joys on earth. That was Catherine. Okay. She said basically three things. The pain is worse there than on earth because you realize how stupid and sinful you are, and you've seen God for a moment before purgatory, and you realize that that was the perfection and beauty and goodness that you have refused and offended. But she also says that it's a greater joy there because you've seen God and you're guaranteed heaven and he's with you there and you're entirely online with his will.

And then she said the greaterness of the greater joy is greater than the greaterness of the greatest suffering. Okay. Wow. I believe she also said, or the father said to her that not one soul goes to hell without having first torn themselves out of my hands. Yes. Yes.

I can't understand why so many people think that God sends you to hell, that God has predestined you for hell. How can they worship that kind of God? Well, didn't you used to believe that? You were a Calvinist. Most Calvinists don't believe that. Calvin apparently did, but those are called double predestination Calvinists. Before we're born, God designates some people for hell and some people for heaven.

That makes no sense. It's free will that alone accounts for hell. How do we get back on hell? I thought we left that for a while. You know, Pascal said something about heaven that I really like, because, you know, sometimes when you start to think, well, how do how do you go to heaven? The more you think about that, you might think, well, that sounds rather silly. I go from here to heaven. How do I do that?

Is that just maybe it is make believe? God's angel, Air Force, of course. Yeah, exactly. Like you say something like that, though, and you go. But then he I don't know where he says this in the poncets, but it's something like, well, surely it's a whole lot more difficult to go from nothing to here than from here to somewhere. Isn't that good? Yes. And that's similar to something else he says in the Pensees.

Do you think, do you think it is the great thing, a great thing that God created the entire universe out of nothing? It is a far greater thing that he is doing with you now. He is creating a saint out of nothing. It is a far greater thing that he is doing with you now. He is creating a saint out of a sinner. Nothingness didn't stick its tongue out at God and say no. Yeah that's a good point. Mercy, the greatest of his attributes. Even in the Quran, his mercy is mentioned 17 times more often than his justice. Really? Well, that's good. There's a great line in Till We Have Faces in the last chapter.

They're in either purgatory or heaven. And the protagonist, Oriol, who has led a very bad life, is about to go to the Last Judgment. And she says to her mentor, a philosopher that she calls the fox, I cannot hope for mercy from the gods. And he says, oh, you'll get more than mercy, you'll get surprises. And she says, well, she has something about justice. She said, will I get justice?

Because she was a very proud character and she thought since she was a very successful queen that she deserved more and the gods took everything she loved away from her. And the fox says, when I get justice, and he laughs and he says, Oh, no, my child, what would become of us if we got justice? What would become of us? Don't ask for justice. I love to raise his understanding of God's justice. She says she takes great comfort in the fact that God is just because it's precisely because he's just that he'll take into account my own wretchedness. Now, don't disagree with her.

Disagree with me. Maybe I didn't say that well. I hope not, because that sounds as if justice is a kind of excuse me, mercy is a correction to justice. Why does this the opposite? That mercy is primal. Well, no, but because we didn't deserve to be created in the first place.

So it's not justice that created us, it's pure mercy. But I mean, okay, maybe I misunderstood your objection to it, but if I'm just and I have to say issue a punishment or a reward, presumably I take into account your weakness and the negative influences of impact. Yeah, but how do you do that? I don't know. I like the story of the judge whose son appeared before him.

He was in an auto accident and the judge gave his son the strictest possible sentence like a ten thousand dollar fine and the son couldn't pay it at all and the judge stepped down from the bench pulled out the checkbook and wrote out the fine himself. What's this Thursday? Is this her? Here's Therese. Though one must be exceeding pure exceedingly pure before appearing in the sight of the All-Holy God, still I know that He is infinitely just, and this very justice which terrifies so many souls is the source of all my confidence and joy. Justice is not only stern severity towards the guilty, it takes account of the good intention

and gives to virtue its reward. Indeed, I hope as much from the justice of God as from his mercy It is because he is just that he is it is because it it is because he is just that he is compassionate and merciful long-suffering and What's that word plenteous in mercy for he knoweth our frame? He remembereth that we are dust as a father hath compassion on his children. So hath the Lord compassion on us. All right, go on. Disagree with a disagree with the saints to ration.

Compassion is mercy, not justice. Compassion goes beyond justice. And our intentions pull that down just to touch. Our intentions are no more pure than our actions. In fact, they're worse We almost always have double-minded intentions. I Want this because it's my will and I want this because of it's your will and the two don't usually exclude each other But I suspect that she's using the word justice in a broader sense than I am.

Wouldn't it be good if we gave each other the benefit of the doubt, the way we give the benefit to the saints? Yes. Yes. That's what Aquinas does. All those contradictory sources he reconciles because he interprets them so charitably. My favorite example in metaphysics is if there's one doctrine in Aquinas that's radically original it's the doctrine that being means fundamentally existence and existence is radically distinct from essence it's not another essence. He's gonna put that down a little bit so he can see a beautiful face. Well, he says that doctrine comes from Aristotle because in his logic, he distinguishes existential propositions like God exists or Santa Claus does not exist from essential propositions

like Santa Claus is a human being. It's true that Aristotle makes that distinction, but only in his logic, not in his metaphysics. He takes for granted the existence of things, never asks where they're created, that's unthinkable to him, and never raised the question why is there anything at all rather than nothing. So Aquinas is taking this radically new step in metaphysics and saying it's really from Aristotle. Now that's not just humility. That's not just charity. That's lying.

No, it's good advertising. It's like the word new in modern advertisements. Almost always it means the opposite of what it says. That is to say, they take an old thing, put a new label on it, and call it new. It's a lie. Well, Aquinas is taking a new thing and putting an old thing put a new label on it and call it new it's a lie Yeah, well quite as I say can new thing and putting an old label on it because in the Middle Ages the old was respected Mm-hmm, and the new was suspected and in our culture. It's exactly the opposite If you could go anywhere in a time machine, but you can't go back to Christ and

Because that's too obvious. Where would you go? And where you know what time period where University of Paris 13th century listen to Aquinas I'd love to go with you. I Think they had coffee back then that's okay. I don't need that I had mead Yeah, we drink me listen to Aquinas I Tried mead once it's not very good. I wanted to like it. What's your favorite drink? Alcoholic drink.

Um, Laphroaig single malt scotch. Stop it. I that's my favorite. Do we talk about this? Are we two people or are we one? Um, yeah, I can have some brought up. Would you have some? Oh, no, you can't. It's a land't. All right. Yeah, no, Laphroa is fantastic. Or I know I meant Lagervillen, but Laphroa is similar in that it's very peaty. Yeah. Yeah. I think it was the second time you came here. You're like, where's the where's the pints? Where's the beer?

Well, we have pints of water. Pints of water. Suppose suppose the oceans were full of beer and water was as scarce as beer is. How we would, how we would make beer water. Swimming would either be a very pleasant experience or a very disgusting, sticky experience.

There's an Irish saint who pictures heaven as a lake, Bridgette, yeah, as a lake of beer. That's right. Well, my image of heaven is probably silly, but it's an ocean and it's waves, but it's made of God. It's a kind of pantheistic notion. And just as here we surf on the waves of the sea,

which is a mystical experience. So we will surf on the waves of God in heaven. mystical experience so we will surf on the waves of God in heaven. How much longer you think you got before you go to heaven? I have no idea. Every time I have you in I think maybe it's the last time. I don't mean to be offensive. I hope not. I'm ridiculously healthy. You're definitely doing better than me cognitively. I'll tell you that much. Worst thing about me is arthritis, but that's minor. But how long do you want to stick around? I mean, I'm 40 and I'm done. I got some things to do and some things to say, and he's got a job for me. And as St. John Henry Newman says, he knows what he is about.

Yeah. I want to ask you about maybe some book projects you'd like to get to. But before I do, here is what Bridget said. I would wish a great lake of ale for the king of kings. I would wish the family of heaven to be drinking it throughout life and time. I would wish that men of heaven in my own house. I would wish vessels of peace to be given to them. I would wish joy to be in their drinking. That is funny, though, hey,

that you've got an Irish saint talking about a lake of beer. Isn't it interesting that God could have done this in thousands of other ways, but he chose bread and wine as the means of coming to us most intimately. Yeah. Eating and drinking. Not accidental.

Because you are what you eat. What you eat becomes what you are. It's also weird though, eh, that there's a big push to be gluten free and to not drink alcohol. At least in my circles. I thought that that was a medical diagnosis. Gluten. Well, that's kind of trendy.

Is it a prestigious thing to be gluten free even when you're not? I think people say that. Yeah. Well, they's kind of trendy. Prestigious thing to be gluten free. I think people say that. Yeah. Well, they think that. How strange. Yeah. Do you go to an Anglican ordinary at parish? I heard that. I did until they moved. And now I go usually to the Latin mass, which is elegant and beautiful. So what's your thoughts on the mode appropriate? Who do you not want to do that? I put a gag order on my lips. That's very grand. Because I want to believe that the pope is simply doing the best he can and making mistakes

as popes are wanting to do, and choosing the wrong people much of the time, but the Holy Spirit is in charge. And he's not going to change doctrine. He can't do that. So we've endured far worse things than we have now. I mean, folks used to assassinate each other. I know. But wouldn't you rather that? Maybe not really.

No, not really. I mean, assassinate each other and just leave the Latin Mass alone. I don't know. I'm open to the argument. It's all I'm saying. No, don't cut it out. Leave it. I'm open to the argument, that's all I'm saying. No, don't cut it out, leave it. Yeah. Okay, here's a question.

Pope Francis dies tonight. No, God forbid, I don't wish it, but suppose he does. And they elect Peter Craif to the throne. And the first thing you do is get a hammer and- Resign, first thing you do is get a hammer. He's I first thing I do is resign. On the balcony. Yes, he's walking out. And what do you say? Goodbye.

Yeah, you got to give a blessing. All right, suppose you don't resign. What do you do? I vote for Cardinal Sara. Oh my gosh. Can we please have an African pope? Yeah. I love that man. He's so beautiful, isn't he? Yeah. Wise, good, strong. On the other hand, Jesus himself picked Peter, not John, for his pope.

Well, you're Peter. Yeah, but John is so much more wise and so much more saintly. And Peter has foot and mouth disease. He's always saying the wrong thing. God's got weird strategy, you know. Yeah. I was talking to someone about this recently and I was saying it felt for Catholics of my generation, eh?

Because I came in with John Paul II, you know, and there was a lot of confusion and heresy and, you know, the catechism is now coming out. OK, the confusion seems to be being clarified. We're on the up and up. Things are going good. You know, so there was this upward trajectory that Catholics my age and around my age believed we were on. You know, it just keeps getting better and better. And, um, you know, it's, it's, I don't know. I mentioned whiplash. There's this sense of which, Oh my goodness, how do I now make sense of things? Everything human comes in waves like a roller coaster spiritually,

as well as physically. I mean, Look at the history of the church before the high middle ages. There was intense corruption in the clergy. Yeah. And right before the reformation again. So Pope Benedict the ninth sold the paper ceiling and bought it again a few times. And some of the Borgias. But again, assassinations. What do you mean they were assassinating each other?

Was it Pope Stephen dragged the body of his predecessor through the streets? I don't remember the names, but I thought that one pope exhumed the corpse of the previous pope and put him on trial. Yes, yes. Can you imagine if that happened today? My gosh. People cared about things in those days more than we do. A little too much, maybe. Yeah, just a little.

It's fine, just leave him. We get it. We'll just put a photo up. No, it's not a nice read the act of excommunication that a great philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, received when he got excommunicated. It will. Is it long? It's one long paragraph. You know, it's worth it.

It's worth it. Oh, stop it. Has he already done it? No, but this is funny. You have to say that. Kadevus in it. That's hilarious. Can you zoom in? That's as bad as Caligula putting a horse on the throne of the emperor. The Cadaver Synod is the name commonly given to the ecclesiastical trial of Pope Formosus, who had been dead for about seven months in the Basilica of St. John Lateran

in Rome during January 897. The trial was conducted by Pope Stephen VI, the successor of Formosus. I'm not saying that right. Successor Pope Boniface VI. Stephen had Formosus' corpse exhumed and brought to the papal court for judgment. Yeah. And none of them and none of them ever changed doctrine. Well, the dead. Yeah, he just sat there.

He accused him of perjury, of having ascended to the papacy illegally. That's that's amazing. Carly, could you imagine if that happened? Did you ever hear of the Potsy conspiracy? Look at that. Machiavelli witnessed? No. Where, wasn't a pope, was a cardinal, was assassinated during the Easter mass at the

moment of the consecration. And the congregation rose up and captured the two members of, I think it was the Pazzi family, I don't know if they were the victims or the perpetrators, and hung them by their feet from the cathedral and watched as they bit into each other's flesh. I like it. Which excommunication did you say we should read? Oh, Spinoza. Spinoza, so Spinoza was excommunicated. Look up that excommunication.

Yes. Funny. Yeah, things are things are wild and wooly. Oh, that's quite a long, that's quite a long. Having well, should we let's see you want to read it, you want me to read it? Having long known of the evil opinions and acts of Baruch disparos, they have endeavored by various means and promises. But you might have to read it in the microphone. Ah, yeah. But having failed to make him mend his wicked ways and on the contrary, daily receiving more and more serious information about the. Something about the.

Abominable heresies, which he practiced and taught and about his monstrous deeds for having this numerous trustworthy witnesses who have deposed and born witness to this effect in the presence of a set of spinosa. They became convinced of the truth of this matter. And after all, this has been investigated in the presence of honorable, et cetera, et cetera. Look at the next paragraph. And after all this has been investigated in the presence of Honorable etc etc. Look at the next paragraph. By the creed of the angels and by the command of the holy men we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch Espinosa with the consent of God, blessed be he, and with the consent of the entire holy congregation and in front of these holy scrolls with the 613 precepts which are written there in cursing him with the excommunication with which Joshua banned

Jericho and with the curse which Elisha cursed the boys and with all the castigations which are written in the book of the law. Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night. Cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he lies down, and cursed be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out, and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him. But then the anger of the Lord and his jealousy shall smoke against the man,

and all the curses that are written in this book shall lie upon him, and the Lord shall blot out his name from under heaven, and the Lord shall separate him to evil out of all the tribes of Israel, according to all the curses of the covenant that are written in this book of the law, by you that cleave unto the Lord your God

are alive every one of you this day, that no one should communicate with him, neither in writing, nor accord him any favor, nor stay with him under the same roof, nor within four cubits of his vicinity, nor shall he read any treatise composed or written by him. Wow. They sounded rather serious.

We're going to bring that back, don't we? All right. So just so the camera's right, just pull that just below your mouth. There you. Um, have you heard of would you rathers, you know, would you rather this or that? That's a fun game. Okay. We're going to play it now. Would you rather always have a mullet haircut or a ponytail haircut? What is a mullet haircut? It's where it's very long in the back and kind of short of the front.

Is neither an option. No, that's why it's good. Would you rather it would be a boring game. If you got to abstain. I don't know. I don't know. I don't I don't frankly give a care. Would you rather always have bad gas or always have really a really dry mouth? I do have a dry mouth and it doesn't bother anybody except me. So I'll take that over the gas. Would you rather be a high school teacher or a clown? Oh, clown. How about both? Would you rather be a high school teacher or a clown? Oh, clown.

How about both? Would you rather be forced to dance all day, every day, until you get a perfect score on Dancing with the Stars or be forced to eat mashed potatoes until you get a perfect score on beat the chefs? That's a stupid question. I love mashed potatoes. And when I got married, I took dancing lessons at an adult education school. There were 50 people in the class. I was the only one flunked. I stepped on my wife's wedding gown and her feet when we were dancing.

One of my favorite quotations is from Brother Lawrence, the practice of presence of God. I am a great clumsy fellow who breaks everything. I asked Jason ever at once, I said, do you dance? He said, not on purpose. That was a good line. Would you rather be forced to listen to the same 10 songs on repeat for the rest of your life or forced to watch the same five movies on repeat for the rest of your life? to watch the same five movies on repeat for the rest of your life? Movies. What is heard is more powerful than what is seen. Well, this is a good one. Would you rather have a time machine or a teleporter? That's good. That's a good one. A teleporter, because I can't have a time machine, because if I had a time machine,

I could go back and kill my grandfather and therefore I wouldn't have a time machine, because if I had a time machine, I could go back and kill my grandfather, and therefore I wouldn't exist, and therefore I wouldn't kill my grandfather. So that's a self-contradiction. Hang on, that clearly went above my head. You would rather a time machine or teleport? No, I don't want a time machine because a time machine is impossible. There is no such logically contradictory. Well what if, what if the, is it the B theory of time is true? One is that there's a successive events and the past no longer exists, but the other is that the past and the future and the present exist and we just have, and it all exists simultaneously. That's what Jimmy Akin reckons. Well, that's true of heaven.

Yeah. Well, you think it might be true of... But that doesn't mean you can, you can change the past. You can't change the past. That's what the past means. The past can live on in the present, yes. And it may be possible to go back into the past mentally. We do that already by memory.

But you can't do that in efficient causality. You can't change the past. Because if you murder your ancestor, you don't exist. And if you don't exist, you can't murder. Would you rather have to speak in rhyme for the rest of your life or have to speak in riddles for the rest of your life? Oh, rhyme. That's fun. Rhyme is music. Riddles aren't music.

Would you rather lose the ability to cry or cry every day for 20 minutes randomly? Randomly meaning in the presence of... You can't control it, it just happens. Who knows when it'll be? Maybe at night, maybe while you're giving a lecture. Lose the ability to cry because I can still cry inside. lose the ability to cry because I still cry inside. I would love to ask you and you, by the way, as soon as you get bored of me, you can stop. No need to stick around. I don't have to go on forever. Yeah. OK.

Tell me about being a teacher and you presumably still love it or she wouldn't be doing it. Yes. Why do I love it? Yeah. What do you love teaching university? Well, it's a combination of doing something that I'm good at and enjoy on the one hand and on the other hand, doing something that hopefully helps people and improves them and makes them wiser and better. It's usually a choice between the two. You either do good stuff and it takes effort out of you and it exhausts you and it's no fun or it's fun and many things that are fun are either immoral or fattening. Yeah.

You said to me that the goal or one of your aims as a professor is to make every individual feel like they're the only one in the classroom. Is that what you? Something like that, yeah. What do you mean? I mean, I can't remember what you mean. Back in the 60s, I think, yeah, I got a Danforth to go to Japan, study Zen Buddhism.

He did. And one of the Zen masters said to me, let's go off into the corner of this room where no one can hear us. I said, fine. And he said, the reason I do that is that when I give a talk, this was a certified Roshi who achieved enlightenment and was certified by another enlightened person. They're very rare. Each monastery usually has only one or two of them. So I was very flattered that he would take the time out to answer some smart, allocate Western

questions. I was about to go off onto a tangent and say something else about him. Oh, okay. And I will. Good. He didn't know anything about me. And he said, what do you do in America? I said, I teach philosophy. And after about a half hour's conversation, he said, I know who your favorite philosopher is. I said, how do you know that? If you haven't even published anything yet. He said, it's Socrates, isn't it?

I said, yes, how did you know that? He said, by talking to you. Socrates always philosophizes by asking questions of himself and other people, and he does it in dialogue. And I sense that half of you is up there on the pipe running along the ceiling, watching the person that is conversing with Roshi and the other person is down in his body. So I thought that was very perceptive.

Anyway, the wisdom that he gave me was when I talk to 100 people, the first thing I say in my talk is there are not 100 people in this room. There are only two people in this room. I am and you are. I am speaking and you are listening. If you think that you are only one of a hundred people in this room, you have only one percent of the responsibility of listening. If you know you are the only person in this room, you have 100 percent of the responsibility. You are the only person in this room. Now listen to me. Yeah, I'm interested now. I want to ask more about teaching, but I want to ask about how you went to Japan. How did that happen? And how did you, when you say you studied Buddhism? Well, when I first went to Boston College, we had a new chairman,

Father Joe Flanagan, who was a genius, and he had a lot of friends in Washington, so he got the power to influence the Danforth people. So he sat me down and said we're instituting dozens of new courses, what kind of courses would you like to teach? I said I love teaching courses on a single philosopher. He said who? I said well Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Kierkegaard, Heidegger. He said, well, we've got experts on all of those. He said, do you know anything about Buddha and Buddhism? I said, no, I took a course at Yale on Buddhism, but the teacher

was probably certifiably insane. I learned absolutely nothing. And he was the most eccentric person I ever met in my life. But I got an honors grade in the course. He said, good, you're the expert. I said, I know nothing. He said, well, everybody else here knows less than nothing. I said, I'm not competent to teach it. He said, well, suppose I get to Danforth to study Zen Buddhism in Japan. I said, fine.

And he did. How long were you there? Two months. They gave me a large amount of money and said go over to Japan and do what you want. You don't have to write to us and explain what you've done. You don't have to publish. We trust you. This was a very liberal administration. We had a one-year-old child. You went with the family?

Yes, my wife and my son. He was hyperactive, so he wanted to stay with the Japanese family, but we knew that he would run through the white rice paper walls into the next apartment building, and there were people, so we stayed in an expensive down city hotel. So the money ran out after two months. It was supposed to be a whole semester. But I went around to the Zen monasteries

asking some of the masters, Smart Isle Key Western questions. I love Buddha. And whenever I read about Buddhism, I am, like most people, immediately drawn to it. I think this must be right. Fascinating person. There's a lot missing there. Help us understand Buddha and Buddhism for those who are unfamiliar and are just maybe

weary and nervous of some Eastern thing. Well, there's a lot of forms of Buddhism, but the original Buddhism and what we know of Buddha himself makes him out to be probably one of the three most fascinating and influential persons who ever lived. I say Jesus, Buddha, and Socrates. They probably changed history more than anyone else. And all of them were strange. They were utterly unpredictable. I say to my classes sometimes introducing the religion, suppose I told you that I spent my entire lifetime searching for wisdom and I tried everything and nothing worked.

Until finally I got a mystical experience by sitting down under this tree and saying I will not get up again until I have received enlightenment. And I got up and I received enlightenment and I preached my first sermon and all of my disciples left me except five. And the first sermon was this, every thought you have ever had in your mind is wrong. You do not exist, the world does not exist, time does not exist, good does not exist, evil does not exist, the past, the present, the future, matter, spirit, none of these things exist. The only thing that exists is something that cannot at all be understood. It is nothing.

And that is the supreme enlightenment and that is the supreme wisdom. Well, that just sounds stupid. Would you remain as my disciple? I would not. And everybody said no. I said, OK, let me give you another question. I might ask what you've been smoking and if you wouldn't mind sharing. Give you another question.

Suppose I told you that I am God incarnate and that I created the universe and that I am infallible and sinless and that I alone can forgive your sins and give you salvation. And I ask you to believe me and bow down and worship me now. Would anybody bow down and worship me? No. No. So why did they worship Jesus? And why did they? Why did some people believe Buddha? And why did the Pavenci children believe Lucy when she said she went through this wardrobe in Darnia,

when they couldn't get it there? Yeah. Because they were trustable. The contrast between the character of the speaker and the content of the speech. It's astonishing. Those are three examples of a riddle that really can't be resolved. See, I think I disagree with Christ because I think the reason they believed Christ was the Messiah wasn't because he was trustable, but because he walked on water and raised people from the dead. That helped. Yeah. Okay, so what you said about Buddha, that's not what I meant when I said, this sounds obviously true. Well, then he preached the utterly rational

sermon of the Four Noble Truths, and he did for the spirit what Aristotle did for the cosmos. Aristotle said all the questions anyone can ever ask about the cosmos can be answered in four different ways. There are four causes. And by a cause, he simply meant an explanation, a because there is what the thing is. There's what it's made of. There's what made it. And there is it's, it's, it's end. It's destiny, the formal cause, the final cause, the efficient cause and the material, the formal cause, the final cause, the efficient cause, and the material, the formal material, efficient and final cause. And that is incredibly useful. Now if you go to medical school you'll find that there are also four

questions that you have to ask as the heart of your practice as a doctor. One, you observe the symptoms. Two, you diagnose the disease that is causing the symptoms. Three, you give a disease that is causing the symptoms. Three, you give a prognosis of whether the disease can be cured. And fourth, if it can be cured, you give the right prescription or treatment for it. And that's exactly what Buddha did in the Four Noble Truths. The disease is that we all are in pain, we all suffer. We can't always get what we want.

We can't get no satisfaction. Buddha is the Mick Jagger of the East. And the cause for that is that we have selfish desire because desire splits the soul into two halves, what you are and what you want to be, what you have and what you want to have. And that gap equals suffering. Yeah. So there are only two ways to end suffering, either get what you want or stop wanting it.

And he gives you a way to stop wanting it. And that's his cure. That's Nirvana, the extinction of all selfish desire. And the way to do it is what he called the noble eightfold path. You subtract your egotistic desires in each of the eight designated areas of life inner and outer. Very simple. How is that different to Stoicism? Stoicism is non-mystical Judaism. Stoicism also has the same

observation of of symptoms, the same diagnosis, and the same prognosis, but a different prescription. Well, actually a different prognosis, because you end up in Stoicism with simply reason totally controlling the passions. You go beyond reason in Buddhism. You're beyond the conceivable into something that has no name, not even the Hindu name Brahman, which is also mystical, but it's a God. But there's no God in Buddhism. Buddhism is a kind of atheism. Yeah, because it makes complete sense, doesn't it? You're unhappy because you desire things you can't have. But you go one step further and say, and even when you've gotten the things that you've

wanted, you're still unhappy. So who's the culprit that needs to be killed here? Desire. But how do you do that? Well, what Christ offers is a transformation of desire. Okay. Not an abolition of desire nor a satisfaction of it as a third alternative. Ooh, what's that?

Your desires are selfish and stupid. Okay. And sinful. So you have to get a new heart. You have to have a heart surgery. But that's supernatural. Buddhism doesn't have the supernatural. There are no gods, there's no heaven, except in one very popular but heretical sect of Buddhism, the Pure Land Sect, where Buddha is a god and he will take you to the Pure Land or Heaven. And strangely, Buddhists, including some of the masters I met in Japan,

have a high regard for these heretics, just as Muslims have a high regard for their Sufis. And they admit that more people get enlightenment from that, or sort of westernized, personalized Buddhism with Buddha as a God who will take you to heaven than in any other sect of Buddhism. Thank you for explaining that to me. That's the first time I've really understood it. So desire is the culprit. Buddhism says kill it. Christ says, let me transform it. Yeah. And that's why we can say thy will be done. Exactly. Exactly. You trust your surgeon. He wants to give you a new heart. Wow. Which is why you

need death. That's anesthetics. Because if you have an operation without anesthetics, the patient is going to hop around on the operating table and tell the doctor what to do. So he has to put us to sleep. So that's why we have to die. So but then how so how does submitting to whatever takes place? There's a sense in which the Buddhist does that there's a sense in which the Christian does that. What's the difference? The motive in Buddhism and in Stoicism is to

avoid suffering. The motive in Christianity is to become like God, and that involves suffering. Christianity plunges you into suffering and transforms suffering. Buddhism and Stoicism relieve you of suffering. Okay. Very different. Wow. Now, you said these folks were surprised that this heretical sect of Buddhists find enlightenment. How does one decide or determine whether another has reached enlightenment? What does that look like? What's the litmus test? It takes an enlightened person to judge an enlightened person and in most Japanese Buddhism they use koan puzzles to test that. Wow, okay. And koan puzzles

are not solvable. Define the indefinable Buddha or what was your original name before you existed or how would a man get a goose out of a bottle if he fed the goose each day through the neck of the bottle until it was too big to get out through the neck of the bottle and he didn't want to break the bottle or kill the goose but he got the goose out of the bottle? How did he do it? And most students try to figure it out and some are very clever and they say well it's a parable, it's symbolic symbolic the bottle is the ego and it's transparent so it's really an illusion and the goose is the enlightened self and there's nothing there exists nothing except that enlightened self the Buddha nature so there's no

problem the goose is already out and that's so close to the truth that if you give that answer in a rational way to a Zen Buddhist master, he will say, I now give you permission to commit suicide. You are hopeless. You will never attain enlightenment. That's the stupidest thing I ever heard. Wow. Because the right answer, the answer that that gives you enlightenment is something like

this. The goose is out. What does that mean? okay good I'm looking I'm trying to look up you demonstrate that you have enlightenment rather than talk about it you demonstrate that you have it that's interesting these Cohen puzzles do we have something similar to that in Christianity without meaning to? Yes, the Sermon on the Mount. Oh my goodness. It's not an intellectual puzzle. It's a moral puzzle.

But what Jesus does is make the law absolutely impossible. The Pharisees were the liberals of their day. They made life easier. All you have to do is obey the letter of the law, 613 of them, and be sure you don't walk a thousand and one steps in the Sabbath, just a thousand steps, and you'll get to heaven. I wish it was that easy. And you just know you have to have purity of heart. You have to love your enemies.

You have to wish to be poor. Impossible! Impossible. Like a co-on. Impossible. So the strategy of the co-on is the disciple bashes his head against this wall, this impossible wall, and the wall doesn't fall down. But something happens to your head, your brains fall out and your mystical self comes up instead. In fact, one of the Roshis...

What does that mean, Roshi? Roshi is a guru, a Buddhist guru. It was in a monastery, and it was lunchtime, and they had already had their lunch, because they rise at four or five. And he says, we have some lamb stew left over for lunch. Would you like some lunch? I said, wonderful. I love lamb stew.

He says, Irish lamb stew. I said, in Japan, wonderful. One of my favorite foods. So he led me into the kitchen, and there was a blazing fire. It wasn't blazing anymore, but it was on. And there was a large kettle with a large black pot. He said, the lamb stew is in there.

And I went close, and I gingerly touched the top, and it was very hot. I said, do you have a hot pot holder or something? And he smiled and said, do you have a hot pot holder or something? And he smiled and said, yes, we have koans. I said, what do you mean? He said, think about it. I said, I think I know what you're saying. I can't get at that lamb stew because there's something blocking my way. And I have to have something that helps me to get that block away. And I'm looking for a hot pot holder. So the hot pot holder is a koan puzzle.

He said exactly. Now, Jesus gives us a koan puzzle. It's the Ten Commandments. Interpret it as, be perfect as my Father in heaven is perfect. You can't do it. Yeah. But you don't bash your head up against the wall. You bash your will up against the wall. And my will be done gives up and says, I am absolutely hopeless. I can't do it. All my hope is in you. You have to do it. And God does it. Yeah.

You know Aquinas in his commentary on the Beatitudes says you know within here lies all of human perfection and happiness Yep, and then he says you know happiness is found in four ways you know and and all of them are wrong No, and not just the things you'd expect you know like money and sex like yeah Yeah, yeah, but goods of the soul not won't be done goods of the body won't be done And that's an interesting one because I do feel like this cult of the body is something that we see a lot today People talking about you know reaching your potential physically and being in the gym and being as fit and as healthy as you can be But he uses this great analogy in the Beatitudes that the body is like a vessel Not in the sense that it's the dualism, but it exists for something else I mean suppose I said I have a boat and you say, well, where do you take it?

Oh, I don't take it anywhere. I keep it in the harbor just because if I take it out there, it'll might get knocked around. That's stupid. And so, okay, suppose you could have perfect health. The question is still then what? What is the point? I love Aquinas' argument against bodily goods as the supreme good. All you need is a trip to the zoo. Watch the animals.

There's some animal that excels you in every bodily activity. And yet there's no animal that excels you in happiness or, for that matter, in misery. Therefore, happiness cannot be identical with bodily goods. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. I do like- But I think the so-called cult of the body is often a disguise for a cult of the soul. Look what I have done with my body.

I have mastered my body. What's the eye that's mastered your body, your mind and will? Look at me. I have a healthy body. I have conquered. God didn't give me this. I gave this to myself. There's a sense in which it's admirable because if one does achieve a healthy body, they have self-discipline. They forego things they may wish to have. They train their desires in order. Right. So there's something there. that's like st. Paul physical training is of some benefit yeah but they call it my body as if it doesn't have its own telos no it's gods yeah i've got it on loan i think

the one word no one will ever utter in heaven is the word of the seagulls in Finding Nemo. Mine, mine, mine. Yeah, I do. Seagulls are terrifying. Sometimes I think, you know, you're on a beach and you shoo the seagulls away. But if those seagulls just turned around and came at you, you would just poop your pants. I mean, that would be one of the most frightening experiences. Geese do that. Geese are demonic. Yes.

They're bullies. Scary. What animal are you? Never mind. I have to make a political statement. The last time a goose did that to me, I called him Donald. So you don't like Donald Trump? No.

I agree with many of his policies, but I think he is a very dangerous man, so I cannot vote for him. I can't vote for the other guy either. Okay. My theory, or my thing is, I want to vote for who I think hates me less. And I think Donald Trump hates me less than Biden. So I will vote for Donald Trump. I don't think Donald pays you any attention. Well, I'd rather that. Yeah. But I do like, I like how low that bar is. It's not about praising their virtues. Like, who hates me in mind less? Who's less likely to damage me in my community?

It's depressing that almost nobody likes either of the two and yet there is no alternative. Yeah, who do you think will win? Oh, Trump will win. Amazing that you just said that with so certainty. Even the polls say alternative. Yeah. Who do you think will win? Oh, Trump will win. Amazing that you just said that. Even the polls say that. Yeah. And when he did win, the polls didn't.

Well, they let him win. I'm not sure they will. What can they do? Well, they could kill him. They could. It could be a fraudulent voting thing. It could be take him off the ballot,

sue him to high heaven. Yeah. Have a impersonator be Biden and then Biden can walk around properly and start. Well, I'm kind of I'm kind of glad that I'll be 87 years old next week because I'm getting out of this insane asylum pretty quick. I have to say, I felt a little bad when I said, how long are you going to be around for? I hope you didn't. I hope that wasn't insulting. I felt like I knew you enough that you're pretty straight. Yes, I take that as a compliment. OK, good. Yeah. Not as an insult. Yeah, it's wild, isn't it? Things are wild. Now, here's a good question, because you look at Biden from the

outside, or at least I do. and I think to myself, mate, go home, you know, lay on the couch. I mean, that's what he is doing, I suppose. But play with your kids. Like, why are you doing this? But then I think, well, that's the that's the poison of power. And that's true of all of us. Whatever little power we have, we don't want to let go of it.

I see Biden as I see Pope Francis. I think he's a good man with sincere intentions, but with defective brains. I would vote for him for uncle. I just won't vote for him for president. I don't know. He seems like a pretty vicious guy. Oh, I don't think so. I think the party is kind of vicious. Vicious people in both parties.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, have you paid politics much attention throughout your years or if you just sort of thought, well, what'll be, will be, and better to focus on more important things? The second. Yeah. I think the most important thing about politics is how, how, how impotent it is, how, how little we care. We, well, we care, but well, at least in the People's Republic of Massachusetts,

politics is our religion and religion has to be politicized. So we've got to pick some idol and that's, that's one of the stupidest idols. It's like this grand entertaining thing that happens every four years. Well, that's why the British have a good system. You know, the King reigns, but he doesn't rule. Yeah. So it's a nice game to play. Have you seen the movie The Dark Darkest Hour?

No. Oh, gee, please watch that. And then text me or you can't text. Do you text? Yeah. I know you said you're terrible. Well, I receive texts and I email. Um, you receive them, but you don't respond. Right. My fingers are too clumsy for this little. Gosh, I gotta come up. That's a great one. I don't. I receive them. I just kind of get first.

That's good. I have no choice about receiving them. I have a choice about sending them. Well, Darkest Hour is about Winston Churchill and it's one of the most gripping, beautiful, I find movies. Yeah. I really recommend you and your wife watch it. I think you'd really like it. There's very few movies that I would say to someone watch this. There's a good movie, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Oh, I saw that. Wasn't that excellent? Yeah, that was good. Again, there's so, I watched that movie with my wife and I'm like.

What's the movie where Peter Sellers plays Chance the Gardener and gets elected president? I don't know. Being there. Being there. That's a great satire on politics. Okay. Okay. All right.

1979. Thank you. There's another one. I appreciate this. Would you mind if we took some questions from folks or would you like a break? No, questions are great. All right. Big thanks to all our local supporters who are watching and sending in questions. I will do my best to get through these. There's a lot of them, so maybe great. Yeah. OK. Cap. I don't know who this person is, but I'm going to try to say all these names are usernames.

They're fake names. But Cap Tyler one says, what does Dr. Crafft believe we should look for in a political leader? Honesty. Honesty. All right. Well, what if they're honest but bastards?

Both bastards aren't honest. Yeah, somebody tells that as it is. What do we look for? That's a good question Because virtue is not enough either because you could be virtuous and incompetent you've got to be clever. Well, here, let's contrast Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon. Richard Nixon was very smart. His policies worked very well, but he was a criminal. Jimmy Carter was a saint. His politics didn't work very well and he was a disaster. I would vote for Nixon. Right, okay. Unless, unless he's such a bastard. I usually vote for Republicans. I didn't vote for Barry Goldwater because I thought he would start a nuclear war,

which would be the worst thing. Yeah, it would. I'm not sure that the loose cannon named Donald Trump is not in that class. I mean, who does he admire? Putin? Kim Il-Sung? You can admire people for some reasons and not others. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like I admire Putin in a way I wouldn't with Biden. But that doesn't mean I think that. Right. Yeah.

Kyle, this is a funny question. Kyle Whittington says, what's the largest animal you think you could beat in a fight? Come on, that's a good question. You. You might be right actually. This is a serious answer to that question. Largest animal I could beat in a fight. A manatee. A manatee. Manatee weighs more than I do, but they're very slow and bumbling in the water though. Yeah.

How are you in the water? Where you just take a knife with you? Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Ah, that's funny. You're much braver than I am because the first thing I was going to say was, well, maybe, well, I shot a zebra that zebra that I killed that you did.

Yeah. How dare you? Yeah, it was fantastic. Tasted good too. I killed that you did. Yeah, how dare you? Yeah, it was fantastic tasted good, too So I could that a zebra like a horse you kill a horse Well, I was assuming that they meant without weapons. Well, how you gonna kill a manatee without a weapon your fist People have killed sharks with their fists. That's what they say If a shark tries to take you punch it in the nose, and I always think before or after I saw you myself

When does the punching occur? Mrs. Otwell or Mr. Rotwell wants to know that you to know that Dr. Crafters is a national treasure. God bless him. James Lewis says on the pain of beauty can voluntarily accepting the dissatisfaction of this life be meritorious?

Of course. It's wisdom and wisdom is meritorious. If God had not meant this life to be dissatisfying, he would have made it satisfying. Yeah. That's a reason we call it a veil of tears. Yeah. I wrote a little book. You actually endorsed it on how to be happy by Aquinas.

And making that distinction between beatitude and felicity, realizing that imperfect happiness is possible but not perfect happiness, I just breathe the sigh of relief. And that happiness is not just contentment. Discontentment is part of it. That the Blessed Mother at the foot of the cross was happier than a man in a drug-fueled orgy Right now. Yeah. Yeah, and that job on his dung heap was happier than then Hitler who just Won the war against France and he's dancing outside of that railroad car holding that

Unconditional surrender treaty. He's not happy just thinks he's happy It really changes. Yeah. We have a, we have a false idea of what happiness is. If happiness is what? The perfection of our nature, something like that. Yeah. Eudaimonia, the Greek word, uh, it ends in Ea, which is not a subjective feeling, but an objective state. Yeah. Right. Well, look at this lane 731 says I love Dr. Krave's only fiction book an ocean full of angels and hoping to visit.

Nahant. What's that? Where is that? Some point. That's a little island off the coast of Boston. And it's like a time machine. Okay, well let me finish the question. She says, I'm wondering if there is anything he thinks I should see there besides the sea

and Bailey's Hill, of course. Just wander around. It's very small. Mitchell Godfrey says, what is God's sense of humor and what is God's best joke? The octopus, the ocelot and the opossum. Have you been asked that question before? No. The three O's, that was good.

Not the platypus? Well, that was an angel mistake. That was an apprentice angel's mistake. Funny. Funny. What are some of Dr. Craift's favorite poems or poets asks Robert Williams? What's your favorite poem? Taking poem in the narrow conventional sense. Let me give two answers that are that are at opposite poles. T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and Wordsworth's

Prelude. One very non-romantic and the other very romantic. Any poems you could recite for us? You're like maybe, maybe, but I don't want to try. I love some of C.S. Lewis's poems. Yeah. I don't know if I've encountered them. One of my favorite is The Apologist's Evening Prayer. If you're into apologetics, look that up and read it. Okay. Thanks.

You know what poem I really like? I got a bit distracted there because it's coming to me. I mean, Grandeur of God or God's Grandur is probably the fate of my favorite, right? But there's another one. Um, Oh, uh, stand. Testament of beauty by Robert Bridges. That's another of my favorites. I love the Cavalier poets.

Shuttered universe. That poem about plunging into the word, which opens up the shuttered universe. Come on No, I didn't write who Hopkins I think so Sheldon Van Ocken, did you know I knew him very well? That's amazing He came and talked to my class on death and dying a couple of times at Boston College He came and talked to my class on death and dying a couple of times at Boston College. What was he like? He was like an uncle, the ideal uncle.

He offered me his boat once. He said, I'll give you sailing lessons and I'm retiring from a boat and it's a good boat and it's boat worthy and I'll give it to you. And you said? No, I am too old to learn to sail. Thank you very much. And I'm too clumsy. And I break everything. Exactly. Here's the poem. It's beautiful. Did Jesus live and did he really say the burning words that banish mortal fear and are they true? Just this is central here. The church must stand or fall its Christ We weigh all else is off the point the flood the day of Eden or the virgin birth have done

the question is did God send us the Sun in Karnak crying love love is the way and he is He is the he is the stanza Between the probable and proved they yawns a gap Afraid to jump we stand stand absurd, then see behind us sink the ground and worse, our very standpoint crumbling. Desperate dawns, our only hope to leap into the word that opens up the shuttered universe. Can I guess who that is? I have no idea. It's Van Ocken.

That's Van Ocken? Yeah. That's very good. Sorry, I'm clearly saying his name wrong. Van Ocken, Van Ocken. Ocken. Yeah. Isn't that beautiful? I thought that was John Dunn or Herbert. That's beautiful.

You know, a severe mercy yeah, is still on the books in Harvard, Hollywood, I mean. And to make, yeah, to make a movie out of that would be an incredible challenge. But it could be either one of the best movies or one of the biggest flops. Hopefully they don't make Sheldon Vanock in a trans woman. You know, I have met, I have asked, I think it's 48 or 49 people now, this question who have read Severe mercy. Did you weep?

I absolutely wept within the first paragraph. You're number 49. 48 out of 49 people who read that book have wept. I don't know any other book like that. Yeah. Oh, Thursday says him too. 50. Me too in a group. 50. Gosh. Yeah. I'm going group. Yeah, gosh. Yeah.

I want to read it again now. Yeah. You know that book? He told me once, I said, how, how did you get to write such a book? And he said, it was a miracle from heaven, but it didn't, it wasn't just God that did the miracle. It was Davey. Davey helped me to write that book. He said her last words were, oh darling, look, and then she died. And at first I thought that meant simply that she was having a glimpse of heaven, which is probably true. But he said then I interpreted that as this is my task, look at my life and write about

that and I will help you with it. Yeah, we recommend that everyone go by a severe mercy Yeah, now he talks about wasn't Lewis instrumental in his conversion. Yes Is that document? There are 17 letters from Lewis in a severe mercy Which are brilliant And Lewis's grief as Reconcerned grief observed is very much like his in a severe mercy,

even to the extent that he had palpable experience of the post-mortem presence of his dead wife. And at the end, what Van Alken called the second death was like what you find in the divine comedy when Beatrice leaves Dante forever and turns to the eternal fountain. A grief observed. I remember weeping after the first sentence. I cry a lot, Peter. My wife doesn't. She's beginning to though, she's beginning to grow up. And so she's crying a lot more than she used to. She's a beautiful woman. I would never say that to her face. Um, but he says something like, nobody ever told me that grief felt like fear. I keep swallowing something like that. Yep. Yep. Yep. That's, I mean,

I've experienced some grief in my life. I've never had a very close person die, but that is the book I think if you're gonna give anything to somebody I don't know your presence totally agree if they are tough-minded enough to be honest Yeah, you know the other thing Is where he talks about how his fear is Is where he talks about how his fear is that his memory of her gradually become corroded. Yes, yes, like snow that falls on the shape and conceals the shape of everything. There it is. Thanks Thursday. No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am afraid but the scent. hey, let me pull this up

What oh, yeah I am not afraid but the sensation is like being afraid the same fluttering in the stomach the same restlessness the yawning I keep on swallowing at other times. It feels like being mildly drunk or concussed There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me I find it hard to take in what anyone says or perhaps hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty.

If only they would talk to one another and not to me. It's delightfully candid. What impresses me about his fear of the snow falling on the memory of her is what it implies he wanted. She was not a pretty woman, and most people didn't like her. And she was a bit like Doc Martin. She had no patience with idiots, and would tell them so.

And yet, he loved that. She would expose his baloneyoney and he would love it. And a ghost can't expose your baloney. Yeah. A ghost can't talk back to you. A ghost can't tell you you're a humbug. And he loved that. Well, what's interesting is he has this wonderful, in a letter he writes about masturbation and

the problem with it. And he says something to the effect of this imaginary harem is always subservient, to which you are always the perfect lover. No demand is ever made upon your selfishness. That's an image of hell. You can't get out of yourself. There is no other. The loss of all otherness. Yeah. I don't think there's fire in hell. Fire is beautiful. Fire is a creature of God.

I think there's nothingness in hell. There's just you. Oh, you can't get out of yourself. You can't even fight anything. That's absolute despair. Yeah. Yeah. I try to remind myself that whenever my wife wants something other than what I

want, or when I'm offended by her or or when I wish she felt differently or thought differently. Exactly. Christopher West was on here recently, who I know you know and love, and he was saying that once he was like, why can't my wife be more like me? And I think he meant in regards to the desire for that intimate act. And then he said, well, if she was exactly like you, she'd be a man. Exactly. Do you want your wife to be a man? No. A lot of people do. Yeah.

And that, I think, is the deepest problem with homosexuality, the loss of the other. Assuming that men and women are really different and God designed them that way. It's not just obedience to God's design. It's what we most deeply need, The other, the otherness of the other. The fact that Mars and Venus can't fully understand each other. That's God's wonderful joke. Yeah. Yeah, homosexuality. I remember a cartoon. Two gays were looking at a couple quarks.

Sorry. Matt Walsh recently said, I, and you know who Matt Walsh is? He did that documentary. What is a woman? Walsh recently said the biggest problem with equity is if men and women are the same, then we are all gay. Two gays are watching a couple. OK, here we go. Cartoon. New Yorker cartoon. Two gays are watching a couple quarrel.

And he said, see, those mixed marriages never work. Say it again. Say it again. Two gays are watching a heterosexual couple quarrel and the comment is, see those mixed marriages never work. Marriages are meant to be mixed. Yeah. Iron sharpens iron. Yeah. We bump up against each other. We surprise each other. We misunderstand each other. Yeah, we take advantage of each other. Thank God. Yep, yep, yep. Yep.

CTC says can you describe what life was like prior to Vatican II? Can you respond to the radical traditionalists who claim there was a rupture in doctrine? Well, first of all, before Vatican II, I think Catholics tended to be much more comfortable taking things for granted and self-satisfied, which is a great danger. It was beautiful and it was wise and it was true and it was orthodox, but it was not pharisaical in the sense of hypocritical, but pharisaical in the sense of we've got it, we're safe,

we're doing the right things. That sounds great, I'd love that. And what was the second part of the question? I guess he's saying, what's your response to radical traditionalists who claim there was a rupture in doctrine? Well, the two greatest men of the 20th century namely John Paul the second and Benedict XVI said exactly the opposite and

Both the extreme left and the extreme right believe in rupture extreme right says the rupture was from The all the good stuff before Vatican to all the bad stuff afterwards and the left says it was a rupture from all the good stuff before Vatican II, all the bad stuff afterwards. And the left says it was a rupture from all the bad stuff before Vatican II to all the good stuff after. And the church has never been through such a rupture. The church is a plant. It keeps growing. It's the same plant. It's the same life. So there's not a rupture. There's a continuity. If there's not a continuity,

you're into Protestantism and you need a reformation in a new church. Now there can be a continuity, but part of the plant can be ill. Oh, there's always bad wood. Yeah, yeah. So there could be need for a remedy within the same plant, which is different to saying it's now a different plant or something like that. Yeah. Any plans to work on the Brothers K slash Lord of the Rings comparison book, says Timothy's. Oh, it's done. It's out. Yep. Word on fire. We'll have it out next week. Next week. Next year.

Wonderful. How did they get you away from Ignatius? Well, Brian Vo was the very bright Brandon. Well, Brian Voigt was the very good man, good editor. He said, I lost after your four volume history of philosophy that Bruce Fingerhut has put out in St. Augustine's Press. Bruce has since passed away. His son now has the press. It's a good press, but it's very small and has a very small audience.

And he says, if you could persuade St. Augustine's press to share the rights with us, we'd give them a large percentage of our profit, but we would probably not double the profits or triple the profits or quadruple the profits yeah and after a long period of negotiation and I probably not a negotiator but I persuaded as any of us interest to try it good I'm so glad and it worked very well because it has sold excellently it is beautiful can you just sum that up

for those and we'll put a link below so people can buy it this hundred philosophers the hundred philosophers called Socrates Children. Yeah, it's an introduction to the history of Western philosophy for beginners, intelligent beginners, but it's not for experts. And it's my classes, basically, in print. Yeah, it's really excellent. So you said, I remember you saying to me, you've never had a difficulty writing. That's the one thing you can just sort of sit down and writer's block, right? Yeah. Oh, maybe for a day or so, especially when writing the novel. I got writer's block a lot there for the plot. I didn't know what was going to happen next. And only when I went to a certain place, the place where supposedly Thorwald Erickson is buried on the beach of Nahant, I didn't know he was buried there, I would go there and sit next to Bailey's Hill and I'd get inspiration every single time there and nowhere else. So I invented this character,

a dead Viking, and I said I wonder if there might really be a dead Viking around there. And I did a little research and I found out that there might be. There's a Harvard professor who has very good scientific reason for believing that Thorwald Erikson came to the hunt. Excellent. In the year 1000. Ursatz asks, Are there any arguments that show you can presuppose free will and not conclude with the existence of God in some sense?

Yeah. Yeah. He says, I was, or she says, I was talking to an atheist co-worker and he found this line of thinking compelling because it is difficult to reject free will and God as such, is such a natural consequence of free will? If you don't seek God, if you're perfectly content with purely natural explanations, free will can easily be accepted as part of your experience and as a prerequisite for anything moral without throwing God in. Yeah, just as you can be a very good scientist and understand many things about the cosmos and still be an atheist. I don't know an argument from free will as a premise all by itself that ends up with, therefore, God must exist.

If you add love to free will, you have a good argument for the existence of God. If love doesn't go all the way up into God, if love is just our subjective desire, and if love isn't something we're responsible for and choose freely, then there are, I think, practically absurd consequences that follow from that. So I think the love plus free will argument does lead to the existence of God, but I don't think a free will argument all by itself does, especially since the atheist can easily be like, like invictus. I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. Yeah. I think Christopher Hitchens was asked if God does exist,

you know, what do you think? And he essentially said he'd shake his fist at him. And there's other atheists who say something like that. Christopher Russell was asked the same question. And he said, I think I would ask him, sir, evidently you exist, and evidently my atheistic hypothesis was a bit erroneous. Would you mind answering me one wee little question?

Why the hell didn't you give us more evidence? Yeah. That's a philosopher's answer. Yeah. The fish-chaking is the rebel's answer. But there might be something noble about that rebel, like Ivan Karamazov. I think so too.

Oh, I see, Ivan, yeah. He at least takes morality seriously and accuses God of being immoral. Yeah. Liz Velas says, I am studying philosophy part-time at uni reading D. Von Hildebrand has gotten me obsessed with learning more about philosophy, but I've come to a roadblock with others recommending that Thomism, as the only philosophical tradition approved by the Church, is the only philosophy I should study in depth. How do you suggest I reconcile the beauty I find in personalism phenomenology with also trying to stay true to the Church teaching? Well, first of all, the Church has never accepted any philosophy, even Thomism, as its official philosophy.

It has praised Thomas, especially as a theologian. Secondly, you can't fully appreciate Thomas unless you know the rest of the history of philosophy. So to be a Thomist only is to be a bad Thomist. Thirdly, I think Thomism and Personalism are eminently compatible. And I recommend to her a little masterpiece by Father Norris Clark, one of my favorite teachers at Fordham University, called Person and Being, in which he shows the mutual interdependence of Thomistic metaphysics and modern personalism. Thank you very much. Let's see, Catholic Viking. Come on, says any suggestions on keeping 10 to 5 year old kids in a single RE class

interested and calm. Never thought I'd have to say please get out of the garbage can and come and sit down. Read the Chronicles of Narnia to them. Yeah. I had to teach kindergarten once. Yeah. Volunteer. I bet you'd be good at that. No. You have to have their fleas and they keep hopping around and you have to have elaborate five hour long lesson plans for each five minutes of class. And I got these kids to behave by reading them the lion, the witch and the wardrobe. And they were so fascinated that they behaved in order to get 10 minutes of the lion, the witch and the wardrobe. And they were so fascinated that they behaved in order to get 10 minutes of the lion,

the witch and the wardrobe every Sunday. Yeah, or if that's too long, the fairy tales. The fairy tales, come on, I love fairy tales. The real ones, not the modern. The real ones, no, the ones where real bad stuff happens. Yep. The Dillons said, my wife and I have read and loved Jesus' shock.

How can the laity help to reignite a love for the Eucharist in our parishes? Love is a contagion. It's a virus. Spread it. Love more yourself. Mitchell Godfrey wants an inappropriate joke. Okay. I have a really bad joke, but I'm afraid it's so bad. I don't know you enough that it might offend you.

Well, if it only insults man and not God, that's okay. It's pretty bad. No, it's my joke. I'm thinking of that one. I'll tell you after the cameras are off. No, it's really bad. Well, I'll tell you a bad one. And if yours is no worse than mine, you will tell it. No, it's really bad. Anyway, well, I'll tell you a bad one. All right. And if yours is no worse than mine, you will tell it.

I promise it's worse. You go. Why don't cannibals eat vegetables? Why don't why they can't digest their wheelchairs? Ah, that's good. Insulting Joe. Mine's definitely worse. Okay. Now, here's an honest question.

Would you be offended? Do you think if it's not about God? No. Would you would you hate me or get very offended and walk out? No. In fact, I love racist jokes. Okay, good. In fact, in fact, here's a historical event.

Back in the 70s in New York City. This, good. In fact, here's a historical event back in the 70s in New York City. You have tenure, right? This is true, yes. There was a large high school that was half black. Well, I mean, we don't have to do this, do we? Half black. No, this is not a joke. This is a historical story. They were self-segregated, the blacks and the whites. They didn't mingle, they didn't talk, they didn't like each other. And there was a new law that says you can't have segregation in the senior prom. So the senior prom had to integrate.

So the teachers tried to integrate them by the latest psychological techniques and they said it's failing. They're not taking us seriously. They don't believe in this stuff, this political stuff. So they had a large contingent of cops at the senior prom. And the cops weren't needed at all because the blacks and the whites, when he started to mingle, started to tell racist jokes against themselves and against each other.

And they all broke up in laughter. And they made great friends that night. They made kind of like self-deprecating jokes. Exactly. Thursday, can you mute both of our microphones so I can tell him my joke? I want to tell you about Hello, which is the number one downloaded prayer app in the world. It's outstanding. Hello.com slash Matt Fradd.

Sign up over there right now and you will get the first three months for free. That's like a lot of time. You can decide whether it's useful to you or not, whether it's helpful. sign up over there right now and you will get the first three months for free. That's like a lot of time. You can decide whether it's useful to you or not, whether it's helpful. If you don't like it, you can always quit. Hallow.com slash Matt Fradd. I use it, my family uses it. It's fantastic. There are over 10,000 audio guided prayers, meditations and music, including my lo-fi. Hallow has been downloaded over 15 million times in 150 different countries

that helps you pray helps you meditate helps you sleep better it helps you build a daily routine and a habit of prayer there's honestly so much excellent stuff on this app that it's difficult to get through it all just go check it out hello.com slash Matt Fred the link is in the description below it even has an entire section for kids so if you're a parent you could play little Bible stories for them at night. It'll help them pray. Fantastic. Hello.com.

Slash. Matt. I want to tell you about a course that I have created for men to overcome pornography. It is called strive 21.com slash Matt. You go there right now or if you text strive toVE to 66866, we'll send you the link. It's 100% free and it's a course I've created to help men to give them the tools to overcome pornography. Usually men know that porn is wrong, they don't need me or you to convince them that

it's wrong. What they need is a battle plan to get out. And so I've distilled all that I've learned over the last 15 or so years as I've been talking and writing on this topic into this one course. Think of it as if you and I could have a coffee over the next 21 days and I would kind of guide you along this journey. That's basically what this is. It's incredibly well produced. We had a whole camera crew come and film this. And I think it'll be a really a real help to you. And it's also not an isolated course that you go through on your own because literally

tens of thousands of men have now gone through this course. And as you go through the different videos, there's comments from men all around the world encouraging each other, offering to be each other's accountability partners and things like that. Strive 21, that's strive21.com slash Matt or as I say, text, text, strive to six, six, eight, six, six to get started today. You won't regret it because people must be hating this. I mean, how rude is this of us who just like ignore them? It'd be like if we were at a party chatting and people were listening, we were like piss off. We need to chat about some things. I love,

I love jokes that are offensive. We're not on, right? No, I think we are. We are, all right. Yes, Thursday, we're on. I'll be, I'll be proper. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The best jokes are the ones you tell on yourself. About yourself? Yeah.

Do you have one about you? No, but- Is that what you meant? I may have misunderstood you. The best jokes- Well, blacks have a right to tell jokes on blacks and whites have a nice joke on whites and so on. Yeah All right. Well, we're dancing very close to the edge. So I've got another question for you here from Mitch H Why is Augustine's confession so great?

What other works from Augustine would you recommend? his sermons Especially the sermons on the Psalms, they're great because there's everything in them. Good and evil, man and God, joy and sorrow, ignorance and wisdom. It's the complete package. Everyone identifies with Augustine. He's not a professor, a specialist. He's not narrow. He's a lover.

And he is absolutely and totally honest. Yeah. This is a good question. This is from Lindsay Hickman. She says, honest question from a Protestant seriously considering Catholicism. And I promise I'm not judging, just curious. Why does it seem like Baptists, Methodists know more scripture than Catholics? I've grown up Baptist and attended church at least three times a week, had to memorize entire chapters for Bible quizzes, chapter drills, Sunday school, Bible study. Is it just not a thing in Catholicism? And why is that?

It's becoming a thing in Catholicism. One of the best results of Vatican II was vastly greater knowledge and reading and love of scripture among Catholics. And this is something that Catholics can and should learn from Protestants. I love that answer. It's like, because the question, she may have expected a defensive answer, but what you gave her is like, yes, you're right. You have a lot to offer us and we would love to learn from you. Yes. And the old Protestant hymns. We're learning those too.

Almighty fortress. 18th century is the century of the best hymns. People like Isaac Watts. You know what song I just think is the most beautiful song? Let us build the city. Let us build it, yes. We're in charge. So here's what you should do.

You become pope, excommunicate whoever's playing that, then resign. I could tell you some stories about the St. Euless Jesuits who write that that miserable music. Okay. Blame the Jesuits. Oh yeah? Some of the Jesuits are the most wonderful people in the world. Some of them are bad heretics. Yeah. But they're like New York. New York's my favorite city. It's dirty, it's corrupt, it's got all that bad stuff in it, but it's got a lot of wonderful good stuff in it too.

Less like the Jesuits. Yeah. Some of them are great. Mitchell Godfrey says, what book of Peters would he recommend to read first for someone who's not read you before? First Peter and second Peter. The two best Peters. Very good.

I like that answer. Abigail says, Dr. Craift, often I'm plagued by old sins that I haven't forgotten, that I have forgotten to confess. So her point is, she's forgotten them. It's not that she's saying she doesn't want to, but she's scared that she's forgotten them. How can God bestow grace upon us when even after confession, we are still riddled with sins that we've forgotten about, or of bad habits that are hard to break. I think the answer to that question comes from, of all people, Freud.

Freud discovered the power of the subconscious. Our mind and will is not just on a conscious level, but on a deeper unconscious level. And if your desire is to confess all your sins, and if that's your deepest desire, and if you've forgotten some, God takes that into account. He'll judge you by your motive rather than by your execution. And secondly, if this bothers you, then next time you go to confession, confess all the sins that you remember. The Church doesn't and can't command us to confess the sins that we don't remember, only the sins that we do.

In fact, Aquinas has a whole article on this where he says essentially that if you forget your sins, they're forgiven. But if you intentionally withhold a serious sin, nothing's forgiven. There's a category in Dietrich von Hildebrand, the great personalist philosopher about that. He calls it the super actual. Aquinas distinguishes between things that are just potential, for instance, my ability to wrestle a manakee and things that are actual, for instance, my participation in this little debate here. But there's a third category, things that are super actual. There's a third category, things that are super actual. Everything that a priest does, he does as a priest, not necessarily just sacred things, but that's a priest doing, a priest eating.

All the things that I do as a married man, I do as a married man, not as a bachelor, even though they're not specifically married things. In other words, all that we know that we are is involved in everything that we do, usually on an unconscious level, including the desire for repentance and the desire to turn away from sin. And God knows that and takes that into account and forgives us. Yeah. Maybe a nice answer, a true answer would be to say, God is for you. He's not your enemy.

You have an enemy and that's not God. God is your father. He's not looking for a reason to condemn you. He's opened heaven under your feet. He is, to quote one good spiritual author, haunted with the desire to save you at all costs. You can trust him more than you've ever trusted anybody. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Robert Williams says besides Pascal Ponce's,

what other works have most awakened the hearts and minds of young people in your classes? Boethius is the constellation of philosophy. Beautiful. Plato's Gorgias, which is basically the Republic without the politics, Augustine's confessions and the Brothers Karamazov and the Lord of the Rings. Amy says, how I wish I had gone to Boston College instead of at Vassar. And had Dr. Crave for my philosophy professor, not only for the sheer joy of being in his presence but also it would have saved me 25 years of Calvinism not being a practicing Catholic.

Thank you Matt and Dr. Crave. Thank you. But what's the question? That's there's no question. Is she just a statement saying she likes you. Ryan KKKK says, how do we practically avail ourselves of God's graces? Well, that's easy. Oh, good. How do you avail yourself of the rain? You just go out into where it is and where it is is everything good that you do and where it is is the church and her sacraments and where it is is the scriptures.

Frank Miller says, Thank you, Professor Craift. You have aided me greatly in my ministry as director of OCIA for 30 years. You offered a definition in your Sunday Reflection Cycle B, 4th Sunday of Lent, resolving apparent conflict between salvation by faith alone versus faith without works is dead. To do this you apparently broaden Thomas definitions used to describe the rational soul to make either narrow the meaning of the one you, St. James, or broaden it as you, St. Paul. This is a great inspiration. How did it come to you? Not sure which spiritual writer gave me this image, but it was the image of a growing plant. Faith is the roots and hope is the stem and the works of love are the fruit.

It's all one thing, not two things. So faith is the beginning of love and God is love and faith leads through hope to charity. So it's not a two part ticket to heaven, it's a one part ticket to heaven. Beautiful. Thursday, were we muted there for a while when we shouldn't have been? Okay, I see Kyle in the comments saying stuff. Oh, I see. Praise God.

Thank you, Kyle. Well, what a joy this has been. Yes. Thank you for coming out and it's just to hang out with you. So lovely. I never say this to another interviewer, but it's been a joy for me, too. Yeah. Well, as you said, it's not really interview. It's a chat, isn't it? Maybe that's what makes it enjoyable. Why don't you like interviews? Because I'm a nervous little child who is unduly sensitive to my

my ugliness, my defects, my stupidity, and I don't like people looking at me and either saying, oh, what a nice guy he is or what a bad guy he is. And that's a fault. Either saying, oh, what a nice guy he is, or what a bad guy he is. And that's a fault. Little children often have it. They don't want to be seen. They want to see. That's why they love to play hide and seek. And we're just little children underneath. Yeah, I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. I think for me, I don't like interviews because I don't believe the other person's really asking me the questions they want to ask me.

It often feels staged, cagey questions they think they should ask. That's a far better answer than mine. Well, that's just why I don't like them. Like conversations more. And that's what this technology has afforded us, right?

I mean, back in the 90s, you couldn't do a three hour interview and have have here for three hours that's amazing have we yeah Wow without a break yeah without a break Wow guess how long I interviewed Jimmy Akin for two days ago four hours six hours and 28 minutes Wow and we had a four-minute break in the middle Wow but of course the difference would be Jimmy that man he could talk for six hours on any topic. And I don't know if you know, Jimmy, but he's a very, very bright fella. He is indeed.

He talks the way Aquinas writes. He'll say there are three reasons. Oh, my goodness. And then when he's well, that's maybe two. I don't mean to be over. I don't mean to praise him too much. But but he'll say, you know, the first point. And then there's like three subheadings.

You know, he's an apologist who talks like that. David Anders ever hear him? Oh, he's brilliant. I love to get him on the show. Yeah. He speaks so clearly. What do you do? Here's a good question. Maybe it might be something for me as well as others. But what do you do when you realize you're not only not as good as you would like to be, but you now know it's not possible for you to be as good as you would like to be. When you're young, you figure, well, I can get there. But then you go in this world, in this world, like we all have different gifts. I'm the pancreas within the body of Christ. And I sometimes like to be the eye, you know? Well, sometimes I think I'm the gas that

comes out of the ears. What you do is you simply trust in God's grace and God's sense of humor. Nothing else you can do. Yeah. And it's not blind faith. I mean, how could God possibly do more than he did? He went to hell for us. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? For a minute there he seemed to become an atheist. He stepped right into the devil's trap. Now, for me, he did that? For this idiot? He's either insane or he's absolute, total, infinite, pure love and mercy. So he's not going to point a finger at me and say, why didn't you do this? My father, a very good father, I would come home with pretty much straight

A's, but once in a while I'd get a B, and he always focused on that B. Yeah, of course you got straight A's, but why did you get that B? God's not like that. He's better than that. Mason Hickman See, my dad had much lower expectations. Yes, you got all C's, but what about this? No, yes, you got all D's, but yeah, all the other way around here. Yeah, very good.

What are you looking forward to in the next week? And it can be boring or exciting. Well, this is school vacation week, so I'm looking forward to getting back to classes because I really enjoy classes. Good. And winter, how's that coming? Is it beginning to warm up? There is almost no winter in Boston. We've had only four inches of snow all winter, at least in history.

So warming. Fantastic. I like to have a warming, because I like summer. snow winter in Boston. We've had only four inches of snow all winter, at least in history so far. Global warming. Fantastic. I like global warming because I like summer. I'd like it a bit warmer. Is that a crime? Is it a crime? All right. Well, thank you very much. It was great. Thank you, Matt. It was a joy. It really was.