Pints With Aquinas - Philosophy, Philosophy, Philosophy w/ Dr Alex Plato

Episode Date: November 3, 2022

Matt chats with Dr. Alex Plato (professor of philosophy at Franciscan University of Steubenville) about philosophy, and philosophy, and philosophy. Locals supporters, ask your questions for Dr. Plato here: https://mattfradd.locals.com/post/2993031/todays-interview A Primer on the Absolute Primacy of Christ: https://amzn.to/3G0sSnF Sponsors: Hallow: https://hallow.com/matt Exodus90: https://exodus90.com/matt-home/ Parler: https://parler.com/mattfradd Website: Pints With Aquinas: https://pintswithaquinas.com/

Alright, we are live. Oh, we'll be live before you said that or no. How's it going? Good. How you doing? Good to see you Man, this is great. This is great. What a great life we lead. So are you off the day? I have to teach later on I'm teaching a a class on st. Bonaventure. Mm-hmm So I really enjoy that class I'm no expert in Bonaventure, but I really love him and and the Franciscan tradition as you know You'd be an expert in Bonaventure compared to all of class. I'm no expert in Bonaventure, but I really love him. And in the Franciscan tradition, as you know, you'd be an expert in Bonaventure compared to all of us. I'm sure it's probably just that, you know, people who are super expert. Well, I know who he is, for example.

You know, some people know that. So but you do, you know who he is. Do you have a class? Actually, I know what he's the patron saint of. Bowel issues. True story. Is it Thomas Aquinas, patron saint of universities? Wow. Bonaventure. Let's see.

Born of venture is the patron saint of enter. Let's have a look here. Bowel disorders. Is that it? There's usually a long list. Is that the only thing? I don't know, but that is so funny in like the arguments, you know, back and forth between Thomists and Franciscans how that's never come up.

Well, there's some stories on him. I forgot the details about him doing the dishes and being a humble man. So it makes sense. Well, you were emphatically saying bowel issues. I had the camera on Dr. Plato. Can we do another one of you doing that so someone can take it out of context? Can we put it somewhere? Yeah. Ready, set, bowel issues. Okay, we got it.

Great. Good. So is the whole class on Bonaventure? Yes, the whole class. So it's a cross-listed class. It's history, theology, and philosophy. And it's part of the Franciscan minor, the Franciscan studies minor at Franciscan University.

So they have a Franciscan studies minor there, which is great. Maybe someday they'll have a major. That's the hope, eh? Yeah, that's the hope. For me, anyway. I've only ever read Journey, The Mind of God. And I remember when I read it, it was like, this is like-

Oh, it's amazing. This is like mysticism. Amazing. In the way that you think of Eastern mysticism, by a Christian. Yeah, and he combines, I think, the best that you think of Eastern mysticism by Christian. Yeah, and he combines, I think, the best of the sort of scholastic analytical mindset is behind everything. You can see it. Like he wrote the sentence commentaries like all the students of the day, right? And then he became minister general of the Franciscans. And then

he started writing a lot sort of different style. I mean, he was also an arts master. So he learned how to do that as well. The grammar, logic, rhetoric, that kind of stuff. And he wrote these amazing, amazing pieces which are not in the disputed question form. So it's not like the Summa, right? Where you've got the objections and the replies and the replies to objections and etc. Sort of the dialectical format. It's in this beautiful ordering of threes and threes and threes and layers of threes because obviously this world is made by God who's a Trinity. So it bears his imprints. beautiful ordering of threes and threes and threes and layers of threes because obviously this world is made by God who's a Trinity. So it bears his imprints.

What's some Bonaventure's main insights? Insights or sort of contributions to Christian philosophy. Yeah. Well, he's one of, he's really well known for his exemplarism, right? And so that's one of his, I mean, Aquinas was an exemplarist. What does that mean? The exemplarist, it's a view of how to account for the creation. So the creation, yes, of course, the creation is rational. And so God thought about it logically prior to when he

did it. Right. And so he had divine ideas and those divine ideas are the exemplars of everything that he made. Yes, no, I know. Right. And so he knows those divine ideas because he knows himself. So in knowing himself in a certain way, of course, he knows how all the infinite ways in which he could be participated in. Right. And so he knows those things prior, logically prior to the creation. Pterodactyls. Exactly. Pterodactyls, redness, lions, matphrad, bread, perfect bread.

Perfect bread. Perfect bread. Yeah. Yeah. So. But that bread, yeah. Yeah. But that's something he shares with Aquinas, unless he explains it differently. They differ in certain ways, which is really interesting. And then of course, SCOTUS differs in an interesting way. So I find sort of as a non-expert

looking back into the scholastic era, I always find it really fascinating to compare those three, Bonaventure, Aquinas and SCOTUS. I think they're kind of the big three. And I think where they agree is the sort of center of our Catholic intellectual tradition, and where they disagree is really interesting. Do you ever meet people who are open

to converting to Catholicism, but things about Aquinas and his teaching that don't actually have to be believed as he states them are obstacles to them becoming Catholic, and at which point you introduce them to Bonaventure and Scotus? Yes, yes, no, that's totally true. There are things like that.

I know that some of my friends that I went to Talbot School of Theology with, where did my masters, you know, J.P. Moreland and Doug Guyvitt and all those people, Scott Ray, William Lane Craig is a research professor there. So I remember one of my friends who went to Notre Dame, he told me that he just couldn't become Catholic because of the doctrine of divine simplicity. And when he explained it,

it was Aquinas's explanation of it, which is a very kind of, I guess, very strict view, you could say. So, just there's absolutely no conceivable aspects or parts in God whatsoever, and that's what it means for him to be simple. I mean, the minimal commitment that everybody, Bonaventure, Scotus and Aquinas all agree on, is a little bit less strict than that. So you can take it more strict or you don't have to take it more strict, but it's the idea that God being simple has no parts and so he can't be composed or caused to be made and he can't be decomposed or caused to be unmade, right? And so there's this sort of simplicity or non-complexity, right, in the way that, you

know, satisfies his first cause or uncaused cause or, yeah. So he takes it in a strict way and this friend of mine, he couldn't see that, the truth of that. And interestingly, there's an article written by Peter Simpson, who I really like. I really like a lot of his work. He's got a great website called Aristotleophile. And you can go to his current work section.

He's got a lot of free translations of lots of interesting stuff there. But he wrote an article and I can't remember what he wrote it, who he wrote it for. Maybe Crisis? Maybe not. Anyway, it's called, Have You Tried SCOTUS? And it tells the story of Anthony Kenny, the famous agnostic, ex-priest. And Anthony Kenny tells the story of how he was in seminary and he ran into lots of problems with how to understand transubstantiation.

And when he spelled all of his problems, it was because he was only taught the Thomistic view of transubstantiation. And so he couldn't overcome that. In this article, Simpson's explaining if he would have known about the Scottistic view, right? And don't ask me to explain it because I couldn't do that off the top of my head. explaining if he would have known about the Scottistic view, right, and don't ask me to explain it because I couldn't do that off the top of my head, but if he would have known that, then it would have been an

option again, like you said, where, you know, we don't have to just go with one doctor. And I mean, I think Aquinas himself would be a fan of the plurality of our tradition, and I think it's really important, that plurality. Yeah, that's a good point. Because we're finite. But I'm sure a lot of Catholics struggle with that, right? Because especially converts to the faith, they just want a final definitive answer on all of these many things, especially if they come from a Protestant background where they've been given all this different information. They want everything kind of neat and tidy.

But now we're kind of saying, well, that there are actually different takes on things and allowances. How do you kind of reconcile that? And that there are actually different takes on things and allowances. How do you kind of reconcile that and why is that a benefit? Yeah. I think we all are sort of naturally dogmatic, right? We want to know the absolute truth and we want to know it absolutely certainly. And we don't want to compromise that. We want to rest there. But I think that there's a pride that's always involved with that, where you could maybe contrast being properly dogmatic with being ideological. So being ideological is where that particular way

of stating it, right, there's no other way to understand it, no other way to interpret it, you're not gonna be open-minded to hear somebody else, right? And so it's like, you're almost proud, right, of possessing the truth. It's sort of like you have a possession of the truth, right, as opposed to you've been given this truth, right? The dogmas that we believe have been given

to us. We take what we've been given and we hand them on. We can't create those. We can't invent those, right? And so I think that the idea of there being a plurality in the tradition is that we're at the absolute limits of trying to use our mind, right, not to possess the truth and know it like that, but to raise our minds to God who is the truth. And so we want to be contemplating Him. And so I love the Bonaventurian angle on that, which, and this, and Scodus perfected that as well, which is theology itself, the science, right, of the truth, right, about God is for

the purpose of loving God. So that's the ultimate purpose, is to love God. It's a practical thing in that sense. But the pinnacle of Christianity isn't to be able to refute Protestant succinctly. Exactly. Ah, to love God. Exactly. And so that's why St. Francis famously said, right, hey, if you're studying it is extinguishing the love of God, then stop doing that. But if it doesn't extinguish the love of God,

that's fine. You know, the famous letter to St. Anthony, can we, is it okay if we teach the brothers theology? Because he was so- I don't know about this. Yeah, so Francis, you know, warned about this because it can puff us up, knowledge puffs up. Yeah. And so it becomes a temptation, I think.

Yeah. Right? And so we have this, you know, pride in possessing the truth. And I think, I mean, I can reflect on myself when I was a Protestant. I think I had that a bit when I was a Protestant. I think I had that a bit. I was a rationalist. Okay. Right? That's how I, that was sort of the last thing I had to overcome when I became

a Catholic. And I think there's a lot of, if I remember some of the comments on some of the last time we were talking, is some people, when I said this, right, they said, oh, he doesn't think faith and reason are connected, or he thinks it's just faith alone. Yeah. Sure. And so, I think that what's it mean to be a rational he doesn't think faith and reason are connected, or he thinks it's just faith alone. Yeah. Sure. And so I think that what's it mean to be a rationalist doesn't mean that you think, to deny rationalism doesn't mean you're disconnecting faith and reason. It means things like, well, the Trinity, can you comprehend that?

What's it mean for there to be one being in three persons? What's it mean for there to be an infinite being who's omnipresent, omnipowerful? What's it mean for these things? We can't actually comprehend that. And what's it mean in the real presence of the Eucharist? What's it mean for Christ to be non-dimensively present in every particle all over the world in the consecrated house? How do I understand that? I can't right and so I think I think that dogmas like that that the central dogmas of our faith

Exceed our ability to understand and comprehend But what reason can do and this is straight from from the sum and I read this right before I converted It was really important for me is Reason can show you that it's not impossible to believe those things. And that's important. That's a very contradictory. Yes. They're not inherently contradictory. And the arguments that show they are all fail. And so then you're left with a mystery and we have to believe these things are mysteries. And if they're not mysteries, right,

then we don't understand them as they should be, which is beyond our comprehension, right? But we can see. So maybe an analogy is, you know, you can look way over there at a hillside and you can see there's somebody there. Yeah. You can see it's not an elephant. This is Aquinas' argument for why we can know God exists in a particular way intuitively. He even uses that example to know that somebody is approaching is not the same to know that

Peter is approaching. Yes. That's the exact words he uses. Wow, I didn't know that. It's like, you know, someone's coming, but okay, but you don't know who specifically it is. Exactly. And so that's to me a mystery.

It's like, you know something, but you know something beyond what you know, which is, I think that's a brilliant and beautiful paradox of human reason. Human reason itself transcends itself, right? It's like we can know there's stuff beyond what we can know, and we really know that there's stuff beyond what we can know. Isn't that kind of, that's kind of startling to me. When I think about that. We know with our reason that there's stuff beyond, right?

What our reason can know. It's not nothing. The stuff beyond our reason isn't nothing. Okay. It's not. So in other words, reason can see that there's stuff beyond it. Is it even on a natural level you mean? Yeah, on a natural level.

So we can see mysteries. We can see mysteries naturally, like beyond it. Is it even on a natural level you mean? Yeah, on a natural level. Yeah. So we can see mysteries. Right. We can see mysteries naturally, like space and time, physicality, and we can see supernatural mysteries like the nature of God, right? The incarnation, the hypostatic union, the real presence, right? The inspiration of scripture. All these things are to me supernatural mysteries and they're similar to natural mysteries.

If you look in a telescope, you can see that there's something there. And that if you had close access to it, you could know about that thing, but you can't at the present. Yeah. Yeah. Where did, uh, where does the Franciscan tradition and the Thomistic tradition disagree most vigorously or most starkly? Where's one of the, that's a good question. A lot of when I, when these differences come up, the students at Franciscan often, they want to hear, now

where do they differ? And again, I would just say, I'm no expert in this matter, but I'm an avid enthusiast for the Franciscan school, especially SCOTUS. And so I know the philosophy part more than the theology part. But I mean, one important difference with Scotus philosophically is how he understands the nature of human reason. So he understands that we can say things about God truly and use a term. So we can say God is wise, for example.

So is wise is a predicate. We know it's true of God. We could also say that about Socrates. Socrates is wise. And so we can predicate of man something, or creatures, and of the creator something. And so the question is, how do I take the terms that I use for human beings or creatures like Socrates is wise, how do I use that term with God if he exceeds our comprehension? That's the mystery. So I've got to be able to explain that bit.

So I've got to preserve God's transcendence because he's incomprehensible. And we know that negative theology is really important. Yes. Right. Or saying what God is not, right? Not saying that he's nothing but saying he exceeds our understanding. He's more than we can understand, right?

Right. So that's one constraint. Because we recognize it's not univocal language that we're using when we say Socrates and God are wise. If it's equivocal and everything we say about God is equivocal, then we can literally know no things about God. Exactly. So it has to be analogical? Exactly. So that's the dispute. And so I think that the idea of the analogy of being is that God is infinite. Creatures are finite and there can be no in-between type of being

that shares both of those things. That's impossible. Being is either infinite or being is finite. So there's a chasm between those, an unbridgeable one. But the question is, can we have a concept that bridges that? So can the concept bridge that partially, let's say? So to me, what Scodus did is he made up a new idea

in the history of philosophy, which is what I call it a quasi-univocal concept. So the concept is quasi-univocal. And so you can talk about what wisdom is, sort of in a lexical definition, let's say knowing all the important stuff, right? So Socrates knows all the important stuff. God knows all the important stuff. God knows all the

important stuff. And so, there's an overlap of the meaning of that. Right? But obviously, the way God knows all the important stuff is infinitely, and the way Socrates knows all the important stuff is finitely, full of errors, maybe some corruptions, but good enough for us to say that's true. And so, we can say now, take the concept of wisdom. Now we can understand that there's a core to when we say it of God that's the same as when we say it of Socrates. So that's quasi-univocal, but then there's part of the concept that isn't univocal.

So maybe I could say that it's the mode of the wisdom or the way the wisdom is had or the way the wisdom is true of God. So of God, it's infinite. So here's an analogy that SCOTUS uses. So we've got a white light, a white on the pines with Aquinas thing, a white on your mug. And that's a quality, right? But the quality comes with some sort of intensity. So the whiteness is the quality and the intensity is the mode of the quality.

That's what SCOTUS would say. So there is no such thing as a whiteness that has no intensity. All whiteness that's real, that's actually instantiated, has some intensity. Well, that's the same with being. And by intensity, what do you mean? Like the brightness, roughly, of the white. In the way we use intensity, usually.

Yes. So that light is a more intense. Exactly, exactly. Maybe it's like brighter white or something like that. And so then we have a distinction between the mode of whiteness and the whiteness itself, but there can be no real whiteness that doesn't have an intensity.

Because if it didn't have an intensity, it wouldn't be anything. It has to have an intensity to exist, right? But here you're not just talking about on the visual spectrum or something physical about it, are you? No, that's physical. Yeah. The intensity of the white has to do with something. I didn't know if you're using a philosophical term that I was. No, no, no, no. I mean, just like whatever a person knows, maybe they use a different term.

Sure. Artists have lots of terms for colors and their intensity and their hue and all this. I don't know. Yes. Yeah. But you can see that all the whiteness is different. Yes. But they're the same whiteness. Yep. I get that. Yep. And so that's the next step. So that distinction is, so SCOTUS calls that an intrinsic mode.

My teeth used to be more intensely white than they currently are. I know. Mine are not intensely white at all. But coffee, coffee is better than intense. Than pure white teeth. That's right. So we have that thing to work with, right? The quality and the intensity.

So the analogy is when you have being, being itself. So the being wise, right? Wisdom itself is a quality, let's say. Okay. Right? And so that has a mode as well, which is parallel to the intensity. What we would say, is it maximal? Is it the most wise, possibly

conceivable? That's the kind God has. Right? Or is it the kind of wisdom that we know is full of finitude, corruption, partial? That's the kind Socrates has. So what Scotus says is if there is that quasi-univocal overlap, right, between the concepts, only part of the concepts overlapping, not the whole thing. So it's not univocal like Aquinas and Bonaventure would deny, right? So, Scotus would also deny that there's such a univocal concept as they denied, but he invented this new kind. So we've got this partial overlap. And so the question is, if that overlaps, now we can understand how we got a word from creatures like wisdom. We know Socrates is wise, right? And we know, you know, Confucius is wise and whoever else.

Right? And we can imagine subtracting all the finitude, right? With our conceptual imagination, if I can use that. Subtract the finitude, subtract the imperfections. And now we just have the core left. Of course, nothing can actually have that core. That's just an abstraction you might say. But then we can imagine amplifying it to infinity.

To infinity. And now we're going, yeah, now we amplify it to no conceivable greater degree. But of course, we're not understanding it as soon as we do. Now we've gone into negative theology. So I've done positive theology first, which is what Bonaventure says. You have to do positive theology first, so you can now say God is wise. And then when we amplify it up, we're beyond what we can understand now. We're saying, he's wise in a way that I can't comprehend. I think that makes sense.

So that is a difference that is right at the core of the philosophy I find of Aquinas and Scotus. Now let me say one more thing about that is that the thing that a lot of students are worried about that I meet is when you say that there's a univocal concept of being or univocal or quasi-univocal concept of being, it seems to remove the transcendence. So that's a problem, right? And then it seems to them like you're denying the analogy of being.

And so actually what SCOTUS says is the only way to preserve the analogy of being is the quasi-univocal concept of being. Because there is no being that can compare to God. He's the standard of being. Everything else is a pale reflection of Him. A participation in Him. Without Him is literally nothing. So it can't be that you've got creatures here and God here under some genus term being that

they share. Everybody, Bonaventure, Aquinas, Scotus, everybody denies that, right? So their analogy of being is denying that, and Scotus does deny that, right? I'm sorry, not deny the analogy being, affirms the analogy being by denying that idea, the genus term, that the two share, because the two beings in concrete reality are infinitely different, right? But there's a quasi-univocal concept that unites them. Does that make sense? Yes. I wonder though, if you look at what a quamicuinous of this is, we can predicate things about God. Yes.

So I wonder how different these things actually are. That's a good question. I'd have to go back and look at it. There was a really great article by Garrett Smith in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, which is the kind of biggest Catholic philosophers publication in America. And he wrote about this idea of SCOTUS, and that's where I started using the term quasi-univocal. That's your term? Yeah, it's my term, because he talks about the kind of univocal...

It's going to look something up in Aquinas. Go for it. The kind of univocal concept that Bonaventure and Aquinas denied, right? Was the same thing SCOTUS denied. And SCOTUS invented a qualification of that in a way that they had never seen before. So I don't know what they think about what he said because that idea didn't exist

at the time they were writing. And so maybe they could affirm that, I'm not sure. But here's one way to look at it theologically, and this is my friend Jared told me this as a way to think about it. Christ, right, is hypothetically united, right? The divine and human natures are hypothetically united, right? How does that work? Right?

I mean, there's a human nature, right, which is created, right? And there's the divine nature, and they're united somehow. So theologically, there's a human nature, right? Which is created, right? And there's the divine nature and they're united somehow. So theologically, there's like an analog. There's a way to unite, right? Incident and finite, right? The two radically different types of being, there's a way to unite them in the person, right? Of the word.

Okay. And so that is like a theological analog that kind of helps you see somehow. You can unite them. Yeah, somehow there's a union here. And that's, I would say, an analog to it. Oh my gosh, that's fantastic. So that's one really important thing.

One really important thing. But they both, here's what they agree on. And like I said, I care about what they agree on too. They both agree God is transcendent. They both agree that we have natural knowledge of God. Okay. Right? Yeah. And they both agree that being is not some sort of genus term

that subsumes finite creatures and creator under some general thing that's a genus of being that includes God and creatures. They both deny that. So they all agree on that. And they both affirm the analogy of being, meaning the analogy of concrete being. God's being is on a different level than created being, which is nothing without God Himself

making it something at all moments. So they agree on that, but they disagree on this. It seems like they do. I mean, I don't know what Aquinas would say. He didn't have that notion. Right? Well, so many thoughts. That's one thing. I don't know what Aquinas would say. He didn't have that notion. Well, so many thoughts. That's one thing.

Here's one thing I'm sure frustrates you as somebody who is very interested and a beneficiary of the Franciscan intellectual tradition is that too often people will say things like, I'm more Franciscan. And what they mean is I'm a heretic. Like here's an example, right? And maybe heretics too strong a word, but you and I went to this debate.

Yes, I'm just thinking of that on lying, right? And someone gets up and says, well, I'm more Franciscan, right? And therefore I'm OK with telling right falsehoods. Right. And you're like, no, yeah. Bonaventure is 100% against. I think that there's a sad, a sad story to tell, I think, about the Franciscan intellectual tradition, right? And it's the story, it's the same sad story of the rise of modernity and modernism, right? In the 1800s, the schools of theology were being gutted, right?

And so they used to have the different seminaries and different schools existed for each kind of tradition, right? And then universities have chairs, right? Like there would be even like a nominalist chair, right? You know, like a SCOTUS chair, you know, a Dominican chair. There'd be these chairs. And so then the plurality of the tradition was preserved in the institution. But those institutions began to be corroded. And then you have the rise of historical criticism and the attacks on Christianity in 1800s until you get Leo XIII saying, guys, we're losing, let's call out the Marine Corps, the attorney patres, right? Let's go back to scholasticism. Of course, there's an emphasis on Thomas, but in that

document he mentions Bonaventure. But the emphasis on Thomas, and that makes sense because Thomas is the universal doctor. Thomas is a genius of organizing and teaching, right? You look at the summa, right? It's probably the best summa. It wasn't the only summa. Lots of people wrote summas, but that's, it stands out. The fact that you don't know of any other summa,

at least most people don't. Yes, exactly. And so it deserved a pride of place, right? But what happened is I think after that, of course there were scholars, right? Like say Alan Wolter, right? Or Efrem Batoni, right? Or Titus Szabo, these scholars were Franciscan scholastics

in the neo scholastic era from Leo XIII, but their tradition got preserved in kind of like rarefied academic settings, right? It didn't continue to produce Franciscan friars. So you get to the point in a couple summers ago, I taught some TORs in my summer class and they said, I take classes at the Dominican house at CUF because there is no Franciscan school. There's no set of theologians who are passing on the Franciscan school. And again, the reason for that, is it partly because Thomas was able to articulate?

I think it has to do with the destruction of Catholic culture, right, in the modern era and it didn't get repaired, right? And so now we're still in this kind of warfare scenario. But how come that destruction in modern culture didn't affect the Dominicans as much as the Franciscans? Because I think with the attorney patrician, you have the renewal of the neo-scholastic tradition comes up again. But if he had of, but what is there to point to in the Franciscan tradition that

all Catholic philosophers could have turned to? I mean, I my understanding is that SCOTUS is very difficult to read. He's not as clear and precise and excellent in his writing and teaching as Thomas is like, is there, is there someone comparable in the Franciscan tradition that we could have turned to? Yeah, no, I think, I think there is. And you're right that the traditions are not parallel in this regard, right? Because the Dominicans made Thomas their one teacher or doctor, which was a big debate

in the Dominican order in the 1300s. And some of them didn't want to make him the one doctor. They wanted a plurality of doctors and the Franciscans didn't have a comparable debate. But as soon as Scotus lived his life and did his thing, he was sort of understood as with Bonaventure as kind of the team. And then there were other kind of Franciscan theologians and philosophers kind of got glommed around it. But there isn't a single thing that you can point to easily. But if we hadn't lost our culture, there's all kinds of Summas written by like, Scodus' disciple, Antonius Andreas. He wrote a Summa. It's very clear, but it's in Latin. Unless you go to Peter Simpson's website,

you can find it in English. But there's lots of these things. There's manuals that are Franciscan manuals, just there were to mystic manuals Yeah, but we lost a lot of a lot of that is in Latin But nowadays if you go I would say a good start would be if you take Bonaventure's Brevaloquium, which is kind of like his What is that would shorter summa or the summa of the summa and like a like a brief treatment, right? It's a brief treatment of all of theology, but it's one volume. It's like that Right. And so that has it's it's not in disputed question form. So it doesn't have, here's all the objections, right? Here's my long response and here's all the responses, objections. It's

sort of like, just here's my answer, my answer on the question. So here's the question. Here's the answer. Here's the question. Here's the answer. Is it any good? Yeah, it's really good. It's really good. And, but it's not going to give you the kind of dialectical thing you want there. Right. It's interesting that you point that out, that there are multiple teachers within the Franciscan tradition, but you know, for all intents and purposes, one of the Dominican tradition, because, uh, it's, you know,

people usually recognize that you can't get too Thomas in the same room without them disagreeing about what Thomas said. And I wonder if that is a result of limiting it to all one person. And you've got all these different varied interpretations of him. Whereas in the Franciscan tradition, you get, you get a similar, um, you do, you get a spread because being in the school, put it this way, the Franciscan school and the Thomas school, it's, there's certain traits and qualities that are, that are required to be in the school, put it this way, the Franciscan school and the Thomas school. It's there's certain traits and qualities that are,

that are required to be in the school, you might say. So certain teachings you'd affirm to are certain core ideas, right? But then what makes, let's say what makes a Bernard Lonergan, a transcendental Thomas, what makes him in the same room as say, you know, a neo scholastic Thomas, right? Of Garagula garage or something. Why are they in the same room? Like, you know, a neo-scholastic Thomist, right, of Garagul Lagrange or something. Why are they in the same room? Like, why are they both Thomists? What does that mean? Right? So I think a minimal, minimal definition of being a Thomist would be when you get to questions of theology and to a degree philosophy, right, your main conversation partner is Thomas Aquinas.

And so you go to him first for the answers, right, and then you go to him to learn how to talk about the answers and to learn about the issues. So it's like he's your teacher, so he's your man. Well, me being in the Franciscan school is sort of like Bonaventure is my man and Scotus is my man. Like that's my first inclination is to go there and see what they say. Because when I became a Catholic, again, I'm not an expert in medieval philosophy or these guys, but when I became a Catholic, I thought, you know, there's these different schools. And because of my friendship with Jared, I had an earful all the time of the Franciscan stuff, which was really interesting.

I realized I already believe a lot of Franciscan stuff. So my understanding of free will, right, was already Franciscan. My understanding of the incarnation of Christ was already Franciscan. My understanding of the incarnation of Christ was already Franciscan, right? My understanding of the creation was already Franciscan. So I was like, then I thought, I'm just going to be in this school. I'm going to make a commitment to make this my school. And that's why, that's what I feel. You feel most at home with that. Yes, I feel most at home with that.

So if you had to choose drinking buddies to have a deep conversation with, it would be the Franciscans. Sure. Or I'd throw out Aquinas too to choose drinking buddies to have a deep conversation with, it would be the Franciscans. Sure, or I'd throw out Aquinas too for a drinking buddy. Absolutely. Pints with Aquinas any day. Pints with Bonaventure. Yeah, beers with Bonaventure.

Yeah, that's good. Yeah. Now, Bourbon with Bonaventure. Bourbon with Bonaventure. Often, Scodus gets painted with the same brush as with the broad brush. And they threw out Occam. And I think Occam and Scodus are both in the same bad camp. So why is Occam problematic, but Scodus isn't? That's a really good point.

And there was a really great article written by a C. I think it was. I forgot the name. It'll come to me, but it's about this. These narratives about Scodus that are kind of false. It's it's called the mispr but it's about these narratives about Scotus that are kind of false. It's called the misprisoning of Scotus, something like that's in the title of this. Yeah, it's an interesting title. But I think that Scotus and Occam need to be seen as very, very different.

For one, Scotus is like a confirmed doctor in the Franciscan order. So they see him as a doctor father, and rightly so. And there's been absolutely zero propositions of SCOTUS ever condemned. He's a completely reliable theological source. It's not the same with Occam. And then their metaphysics, so again, I'm a philosopher, so I see more that side, their metaphysics is very different. So Occam, the whole first part of his career was all about this metaphysical reductionistic program. Right?

So get rid of all the extra entities, right? That you don't need too much multiplication of entities and simplify everything. And so that's where you get sort of him being against SCOTUS. He's actually SCOTUS' enemy on the point of realism. Right? So sometimes you have the realism versus nominalism debate. And the way that's put is sometimes people say, well, that's the big problem with Occam. And I think they're right in a certain understanding of that term. But if you look into the actual debate about nominalism, it's a very complicated

debate and many modern philosophers even count Aquinas as a kind of moderate nominalist. And so it's like, okay, it's not, I don't think that's the core issue, right? I think the core issue is go back to the idea of divine ideas, right? So Aquinas, Bonaventure, Scotus, they all affirm with divine ideas. God logically prior to creation has ideas.

So his creation is completely rational and ordered, right? Occam completely denied divine ideas. He just said the created things are the divine ideas. So there isn't a divine idea prior to creation. It's pure will. So how do you understand creation as rational? That seems difficult for me to imagine. So now you have, this is the problem, right?

This to me is a more fundamental problem than the nominalism of Occ problem, right? This to me is a more fundamental problem than the nominalism of Occam, right? Is that he's not a realist with respect to divine ideas or common natures. What, where are those? So when I talk about things, how do I get the kind of rationality, the strong rationale that Abanav and Cher Aquinas

and SCOTUS get? So is it fair to say that Occam then is a strict normalist? Yes, yeah. For those at home, what is that? So he denies the common nature and the universal that you get from the common nature. So the common nature is the root for Aquinas and for Bonaventure and for Scotus

of the universal that we abstract. So if I say, what is dogness? Yes. You would answer that question by pointing to individual instantiations of dog. Yeah. For Occam, it's like, there is no common nature between all the dogs, right? There's like a- It's just individual.

Yeah. There's individual dogs and we have a concept that ties them all together in a certain way. Yes. Which is the case. I mean, that is how that even on- That's true. We need a concept. So the question is, is the concept a universal, right? So if I say the concept is a universal, right? Then I need some sort of I say well what makes it universal the fact that I made it a concept and that's

Yeah, yeah, or the fact that there's something out there that they share in common that are really in common. Yes So that's a quite a spot of interest Do for the incarnation if for us to be redeemed Christ had to take on a human nature if human nature doesn't exist? Or am I wrong in thinking that Occam would say that? I'm not sure what he said about that particular point, but we could draw out the implications in this way. And it seems like, I mean, I don't know how to understand things without universals and common natures. That to me destroys philosophy in a certain way. He must have thought it did something good for God. Well, I know there is an article by Peter Geech

that he writes about Occam's theology, right? And that's kind of the results of this nominalism are, God is so transcendent for Occam and so mysterious for Occam, right? That he's beyond logic. And Geech was this professor of logic in his whole career as a logician. So I'm taking his word for this, right?

Is that that's the crazy thing about Occam. You get God as this completely unknowable thing, or this pure will that creates without prior ideas, right? That to me sounds like a kind of extreme form of an Islamic God, right? It's just pure will. And then when you get to Occam's volunteerism, as it's called, to me, that is really a stinky part of him.

Sum that up real quick for this. as it's called. To me, that is really a stinky part of him. Sum that up real quick for this. So he's an extreme voluntarist, so he says explicitly, God could have commanded that his creatures to hate him, and that's possible. And that'd be obliged to do that. Yes, and then we'd have to do that, whereas Bonaventure, Aquinas, and Scotus

all say that's impossible. God can't, It's impossible logically for God to command you to hate Him, right? And so, they're all not an extreme volunteerist in that sense. Now, they have interesting differences, Aquinas and Scotus, on the point of the Ten Commandments and how to understand the different levels of the Ten Commandments. But Ockham, to me, is planets away on these points, on his extreme volunteerism, right? Totally not at all like the opposite of SCOTUS on this point, right? His extreme nominalism, SCOTUS is an ultra realist is what he's called. Even more realist, you might say, than Aquinas was, right?

On the common nature and the universal, right? And SCOTUS believes in divine ideas and Occam doesn't. So to me,'s Ockham, this metaphysically reductionistic program, right? To simplify everything to me was destructive of, of the, of the traditional way of doing metaphysics in this Catholic tradition. So, and you began by saying that Ockham wanted to cut everything away that seems

superfluous or, and of course that's why I wouldn't bring that up. Cause people will usually heard of that. And is that what's interesting is that was invented by SCOTUS, right? And so the, the, the doctrine isn't that you should cut out entities as much as possible. That's not Occam's razor or SCOTUS is razor, right? The, the idea is you, you do not multiply entities beyond necessity.

So what makes an entity necessary is your, what you need to explain, something that's a good, that needs explanation. So you might say the creation, we want that to be rational, the result of a perfectly rational and ordered will. We understand will to be ordered by intellect, right? And so the intellect is prior to the will logically. So then God wouldn't have to have divine ideas prior to his willing of creation

for it to be rational. Seems like then I need divine ideas. Right. So Occam for some reason thought we didn't need that. And I haven't read him. So I couldn't tell you chapter and verse what he says, but I know for sure he denied divine ideas. So I thought, well, no, we do need that. And then he just bites the bullet, right? That God's divine ideas just are the created things. There is no distinction between those. And so he, in other words, SCOTUS would say he didn't use the razor, right?

Right. He cut away an entity that was needed to explain. So it's going back and forth with Ockham. No, no, he's, he's, he's later. Ockham's late. How much longer? How much longer? How much longer? Next generation? Yeah, half a generation, next generation.

So is Ockham writing in response to SCOTUS then? Yes, so he came in and was writing, oftentimes his enemy is SCOTUS, especially on that issue of realism. Where SCOTUS's enemy was Henry, not enemy, his interlocutor, it was a friend of his actually, Henry of Ghent. Right, and so his main interlocutor was not Aquinas. He did write about Aquinas sometimes, but he was already like removed from, from

Aquinas's time. Right. Um, so he did mention Aquinas and that was an important position obviously, but his main person he was arguing with in his career was this guy, Henry of Ghent, who was a secular and, uh, I have. Because Scott has taught there, allegedly. Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. Did you get to see where he taught? You know, when I was there, right, I didn't, that wasn't on my radar screen.

I did go, I was around Greyfriars, the actual place which sadly is no longer a religious house of Oxford University, which is sad, super sad to me, makes me almost cry. No. But anyway, I'm in contact with some of the Greyfriars, and they recently went back to Walsingham for the first time in 400 years. Really? And they're studying at the Blackfriars because they don't have a Franciscan school.

But I mean, the Blackfriars are awesome at Oxford. I've I've met some of them and and and been there and something some of my favorite Thomists. OK, I think a nice introduction to SCOTUS that helps people appreciate him is the idea of the primacy of Christ. Absolutely. Do you want to breath it up? Yeah, talk about that. I think that first we should say this is often Dominican-Franciscan debate.

Yes, but it seems that Albert the great from the the book you gave me, thinks it's more proper, or more plausible, though he doesn't weigh in on it. Thomas seems to say no, but it's not a... It's possible. It's possible. It's possible, but the weight of revelation doesn't justify it. The idea I find beautiful. I don't know what I mean by that, except that when I hear it, it's pleasing.

And that's one of the ideas I had before. I knew that SCOTUS taught that. I thought that makes sense. Right, that idea. So let's break it down for people, because it's actually, it's very easy to grasp, but you got to enter in slowly. I can only give you a surfacey understanding of it,

but I think my surface is accurate at that level. Right. Is, so the question is, the incarnation, was God's purpose in incarnating, was that posterior to sin, prior to sin, or prior to sin? What is the reasoning, the motive, the reason for the incarnation? And so what Scotus says is, given that we have the incarnation as a historical dogma, we can now think about it. And we can sort of work, we can sort of backfill the rationality.

Right? So we're not making a pure a priori sort of argument about concepts. It's like we have the incarnation, we have the hypostatic union, we know what that is. Let's work back now to figure out what God's motives were, as it were. And so he understands God, according to the Franciscans, as goodness and love itself, right? I mean, of course, Aquinas believes that, but it has a certain priority of place in the Franciscan order, hence the title of this book, Caritas in Primo, right? First, the love is the first idea to think about. And so, if God is a perfect lover, right,

then he wants to, if he's going to it all, right? He's gonna create a creation that's the closest possible to himself, because that's what a lover wants to be united as much as possible, right? To his beloved, right? And so the idea is that's what the incarnation is. The hypostatic union is the closest possible union of creature, right?

And creator, there is no more possible closer union than that. And so that union is out of the God is a perfect lover. So his motivation in creation is first the incarnation. So the incarnation is the reason for creation at all. And everything else is sort of about that. So Christ is a metaphysical mediator, even if Adam hadn't sinned.

So Adam is created in the garden, he's not perfect. He's got a path to follow, even if Adam hadn't sinned. So Adam is created in the garden, right, he's not perfect, right, he's got a path to follow, even if he didn't sin. And so he would, even if he didn't sin, would be united to Christ and through that mediation, right, attain to the beatific vision, right, attain to a perfect participation in God's life itself through Christ. So Christ is sort of predestined, right, to be incarnate apart from sin. Right. And of course, now that we did sin, right, He still serves as a mediator, but now He's not just sort of raising us to a higher level into the likeness of God, right, as Bono which is like,

hierarchizing our soul into God, right, but now He's first like, reaching down even lower and redeeming us because we fell down into the dirt and sin So just fucking sum it up in a sentence in case people are struggling here Are we saying that the Franciscan school would say Christ would have become incarnate regardless of sin The Thomistic school generally says that Christ became incarnate because of sin and if there were no sin, he wouldn't have become incarnate Yeah, so that so that it's an occasion for it. They wouldn't want to say that was the like, ah, main reason, right? But that is the occasion. I think they would.

I think Thomas would say it's the main reason. Maybe you're right. Yeah. Well, but they, but you're right about that. They generally hold that because there are Thomists that do hold the absolute primacy. It's not, you don't have to reject it to be a Thomist. But it is distinctive of the Franciscan school. And let me say one more thing about SCOTUS

that I find to be helpful is SCOTUS, I think a lot of people come to Scotus and forget that he is a Franciscan friar, right? He is a devout man, right? He is a theologian, right? He's a theologian in the Franciscan tradition. And so he has the Franciscan understanding that he got through Bonaventure, right, of the relationship of faith and reason. And so obviously he's a scholastic, so he thinks that reason has this exalted role, but reason's exalted role is the faith that seeking the understanding uses reason. So first we have faith, right, and we try to seek an understanding of what we believe through reason.

So he has that view of reason. It's connected intimately to faith, just like any scholastic. But seeing him first as a theologian and friar and a devout person is the right way to see SCOTUS rather than the disruptor of the Thomistic project. Yeah. I don't think Thomas would want to see us say that about SCOTUS, right? That he's the disruptor of this project, right? I mean, Thomas knew his limits, right?

I mean, the famous story about the end of his life, right? He had that ecstatic vision. I mean, St. Francis had an ecstatic vision. And Thomas says, compared to what I just experienced, everything I wrote, which by the way is super amazing, is like straw compared to what I just experienced. Whereas in the journey of the mind to God, Bonaventure, his whole thing is based on the fact that Saint Francis had an ecstatic vision, right? And that that's what we're supposed to do. The journey of the mind of God is the journey, right, to be able to be like Saint Francis,

to be able to be a saint, right? And we're supposed to do that journey on earth as much as possible. to be a saint, right? And we're supposed to do that journey on earth as much as possible. And so, my point is that Thomas knew his limits, right? And that Scotus was first of all a Franciscan friar, right? And to understand that, which should make us sympathetic and interested to hear his voice. And of course, he's famous for the defense of the immaculate conception, which is connected to that idea of the absolute primacy, right? is this metaphysical mediator, so again, He would save, right? Because one thing you won't get if you don't have the incarnation is the Mother of God. Absolutely. And one thing that you will get if you have an incarnation is a Mother of God.

So it sounds like we're saying if there was no sin and Christ didn't then Christ, if it's true to say no sin, no Christ, uh, it's also true to say no sin, no mother of God. So there's more you miss out on. Yes. Um, yeah. So yeah, here's what Aquinas says in the zoom and I'd love you to comment on it. This comes from the tertiary pass question one, article three. I'm just going to read the said contra and respond to you. Augustine says, expounding what is set down in Luke 19, 10, for the Son of Man is come to seek and save

that which is lost. Therefore, if man had not sinned, the Son of Man would not have come. And on 1 Timothy 1, 15, Christ Jesus came to the world to save sinners. Aglos says, there was no cause of Christ coming into the world, except, no cause, world to save sinners, Aglos says. There was no cause of Christ coming into the world except, no cause, except to save sinners. Take away diseases, take away wounds, and there is no need of medicine. Oh, fair enough, yeah,

okay. And then he is just part of his respondio. He says there are different opinions about this question. For some say that even if man had not sinned, the Son of Man would have become incarnate others assert the contrary and Seemingly our assent ought rather to be given to this opinion. Hmm the second one. Yeah. Yeah, I Can read more but that sounds so that's that's a line that you supported your yeah Yeah, it sounds like a safe enough says no in primary reason. Yeah, where it seems like SCOTUS is not it's definitely saying If it's not, there's no incarnation. Where it seems like SCOTUS is not, it's definitely saying, contrary to that, that if there was no sin, there would have been an incarnation.

And we know that based on our understanding of the incarnation. In other words, the perfect union, the hypostatic union, is the closest union of a creature and a creator that's possible. And so that would be first willed by a perfect lover. And so that would require a mother of God. And so Mary was predestined as well. So you have the predestination of Mary. And then by that, Scotus is able to argue

for the immaculate conception in a way that was new. And so we basically argued that, again, the same sort of reasoning is God would be the most perfect Redeemer. So the most perfect Redeemer, the most perfect Savior would save in all the kinds of ways in which somebody could be saved. I see. And so being saved as Mary preservatively from original sin. So she was saved preservatively

from original sin. She would have contracted it if there wasn't this act of the Savior, right, to preserve her from original sin. So that's a different way than all of us are saved. We're not saved that way. Right. And so the perfect Redeemer, he says, would redeem in all the ways he could redeem. So he did. And so that's one of the arguments to that. That's great. I didn't realize that it was his understanding of the primacy of Christ that helped him articulate the Immaculate Conception.

It's again, from that idea of God as love. God is love and God is the perfect lover, and so his created order is going to be a perfect order for love and of love. And I think that is a key to understanding creation for Bonaventure and SCOTUS. And when I say these things, it would be wrong to hear me as saying, and Thomas doesn't believe this because sometimes they agree, but there's a matter of emphasis that's different. Yes. Right?

And I find the emphasis to be placed in the right way with the Franciscans. That's how I feel. And when, go back to the issue of divine simplicity, for example, like, Scodus has a very different view of divine simplicity than Aquinas. So Scodus has, I call it the subtle view, because he's a subtle doctor. Right? So he does not eliminate all conceivable kinds of complexity in God. He eliminates the kind that would threaten the doctrine of simplicity.

And so, he allows a kind of multiplicity, you might say, or complexity in God, but it's not the kind that is possible for there to be a metaphysical separation in God. So, they're not parts that are separable. It's like triangularity and trilaterality. So being three-sided and being three-angled, those are not the same, but those are metaphysically inseparable. You can't be a triangle without having both of those, you know? And so those are aspects of a reality that are metaphysically inseparable. Even God cannot separate those. Tell me what you think about this analogy, improve it if it's terrible. I was trying to think how you ever tried to see something far off in

the distance and someone's trying to tell you where it is and you can't quite see it. And maybe somebody says, well, you see that thing over there, look at the top of that, now go straight to the right over there. And you might be like, I don't see it. Someone might have a different way of seeing that same thing. Like that's your starting point. And then it gets you to the right over there and you might be like, I don't see it. Someone might have a different way of seeing that same thing. Like that's your starting point and then it gets you to the same thing. And sometimes one person's explanation helps you see that one thing. Brilliant analogy. I completely agree with that. And I wonder sometimes that's what the Franciscans and the Dominicans are like. It's like we're both getting to the same thing and sometimes you just feel more at home with the explanation

of getting there than somewhere else. Completely. Completely. Because I'll come up with in debates like this about simplicity, right? And I'll say like, I just don't, I can't understand what Aquinas is saying. I just don't understand it, right? And they'll try to explain it and I'll, I just don't get it. It doesn't seem true or it even seems, maybe not even that. It doesn't seem coherent sometimes when I hear it explained, right?

But then I think, well, I'm finite. Like how could, how can I say that this man who I love, St. Thomas, right, had an incoherent thought? I don't want to absolutely say he was incoherent, but I want to say my understanding of it, it seems like that to me. And because I have another explanation available, which is completely approbated by the church. And gets me to the same thing. The same thing I need to do. Yes. Right? I need to affirm that God is simple, then I can do it this way. Yeah.

And to me it seems like why wouldn't I help myself to that? And so it's the same with the Trinity. Like I've never been able to understand and that Thomas's view of the Trinity as that the persons of the Trinity are subsistent relations, right? So what that means is that the relation is prior to the things that are related. So when I think in order to logically prior, yes. What does that even mean? Normally the way we understand relations as a sort of metaphysical idea, right?

Even if we don't think of it as metaphysics, if we haven't like done it explicitly like that, but we think you can't, there's no such thing as brotherhood if there aren't two brothers, right? I mean, for there to be brotherhood here, for there to be real brotherhood, a real relation here, there has to be the Rolata, as we say, for there to be the relation. So the Rolata are prior logically to the relation. But what Aquinas is saying in the Trinity is the opposite, right? And so I understand it's the Trinity, so at some point we're going to help ourselves

with tools that go beyond our thinking. But that's a tool I don't understand using. I don't get that. And so when I look at Bonaventure and Scotus on the Trinity, it makes more sense to me. Can you lay that out a little? Yes. So the typical way that the Trinitarian discussion goes is like, well, you can start with a be more Western or you can be more Eastern. That's sort of the typical way. I mean, that's over simple, but it's good to start there, is that the Western view was like a gust and you start with God as one, right? He's radically one. He's radically simple, right? And so you go from there and try to understand how that's consistent with three. So you start with one and try to get to three, right? And

the Eastern is, you might say, kind of start with three and try to make sure that they stay one, right? And so what you're trying to do in Trinitarian theology is avoid the skillet and charybdis, right? Of tritheism, right? And modalism. So you want to say what Bonaventure says, this is a nice formula, I think. God is one because he's three

and God is three because he's three and God is three because he's one. So you, so you want to be able to understand that mysterious line. And so that I take to be the goal of Trinitarian theology is to understand that. Why is God one because he's free at three? Yeah. So the idea is that, so again, this is, I'm not a theologian, right? This is off the top of my head. So God is one, obviously, because he has a- Can I just say, only academics qualify all of the statements they're about to make.

The rest of us who know nothing about anything are the only ones who say things with tremendous infallibility and so I appreciate the humility. There's experts out there that would be happy to say things in the comments and correct me. And they should, if they can appreciate your humility. Um, yeah. But, uh, so, okay. So I think it starts with, let's, let's start with the idea of, um, of God's person. So God is personal. The one being of God is personal, which means what, which means he has an intellect and a will, let's say.

Okay. Or a memory, intellect and will. So he has similar things that we have. So that's what Gustin's analogy is, right? The psychological analogy. So we have a memory or consciousness, the power of consciousness. That's my gloss on what he meant by memory, right? It's not just a repository of past facts or something. It's the power of consciousness, the power of thinking and the power of acting, right? Or loving. And so those powers are all three aspects of the human soul. And so that's the image of God, according to Augustine.

I see. So you, yeah. So, so to, to maybe muddy the waters, but to help me understand the analogy, your three, because you're one, like your one one that holds your three-ness together. Exactly, because I'm one soul, and that soul is three powers of inseparable, metaphysically inseparable. So back to Scotus, using one of his famous tools, remember I mentioned triangularity and trilaterality?

So he has a special term for the distinction between the trilaterality and the triangularity because they're metaphysically separable, metaphysically inseparable, meaning God can't even separate those two and they'd be real, right? But they aren't the same thing. Yes. They're not identical to the one another. So he calls that a formal distinction, SCOTUS. So those are distinct formalities or ratios. So aspects of a reality that are distinct in the reality.

I see. And my mind picks up on that. Without the thing separating. Without the thing being able to be separated. Yeah, it can't. And so Bonaventure has the exact same term when he does his disputed questions on the mystery of the Trinity. He calls it a distinction of reason on the part of the thing.

So obviously you know from Aquinas you have- Slow down for me. I'm slower than you are. Say it again. So a distinction of reason on the part of the thing. Okay. So the thing in this case, our example is the triangle. Yeah. And the distinction of reason is we know that the ratio of triangularity is not the same idea or ROTC or concept as, as trilaterality. And so, and so the distinction is rooted in the thing itself, in the triangle. It's not that my mind made it up.

Like the morning star and the evening star, that's a distinction of reason, not on the part of the thing. It's on the part of us, right? Because I talk about Venus in the morning or Venus in the evening. It's Venus. This is one thing, radically one identity.

But that's a distinction of reason only in our minds, not on the part of the thing. Yes. Right. And then there's, then there's of course, the distinction say between this mug and the coffee in it. Yes. Those are metaphysically separable. And unfortunately they are completely separate at this point. So, so that is a distinction on the part of the thing. What is substance and accidents then? Is that a formal distinction or? Yeah, that's a good question. We don't have to go down there until you want to finish the Trinity

But let's finish the tree and maybe we can get back to that. So so the Trinity let's get that done So you ask how how is he free because he's one that was the question, right? Yeah, so so God is a personality Put it that way. I don't know how many right now, but he we already know he's a personality Right because he has right the, the image, right, of memory, intellect, and will. So I already know that. That's his oneness, he's one personal being. How would you know that?

Unless he's revealed himself, is that how you know that? Well, we do know it because he revealed him, and now we're working back to explain the sort of reasons for the Trinity. It's not natural theology that gets us to a personal goal. Yes, we're not doing natural theology here. Yeah, so, and I think, side point on Bonaventure, when you read Bonaventure,

like in the journey of the mind to God, right? There's Trinity's everywhere. And of course he connects them to the Trinity, but he's not telling us that if we hadn't known the Trinity, you could have just worked your way up naturally to get the doctrine of the Trinity, right? But he's saying there is traces, as he puts it, or vestiges of the Trinity in everything,

right? So you can see in every creature, right, there's power, wisdom, and goodness, right, in the creature or there's causes, right, to its being that are related to power, wisdom, and goodness, which you can already hear those terms already relate in a special way to the persons of the Trinity, power, Father, wisdom, son, goodness, Holy Spirit. Right. So he makes that connection directly, but he says that connection was there in reality before I made it because I know the Trinity. Right. And so the Trinity is in everything. So, um,

so I think it's wrong to read Bonaventure as arguing sort of from natural theology to the Trinity. It might seem like that if you, if you encounter him, I think it was Richard of St. Victor who perhaps tried that. Yes. Well either Hugh of St. Victor or Richard of St. Victor. I think it's Richard. Yeah. I, I, and I think it was the love lover. Yeah.

I love it. I couldn't comment on what, what he was trying to do. Maybe he did that again. I'm not an academic, so he absolutely and fallow. We did. I would guess just from my, my knowing that the Victorine school, Hugh of St. Victor and Richard of St. were super important to the Franciscans and Bonaventure. Right. So it might be more nuanced.

Yeah, so it could be correct, right? And even if you're correct, what Bonaventure is doing isn't that. I'm thinking maybe he was doing what a lot of scholastics were doing at that time, which is kind of like Anselm, where you're like, we already have the revelation and we're sort of like going back to find the reasons that are already in it. Yes. And then working up So it looks like an a priori argument. It's not but it's not that's why I would get that's important to know that Bonaventure doesn't

Do that. Yes, it's a mystery. Richard St. Victor is about to come into the story by the way Here we go Richard. So why is he one because why is he three because he's one? Well, the oneness of him includes personality. So how does that get you three personalities though? Right? And so what that that raises the question of what is a person? And so Boethius had a famous definition, right? Right? A rational substance, right? Of an intellectual nature, right? So Richard of st. Victor slightly changed that, right? To a rational existence. So an individual, sorry, an individual substance of a rational nature, that's Boethius. Individual substance of a rational nature. Okay. Richard of St. Victor changed it to an individual existence of a rational nature. So now the term is not substance, but existence.

Right? So we can maybe say like act of existence. Okay? but existence, right? So we can maybe see like act of existence. Okay. So now if we understand the act of existence, right, as the termination, this is going to be conflict as the termination of, um, of a being, right? Of a being, being right, of a being acting, right? According to its nature, right? Then we have God's a personality. So we have the Father, and this is exactly what Augustine tries to do. The Father is the unbegotten.

And so he is, you might say, God with the power to think about God or the power to love God is just that power that's already there. So there's no begotten, he didn't come from anything. You might say there's no divine causality, right? So he's the personality of God ready to think about the personality of God. From all eternity. Yeah, from all eternity. And the son is the God himself, the personality of God, thinking of God. So he terminates in a different place, right? Does that make sense? Yes, it does.

Okay, so he's a different person, because the term of his act of being right is different. And the same with the spirit. The spirit is God accepting God's God self or accepting his own identity, loving himself right for all eternity. And that's a different term. Knowing and loving. Yes. So you have, you have the natural mode or the intellectual mode of God's being right. And that terminates in God's being, right? And that terminates in a different place, right? Than his voluntary mode of being, right? But we already know he has those modes of being

because he's a personality. We knew that before we started counting how many acts of existence there are. Does that make sense kind of? Yes. Okay. So what you get with a Bonaventurian view is more emphasis on the, on the individuality

of the persons as terms, right? Rather than as subsistent relations. Right. Now, of course, none of those would be unless the other ones were. So that's the question. The next question, how is he one because he's three. Okay. So that was the next question. Yeah. And so, so he's three. He's three of these particular kinds, right? So he's memory, divine consciousness, power of consciousness, divine act of speaking the word, right? Or thinking actively and then love. And so those three acts of existence, right? Are only united because again, their personality in general, you can't have intellect without something to think about.

So you can't think about anything unless you already have the power of consciousness. It's already logically required and prior to the act of intellecting, if I can use that verb, right? And the act of willing requires logically part of it, the act of intellecting. And so there's these logical relations and logical order to these. I can't want what I don't know. Yeah, exactly. And so the same with God, the persons, the persons can't be unless there were the other persons.

So they're logically interrelated in that order. And so there have to be only one God self for there to be three persons. And once there's three persons, there has to be one God self that they are excellent. And so that's kind of a surface understanding of the Trinidad according to Bonaventure. Yeah. And again, if someone's listening to this thinking, well, I'm not convinced by that argument. It's important to realize it's not really an argument. It's not an argument. It's something that's been revealed, which we hold by faith and then we seek to understand.

And so I think one cool thing about Bonaventure is when he does the Trinitarian theology, he has these special predicates or words that are true of God that he calls appropriations. So I mentioned one earlier when I said every created thing requires power, wisdom, and goodness. So you kind of naturally apply those words to the persons. Like power more belongs to the father, it's more appropriate to the father than it's appropriate to the son. Wisdom's more appropriate to the son than to the father.

And love or goodness is more appropriate to the spirit than to the father or the son. Of course, they're all those things, but there's a more appropriate to, that's the idea of appropriation, what he calls an appropriation. And so that is only possible if you have these acts of existence that are the persons that are more independent, you might say, then saying it's a subsistent relation, which I don't, again,

with all those qualifications I said about that, I don't know how to make sense of that, but I do know how to make sense of the one I just described. And so that's why that's where I'm coming from. Yeah. Can I tell you how I talk sense of the one I just described. And so that's why that's where I'm going from. Yeah. Can I tell you how I talk about the truth to my kids? Go for it. This is going to be the opposite of the spectrum of complex.

This is as simple as it gets. And you tell me if it's heretical. All right. So what I'll say, and if you think this is me, the non-theolation will tell you if this is heretical. I say to, let's say I'm talking to Peter. And I'll say, if I made a statue of you, that would be a being who is zero persons. Okay. Okay.

You are a being who is one person and God is a being who is three persons. That is so simple and not terribly helpful, but perhaps more helpful than if we start using shamrocks and analogies like ice and gas and water that lead to modalism. Yeah, totally. Well, how do you, if your daughter was to ask you to explain the Trinity, what would you say?

I mean, I would use Chesterton's line from everlasting men to begin with, which is the Trinity is just the logic of love, right? And of course that sounds like Richard St. Victor and it is, but he wasn't the only person that had that idea, right? That's, that's Augustine, right? Go into yourself and notice, right, that there's a self there for you to love, right? There's a self for you to think about so that you can love,

and then it's an act of loving him. So like you love yourself most. So that's how he gets to the Trinity here, right? Then he reflects up there. So Chesterton said the Trinity is the logic of love. Love requires, you could say, as an idea. Now we wouldn't have been able to say that statement unless we had already known that God was a Trinity. Like, why isn't it like a thousand people

then, or an infinite number of persons that love each other? Isn't that more love? Right? And so you need some sort of explanation why three and only three. Revelation. Yeah. So we need some help there. So just to draw this point out that we've kind of been skirting around I really like this idea and it's often brought up in the theology of the body and things like that But you have you know God from all eternity has loved the son the son from all eternity has received that love and given it back to the father and This love is whatever you say. It's so complete perfect that it is another person the termination

We've been made in the image of likeness of God. When a husband gives himself to his bride, the bride receives that gift and that receptivity isn't passive. It's an active receptivity by which she actually gives back to the husband. This love is so profound that it always overflows and sometimes nine months later you need to give it a name. I love that. I mean that's helpful. Totally. Again, it's not the argument for the Trinity. It's just a way to... No, it's to me it a name. I love that. I mean, that's helpful. Again, it's not the argument for the Trinity. It's just a way to- No, it's to me, it's one of those like Bonaventure tracks

about like the traces, the vestiges, the images, the sort of reflections of the Trinitarian love. Now, one thing that Bonaventure does, and I've only read it once, I'd like to read it again. I'd like to encourage everybody to pick up a copy of Journey of the Mind of God, because it's probably a hundred pages. Would you say?

It's not long. Yeah, it's not long. But, it's very, very dense. It's very dense. Go slow and just take what you can, right? And enjoy what you can, because there's some thoughts in there that have the highest levels of philosophers. That mind break your brain.

Yes, I mean, like Tim Noon at CUA, right? And Hauser wrote this article for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is free online. It's an amazing philosophy resource. I recommend it to everybody, right? When you want to look up something in philosophy, this is a great resource. So, if you look up Bonaventure, right, they have an entry on Bonaventure. And when they talk about his ontological argument, so to speak, for God's

existence, I mean, they're doing philosophy at the highest level that philosophy has done today, right, on this very short little treatment of Bonaventure in the journey of the mind of God. So it's very packed. And he's like a poet, and that every single word mattered, and every single sentence was perfectly chosen. But you're missing the details of the dialectic, which is as somebody used to reading Aquinas and doing reasons back and forth, you're not getting that. You have to go to a sentence commentary for that. Because like every student, he read a commentary on Peter Lombard's sentences and it's all the disputed question format, just like the summa.

Right? So the summa is kind of like an evolution of that. It's just highly ordered and condensed and cleaner. That's what a summa is. Yeah. So here's my understanding of something he says and I'd love you to correct me or just if not correct me expand upon it because I found this idea fascinating. The idea is that sin has bent man over on himself. So he's kind of like a cripple as as it were, who is unable to see himself rightly, nature rightly, other people perhaps,

and that what's needed is the word of God to untwist him so that he can see reality rightly. Right. And that. And I like that. Is that basically right? I want you to expand on a second, but I want to say something else. I really like that idea, you know, because in the book of Romans and I think it's in wisdom and elsewhere, it makes the claim that like God's existence is manifest and that it's our sinfulness that prevents us from seeing what really couldn't be clearer.

Right. And so I liked that. And then I thought of an analogy because I used to do a lot of work with people who were immersed in pornography. And you might say that pornography bends man over on himself in a way so that he's unable to see the goodness of his wife's body completely like she is good. She is beautiful. I mean, she could be as beautiful as you want, but pornography will make you blind to that beauty. beautiful as you want, but pornography will make you blind to that beauty. And what you need is something to untwist you so that you can see reality.

All right. Yes. But please expand upon that idea. Because that's a beautiful idea. And I think that's the right way to see it. And and I don't know if Thomas would deny that idea, but I think it has a special emphasis again in the Franciscan school, because the Franciscan school back to the differences, is there's an emphasis put on love and so there's an emphasis put on will. It's not will to power, it's not Occam, it's not Nietzsche, it's not anything, it's will means love, the desiring part

that is supposed to love God for God's sake. That's the emphasis for the Franciscan schools on that part of man. And so, for example, philosophy itself, reason itself, there is a method that's philosophy, right? It has an end, right? Of course, that end is the love of divine wisdom. That's what the word philosophy means, right?

Philosopher, right? And so loving divine wisdom, that's the end. But what Bonaventure says is that can never get to the end. Philosophy will never get to its own end without the faith. Right? So we need faith to strengthen, right? And to motivate and to keep on track for philosophy for reason to even do its job, right?

And so what he says in the beginning of the journey of the mind of God, and I wish I had it right here with all my friends over here, my books, I should have brought that one too, is that he talks about it's only the man of desires that can make this journey. The first thing you do is get on your knees, right? You pray that you can become holy.

You pray that God removes your ignorance. You pray that God removes your concupiscent desires. And that's how you start the journey of the mind of God. That's literally the prologue. You can't do any of this stuff appropriately because your mind is broken. It's bent. Right? Now, we can see even when we correct ourselves by holy desire, we still only see through

a glass dark leap. We still only see in the mirror, which is the created order. It's like a mirror. You look down at it. You look down and it reflects on God. If you know it's a mirror, then you can see it's reflecting God, but it's dim, right? It's obscure because of our sin, even if we're living wholly. And so that is absolutely where we have to start. And there's an emphasis put on that. And I'm perhaps looking like I'm glazing over

because I'm having this memory of once upon a time, I used to live in the outback in Australia, and I watched this particular show one evening, this movie, where a man in a loving marriage with a beautiful family destroyed it all by his greed. I think he was somehow doing something nefarious with money and he destroyed this beautiful thing that he had. And it just affected me so profoundly that the next day at work, I was an analytical lab technician in a copper mine. I was. Yeah. Yeah. And I was on my own and I fell on my knees in my gigantic suit and my mask, you know, and I just I was crying.

I'm like, Father, like, I want to be saved. And I was weeping and I'm like, just break me, burn me, like make my life a living hell if I can have a living heaven once it's done. And I wonder if that is kind of what the Lord sometimes uses to wake us up. Totally. This just the pain. Yes, I was just reading. There's a really great book I found recently, a spy guy named Jason Baxter. It's called The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis.

And it's a popular level book. It's not deep and complicated, and technical is what I mean. It is very deep. But he talks to the subtitles, something like How Great Books Made a Great Mind. He talks about C.S. Lewis's all of his favorite books, right, that really influenced him,

as Owen Barfield talked about the third Lewis that nobody knows, right? So everybody knows, like, the fiction writer, right? And everybody knows the Christian apologist. But then there's, like, the medievalist. Like, I mean, he was at the top of his game in that sphere, right, as a scholar. And so this book is about that. But when he talks about Louis's understanding of his own conversion, right, That for Lewis, it was all about what you just said, it's like giving up yourself. Like we want to have this last possessive bit of ourself.

That's just, it's ourself, it's my, it's myself, right? And we want that for ourselves. We don't want to just want God for his own sake. We want to want him for my sake, right? And that to me is again, that brings me back to the metaphysics of the Franciscan, which makes sense And that to me is, again, that brings me back to the metaphysics of the Franciscan, which makes sense of that to me, because Scotus has inside the will, there is a distinction of affections. And he gets this from Anselm, and Anselm uses this distinction to explain

the fall of the devil, which is an amazing mystery to try to understand. So the distinction is that inside the will, there's one part of the will, you might say, that desires to love God for God's sake, right? And then there's another part of the will that loves the will for its own sake, right? So for its own perfection. So that part would be what we call like Aristotelian eudaimonism or something, you know, like, there's all the perfections of my human nature and I have a proper love of that. But for Scodus, right, there's a higher part of the will and that's loving God for God's sake or loving justice for the sake of justice. And so to me, when he talks about freedom, right, so we have this amazing Catholic view

of freedom from JP II's and cyclicals and before, right, and that freedom and truth, right, have to go together. And so Scotus' analysis is that that affection of the will, the higher one, he calls it the affection for justice, right, loving God for God's sake, loving the best good the most, right? Yeah.

And so that has to keep in check and moderate this desire for your own self, which has a good part to it. We should want to perfect our own qualities and self, but we can't have a possession of that apart from this other one. So the only way we get ourselves, as Scripture says, is by giving up ourselves. And that was the hardest thing for Lewis, right? And he had all these amazing experiences which he talks about, where he was moved to these experiences like the one you just said, where he was moved to like, again, God's saying to him, give up yourself and he says not to, and then he kept it until finally

he did. Right. And then he said he was like the famous line of he was the most reluctant convert in England. Yeah. Right. But that's what he had to give up. And he realized that that was what all of us have to do is that that's so hard to give up.

He uses an analogy somewhere about tin soldiers becoming lifelike. Yeah. And if that were the case, that you could make tin soldiers lifelike, that they would protest as they became less tinny, feeling as if they were dying. That's the idea. They were actually becoming a lot of... You got the idea right there. That's it.

That's it. That's the idea. What does Bonaventure mean when he says that the word has to untwist us? What is that? I don't know where he says that. Right. No, but that is, that is a kind of common view of sin. Like it bends us over and twists us. And so our faculties are misdirected. So I think the, the kind of strong Calvinist view, as I understand it,

is that the faculties aren't just twisted and bent, but they're broken. So they don't work anymore. Whereas the Catholic says they do work, but they're twisted and bent. And so we can love the good, but we're messed up. And if we don't get on track, then we're ultimately gonna love the good for our own sake, and that's what Satan did.

And so he chooses a lesser good. So I think untwisting is first of all, seeing the correct hierarchy of goods. And then for Bonaventure, once we're in that position, that once you're untwisted, then the real path of sanctification, you might say, begins. And he describes that as a hierarchization is his word. So when grace is working in us and we're loving God

and we're in a relationship that's active, then there's two kind of principles, right? There's you and there's God, and God is sort of empowering you and motivating you, but it's still you, right? You're still making free choices. And so that process, what occurs is a hierarchization where God takes your soul,

imagine like your soul's like a cloth on this table, and he grabs the middle of it, and he starts lifting it up closer to himself. So you're like getting taller. Your soul is like getting taller. And he even describes it as going through all the hierarchies of angels, right? The ninefold hierarchy until you get up to where you're like where God is. And that's the end of the process of hierarchization. Your soul is made and God conformed,

right? And so first we untwist, right? Which is now we're looking up and now we're participating with God. We're cooperating, you might say, with God, we're letting God love us for our own sake and not us loving us for our own sake. Right. And so that's how, when we give up ourselves, we receive ourselves. I want to talk about what we do when our faith in God feels like a bullshit. Yeah. So like, uh, I was telling a fellow was sitting here the other day and he was talking about extraterrestrial life and lovely fellow, very intelligent, wrote a great book on the topic and his seems to be very invested in the idea

that there are indeed aliens that, uh, I don't want to speak for him, but from what I got from it, it sounded like he was saying the US government certainly has covered things up and there's multitude of evidence. He's saying all this and I don't care at all. And it's not cause I don't think he's wrong. It's that even if he's right, I don't care. Like I'm an apathalian or just something. I don't care. And then I thought that's probably what it feels like for atheists as we try to

tell them about God. It's like this guy's telling me about aliens. I'm like, I just, I couldn't care less. I know I this is it says a lot about you that you're interested in this. Like what's going on in your home life? But like I don't care. And I was at mass, I think recently, and I'm just like, maybe this is just all crap. It's the whole thing is rubbish.

Yeah, none of it's true. And at some point in my life, I decided that it was maybe because I had some emotional experience and then someone gave me an argument that I wasn't intelligent enough at the time to pick a part. And so I latched onto that and that boosted my belief. And now here I am. Have I not just talked myself into this elaborate fairy tale? I mean, there's a and I don't think this, but I'm trying to devil's advocate.

I understand. There's a, I've had those thoughts. Yeah. There's a, there's a coherence to say star Wars. Congratulations doesn't make it true there. You can make Christianity coherent even as we show you the blatant holes in your theory, namely evil and God not making himself evident to those who really would like to believe, but can't seem to be able to intellectually accept it. And so you have to then come up with a narrative that makes your story more sophisticated, more difficult.

And then you cover it up with all this philosophical jargon. But it's not true. None of it's true. Now I say that and then I am reminded of something Lewis said where he says, now that I'm a Christian, I do have moods where the whole thing seems very implausible. But when I was an atheist, I also had moods where that seemed implausible. So what am I to do? I think that's a great quote. That's my trend. That's what I was going to say. Something that you, if you're in that boat, then you have to at some point make a choice.

Right, and to me the choice is whether to be what Kant calls, right, a misologist. Right, somebody who hates reason. Right, from Logos and Miss. If you make a choice. You have to make a choice. So you're like, I thought I reasoned all this out. Right, but really what I did is told myself

a self-congratulatory narrative. Yes. Right, for different motives that were underneath my intellect at that time. Right, And so, to use Lewis's term, you've bulverized yourself. You've explained away what you believe by some other motives that are non-rational underneath your intellectual processes. Like, the only reason why you're a Catholic is because you're a white male and it, like, helps the patriarchy or whatever in your mind. Right? That's bulverizing you. Right? So, you can bulverizeize yourself is what you're just giving an example of. And so then you

have to make a decision. Well, is just, is that how reason always is? Right? Because this is always going to disappoint me because I can always do that. I can always imagine a situation where I've talked myself into it. My love of light love with my wife, why I moved to Steubenville, how I raised my children, how you raise anything, the most natural things you can you can you can attack reason and distrust it. Right. And you can you can even get to the point. And this is what Kant says, where you could even be vulvarizing your destruction of the reasons you have.

So you got to make a choice. You recognize is this a self-defeating game. Right. And so you reject mythology. Right. Misology. Yes. The hatred of reason, because it's like reason led you reject mythology. Right? Okay, mythology. Yes, the hatred of reason, because it's like reason led you astray. Now you've been living as a Catholic and you've wasted your time.

Screw reason, right? F reason, I'm gonna do what I feel now. I'm gonna do what, like Nietzsche. Like just be whatever's innocently becoming in you. That's his idea. Don't take all this reason. Don't take all this thought that the cosmos has an end and there's an order in nature. All that's crap that's been made up by like Socrates and Plato and Christianity. Let's do LSD and which SpongeBob SquarePants. Anything you want to make yourself

great. He probably wouldn't have said that. But anyways, the point is that's a hatred of reason because reason doesn't get you greatness or something that you ultimately want that's deep inside of you that reason is impotent to help you with It just keeps screwing with you, right? So you can be a misologist concepts like I checked it It's like a woman who floats with you, but won't allow you to have her you begin to resent her. Yes, exactly And so then you reject let's say that completely and so that's missology He says that's the temptation for all of us and I I think- Kant said this? Kant did, yeah. And this is a temptation, I think, because we live in a very multicultural pluralistic

age, right? And we have a situation that's very different than civilization. Yes, Thomas Barabentura. We live nowadays in a situation very different to the way that those guys live, because then think about the different religions that were competing with them. It's like Judaism, Islam, maybe some Eastern stuff they heard. But like we have this proliferation of knowledge of religions from all over the world that exploded by texts and everything. And scholars started studying this in the 1800s intensely and became up with this pseudo theory of comparative

religion. But the point is they got all this knowledge and now we're trying to work through it. And we live in a culture now where there isn't a dominant spiritual form to our culture, right? We still have the sort of fumes of Christianity in our culture, because lots of individuals are Christians, but the societal form is no longer supportive of a general spiritual vision. And so when people encounter religious disagreements, immediately what that does is makes them doubt their own religion. Cause they're like, well, if I was raised a Buddhist, I'd be a Buddhist. If I was raised a Mormon, I'd be a Mormon. If I would, and they do this thing where they think the epistemology is all on par, right?

Sometimes philosophy called the epistemic parody thesis. So you think that the plausibility of all the religions is basically the same. So the only reason for you to be a Christian, right, is because you like it, right, or it makes you comfortable, or to change, because it would be more comfortable to not be a Christian and have this guilt complex on me, right, or whatever. So the only things that can motivate you are not issues of reason, but issues of compatibility, simpatico with your personality or whatever, right? And that's a temptation in our era.

And so I think we need to go back to one of the bread and butters on your show, right, is natural theology. Right? There is evidence that we can look at, right? There is evidence about the nature of God, who He is, what He's like, which help us in the examination of religions. We don't have no foundations going into it. So now back to your issue though about misology and hatred. So I think that's the situation where

people grow up and they now no longer know how to deal with their most fundamental worldview commitments. And they think, well, reason led me astray. I was trained by my catechist or my Sunday school teacher in my case. And it was all wrong. So like screw reason. I'm just going to do what I feel now. And what I feel now is I kind of want to be a Zen Catholic right now or whatever. I want you to keep speaking because I'm finding this very enjoyable. So, so I mean, I think that we have to make a choice going back to that point between being an insologist, being just admit that we hate reason. Well,

then just do whatever you want then. Couldn't have been just that that I hate I hate my reason Maybe my reason led me astray. I don't know what other reason you're gonna use Right, you got no other options here, right? And so if you're a misogist though and you make a decision to hate mythology was that reasonable or not? So that's really the decision you're like screw it I don't care what the reason is not and just go and you just forget about it We're gonna just suppress all that and then live your life

Right in pursuit of whatever you feel like isn't there a different version of this though where you're not hating reason or not and just go and you just forget about it. Right, and just suppress all that and then live your life, right, in pursuit of whatever you feel like. Isn't there a different version of this though where you're not hating reason or not, you're more hating your access to reason. So you're hating, you know, your ability to understand things. So, you know, say you had one, I don't know,

you thought you understood something, but then later you changed your mind on that because you're kind of trusting of someone making an argument or something like that. That's different than kind of like you fully really understanding that argument and then somehow it's not true. Because the only way for that to happen

is you didn't actually understand it in the first place, right? Yeah, maybe I could say in the end it comes to the same thing because when you make that decision you can be like, well, this is what Kant says. Did you make a mistake in reason because you didn't conform to the norms

and standards of reason? And now you're gonna try to conform to the norms and standards of reason so it's trustworthy but your access to it was the problem. Then you're going to be committed to reason now you might not might not solve your problem immediately right but now you're committed to what maybe I need to look at the arguments again maybe I need to look in detail at the objectors and entertain those better. and entertain those better. In other words, maybe I need to be more disciplined in my use of reason, right? And so it wasn't reason's fault. That would be to reject mythology. It's not reason's fault, it's my access to reason.

And we are prejudiced and we are biased, and that is true. That's why there's something going for the thing you said in the beginning, that sort of thought that you were sort of pretending, right? Which is, well, maybe I was biased. Maybe I just am a Christian because I thought I was. I had those same thoughts when I was in college, at a Baptist college.

I tried to become an atheist. And I thought, you know, maybe this is just what my mom told me and I love my mom. And you know, maybe she was wrong. Maybe she was duped, right? And I'm duped too. And so until you, to me, I pared it all down. To me, it seemed like the most logically basic thing was,

is there really a God who's personal? Right? And what are the arguments for that? And I encountered apologetic arguments, right? And I thought they were pretty good, but then I could skepticize them. I could never refute them. I could never overturn them. But there's plenty of objections and other experts that are atheists and agnostics, even

good people that are atheists and agnostics, that you're like, why don't they believe this is so it must just be my bias must be. So you start thinking that, right. But then, I mean, I think that inquiry at that point, you know, it's multifaceted and multi-level. So natural theology, a misunderstanding of it would be, it's just sort of these like pure abstract propositions put in deductive or inductive form. That's sort of like maybe old school natural theology, maybe in the Renaissance or something like that. But now it's natural theology includes all the disparate facts of experience, this personal encounter you had with God when you were in that suit. Now, that's something you have to deal with. Also the arguments from the five ways. Also Anthony Kenny, who was

an intelligent, amazing philosopher, like rejects us. Why? So these are all disparate facts you put together. And natural theology is more like the explanation for all these facts. Like Sherlock Holmes, the guy walks in his office, right? And he's like, oh, he sees like Masonic pin,

his left hand's bigger than his right hand, he's got certain dirt on a certain kind of boot, and he like puts all these disparate facts together to say, okay, I know why this has got, who this guy is, where he was, and what he wants me for. So he puts these facts together, which are disparate. That's not like an inductive or deductive case to get to his explanation, but it's a, it's a path of rationality.

So the reason I brought that up is because in my own case, I saw all the like kind of clear propositional arguments laid out right in order. And then, but then there were lots of things that could skepticize all over, but something I couldn't get rid of was my own experience of God. And I could, I could skepticize it. I could say, well, I'm, I'm projecting God, right? Because I was raised to think there's this God, so I'm projecting it, right? Sort of a Freudian thing or something, right? So, I've overrised myself. Right? But I could also say, well, maybe not. Maybe it is what all these apologists are saying. So, I'm in

this completely agnostic position. And so, then I had this experience where one of my friends, he said, one time he ran into me and he said, hey brother, where's your joy? And I knew that there was something about my life that was up. It wasn't just my intellect, like in this sort of abstract thing, trying to figure out this, something about my life was up. So something deeper, like maybe my will, maybe I'm bent or not untwisted enough. And so then he, by friendship and love, I eventually said, okay, and that got me back on track where I saw different arguments, I was able to overcome certain objections, and I can only explain

that as a movement of grace. Now, sure, it's, of course, logically possible that this is all made up and it's not a movement of grace, but I'm like, how else am I supposed to explain it? Yeah. So to me, Christianity is true, right, because it ultimately explains all of these details of all different sorts at all different levels right, and so that's Using that other kind of reason not just linear kind of

Again Lewis who said I believe in Christianity like I believe the Sun has risen Yes, not because I see the Sun because by it I see everything else. Yes, that's right. That's right and so this is this is something I'm working on now and I don't have a worked out view on this, but to me it seems like a Christian who is in good faith and who's not, what do I say? Not corrupted by too much of bad philosophy. They just see it like the sun. They assent, Newman uses this word,

they really assent that God is the creator, God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, all things visible. They assert that like there's a cigar right there. Now, once you get there, then it's like the foundation for everything else you know. So that's more like, say, if you've had, you've talked about reformed epistemology

and plan to get that kind of view, right? It's like a properly basic belief for you now, right? It's one that you infer other beliefs from, but which you don't have, you don't have evidence or natural arguments for. But I think that view of reformed epistemology, I would contest. I think it can become a properly basic belief, but it nevertheless has all these support relations from all these disparate facts. And that might've been how you first got to the proposition. So you might've first got to it by this kind of complex inference, it's called an abductive inference or an inference to the best explanation.

But then as you experience life, everything makes sense in part of it. And now it's become a basic belief because now you don't believe it from inference. You believe it on real ascent, just directly as a fact. You see it now as a fact. And I would say that's my experience. That's my experience, both going from trying to be an atheist to being a mere Christian, and then going from a kind of Protestant Anglican Christian to a Catholic Christian. I would have that, I had that experience twice.

I like the idea of proper basic beliefs. You explain it pretty well. Here's a few. We believe in the historical past and that the we don't believe that the world was created five minutes ago with the appearance of age, breakfasts in our stomachs. We never ate half smoked cigars. We never smoked memories of things that never happened But there doesn't seem to be any way to disprove that that the universe began to exist five minutes ago with those attributes It's just that there isn't doesn't seem to be any good reason for thinking that yeah But it does sort of make sense of things another one would be Maybe that nothing exists outside of this building that we're sitting in right now.

We have no immediate access to it. In fact, when I was about 16 years old, I went through a fear of that. I would quickly open up my door to see if the outside world was still existing. Plug in the Truman show, that whole show, that whole movie. Yeah, it was like that. Or the existence of other minds. Yes. You're all cleverly constructed robots that are indiscerniblely different from the actual

human being. Yeah, whether this is some computer game. So you have appearance, right, which we by an act of conceptual imagination, imagine the appearance being identical in every respect from the reality. And so then I could just substitute reality for substitute and go back and forth. And it would be the appearances would be exactly. And yet so, but we do have these beliefs even so you could even argument to the ground, right? That this is actually a simulation that you're in and I wouldn't know how to respond to you. But at the end of the day, I might say, I just, it doesn't seem like that's true. It seems,

and I don't have any good reason for it. That reality is as it appears to me, basically that you do exist that the outside world exists that the universe did not begin to exist Five minutes ago, right Solipsism is false the idea that I'm the only one who exists that just seems false Yeah, even though you can come up with a good argument or one that sounds good for it, perhaps Same thing with God's existence, but here's what I thought once upon a time when I was getting neck-deep into William Land Lane Craig debates back in like 2010 or something, you know,

for YouTube really took off. Yeah, I was just like seeing the way in which debates for God's existence were getting in the way of my relationship with God. And at first, I wondered if that was just because I was being threatened by atheistic arguments. And I think that was true partly. But I also think it was true that I was in a way obsessing over arguments for something that just seemed likely to be the case to me. And I thought to myself, wow, maybe someone could start flirting with solipsism.

Watch a bunch of debates on YouTube. I'm not sure who's doing that. These debating who's into that or who the person who's the solipsist thinks he's debating, but you could imagine getting down into that and that ruining your relationship with everyone in your life. Yes. Yes. And someone who loves you might shut the laptop lid and be like, you need to stop this.

Where's your joy, brother? Yeah. That's what I mean. Love your wife. You need to. And I, so it's hard to say, maybe arguments for God's existence and debates of God's existence are getting in the way with your relationship with God because our immediate skeptic kicks up and says, Oh, you're telling me to leave my brain at the door. Are you? You're telling me that at the end of the day, Christianity is intellectually bankrupt. Are you? And it's like, no, it's

not what I'm saying. No, it's a switch that occurs. I think that, so in looking at some of the comments and whatever on both when I had, when I went on Cameron's show, right, and your show, I read different comments and there were different YouTube chatter about what I said. And one of the things I said is, well, this guy just sort of leapt into faith, right? He's, he's not, he's just another one of these Catholic philosophers who doesn't have reasons to believe. I mean, it's more complicated than that. There's what I said, there's a whole inferential process where you read literally books and books of arguments, right? And you read the critics. You read books like the Rationality of Theism that Copan edited, and

you see like 10 different arguments. You read Plinicus 24, two dozen or so arguments for God's existence, and you look at the skeptics and Dan Dennett's and the Richard Dawkins and, right, and the William Rose and the atheist, and you do all this homework. And then you get to the point where you're like, it seems like God exists from the evidence, right? And that's a certain point. But you haven't got to the point where you're really assenting, like I said, right? So when I, but then as you get to the, with this experiential stuff, you see sort of, you experience God is the best way to say it, right? as you get to this experiential stuff, you see sort of, you experience God is the best way to say it, right?

And you've already allowed for that possibility because you can't eliminate it, right? And so then you have these moments of grace where it's like God speaking, like for Augustine, a tola lega, or my friend who said, where's your joy brother, right? Or even our own thoughts can do that to ourselves, right? And then we get to this transition point where we have all those inferential reasons. We could go down the rabbit hole if you want to, right? Or even our own thoughts can do that to ourselves, right? And then we get to this transition point where we have all those inferential reasons. We could go down

the rabbit hole if you want to, right? But then you have just the common sense thing is like I said on your show the first time, people already believe in God at some level and some degree, right? And it's just like sort of seeing that it's already in your experience, right? And so I think I would have three responses to that kind of, um, solipsism, you know, five minutes ago the world was created kind of stuff. One, you could just say that the seeming that you have, like my colleague, Logan Gage talks about the seemings are like kind of evidence themselves, right. And that you could go that route. Um,

you could go the route of more to me, the sort of more complicated route of the Wittgensteinian route, which is, um, when we use words, right, we use words to ask questions. That's one way we use words. And when we ask questions, we assume there's sort of a range of answers that are reasonable and others that aren't some that are nonsense and some that are sense. And so that distinction is inherent in the very language that we're using because language was built right for us to be interacting in rational ways. Right. And so if we start using language to doubt at this fundamental level,

then the very rationality that's already built in language is undermined. So it's like, so that's what he tries to say. And so it's like, he says, there's just certain propositions like, we've never walked on Mars or England is an island. Right. Well, is that, I mean, do you arrive at that by inference? No, you just learned that as you grew up and then it became part of your way of thinking and speaking. So somebody who says, no, England's not an island, would be like, what are you, who are you, what?

Where are you coming from? Like, you're crazy? What? You know? And so the rationality that's built into propositions like that is part of the way we use language. And so language is an extension of our reason. And there's a distinction between sense and nonsense.

So he calls those hinge propositions. And so you could try to go that route to respond to it. When somebody doubts whether this world was created more than five minutes ago, you'd be like, well, what kind of standards of rationality? Where'd you get your distinction between sense and nonsense? Right. And if they try to like come, come at it a priori, then they're subject to Wittgenstein's most famous argument, right? Which is that there's no such thing as a completely private language, right?

You learned language socially. That's the only way to learn language. It's already social, right? So it reflects your social nature, right? And so, so that route wouldn't work, right? If you tried to say, say that, try to say, well, I just have these, grammar was sort of just already created in my mind with all this. So like, okay, maybe I could say that's logically possible, but then you're going to have to say all these other words that I'm using, right? To even run this debate, right?

Have standards in them that are contrary to what this debate is getting me to believe, right? So that's the other route. The other route that I go that I like more, but it's more vague, right, is that there's transcendentals that we have knowledge of, being, truth, goodness, beauty. We already know what those are at some level, right?

And those transcend, right, physical experience. They transcend time. They transcend time and space. That's why they're transcendentals in that sense, right? And so we have this ability to know that at that level. And so to me, that provides itself a standard for reason. And maybe you can combine these three ways in some ways. But I agree if you're captured by the logical possibility

that the appearances could remain the same and the reality just be swapped for a substitute, right? Then it has a compelling question. I think it is a compelling question philosophically to then try to spell out what is the issue? What's the problem? What is evidence, right? What's the nature of rationality?

Where does it come from? How does it relate to language? Do we know transit? So those are further disputes that to me the philosopher who encounters those arguments is going to wonder at those further truths before he accepts Verdicts, right so they serve a use I would say You took my way to go about the multiplicity of Beliefs and worldviews that we have to interact with today that people 500 years ago may not have had to deal with. What do you say to the person who says to themselves, whatever conclusion I arrive at, there will be someone who holds a contrary opinion who could probably talk me out of it.

Therefore, maybe I shouldn't hold anything until I am, you know, so convinced that I could beat anybody in. Does that make sense? That makes complete sense. And part of the problem with that is, I mean, it's got to be subject to its own standard. So if you say, well, if somebody says that whenever you encounter anybody with a disagreeable, that's contrary, then you should withhold your judgment. Somebody else is going to say, no, I'm going to argue to you that you shouldn't withhold your judgment when that happens. So you can't withhold your judgment when that happens. So you can't avoid this.

If there's such a thing as truth and there's such a thing as believing it, right, then you cannot avoid, right, the fact that when you affirm something is true, you exclude the false as the opposite of it. That's just what it is to believe. And so you're going to have this thing. And so the question is then back to the nature of evidence, you might say. You have to encounter the evidence honestly for yourself.

One of my really good friends, his name is Tedla Wolde Johannes Gabriel Jesus, right? He was an Ethiopian, he is an Ethiopian philosopher. And he was my roommate at Talbot. And he told me this one time, very interesting story in his own right, which we could go down if you want. But he said, you know, you just have to follow the truth no matter what and the evidence is you understand it

no matter what. And that's you have to be true right to yourself in that regard. So that's the Socratic, right? Exhortation, know thyself. It's by knowing yourself that you can discover the truth. And knowing yourself means I think this is really true and I think this is true because of X, Y and Z.

And I think that even though that guy's really wise, I just don't see why that's true or how that's true. And I've just got to be honest with what I see now. And that matters. Even if you're wrong, it matters. And so, I remember when Richard Swinburne, a famous Christian philosopher, came to my master's degree at Biola University at Talbot School of Theology, he lectured for three weeks. And the very first lecture he says, are you willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads, even if it leads to atheism? Because that's the right attitude. And I think he was right. Or like Aristotle says, doubt is the beginning of truth. Right? It's the beginning, not the end. Right?

So I think we have to just be honest with what we have in front of us now, what we think at all levels. And so I think that inside, think of it this way, your soul is this big interior castle, okay? It's a huge reality as Dalek used to say. You could talk about your soul all day without stopping if somebody asks you how you're feeling and they, you could just talk about it forever. It's that big, right? So we don't think of it as just like tiny thing inside of my skull or something. It's huge, right? And so that itself has realities in it at all different levels.

So call that the investigation of that, right, the introspective way. And the introspective way, of course, is part of the journey of the mind of God. So we have the outside stuff, right? Start with creatures and all them and how they work and how they're vestiges of God and how they can lead you to believe at least minimal things like there has to be something more than this dependent physical stuff for there to be this dependent physical stuff. Right? So there's like, the world is, as Willard says, ontologically haunted.

You can't just be a physicalist down to the ground. That doesn't make sense. But it doesn't get you a personal God yet. So you can start with the external way, right, the extraversion out here. But then you get into your own soul. It's nature, how it works, right? And then of course, everything that can be in that, which is all your experiences, all the evidence, right?

All the things, all the conversations, the little things that aren't explainable except by Christianity, or all these little things are all in this history, right? All the things, all the conversations, the little things that aren't explainable except by Christianity, or that all these little things are all in this history, right? How to understand the rise and fall of nations. This is all in your soul and you're trying to make sense of it. To me, that being honest with yourself is taking account of all of that as much as possible and being honest with what you know and what you don't know. Gosh, it sounds so overwhelming. You can see why someone's like, I'm just gonna go home and get drunk. Well, I'm a philosopher, so I hang out here all the time. But I think that people are right

to ignore certain conversations. So as you said a while ago, I just don't care about certain conversations. So to me, that's- I don't mean to not care. Socrates didn't say he didn't care about theology. He said, I don't know about things in the underworld. I don't know about that.

And what makes me wise if I'm wise in any way is that I say I don't know that stuff. But what I do know is it's wicked and shameful to do a wrong thing. I do know that. Right? And I do know that we should always obey our superiors, be they gods or men. I do know that. Right? And so he had a certain realm of knowledge

he was confident on and he said, and we need to practice philosophy, which is being willing to stand, right? On your ground when it concerns matters that do, that you do care about, which is, what am I gonna die for? Sure, maybe there's aliens and that's a fascinating discussion, right?

But what are the issues that I'm gonna die for, right? Those are the ones that we definitely should care about and other ones maybe we shouldn't, right? We should put a priority list. And if people are working and people aren't scholars and people aren't philosophers, well, they can only, they have to prioritize, right? And of course, then they're putting the good, the highest, which is tells you what are your priorities? What's the order of goods? Well, maybe it would be wrong for you to study the existence of God because it's detracting from your life in a certain way. Or maybe what Dallas Willard told me once, right, is if studying the Bible is distracting you from loving Jesus, well, just don't study it for a while. Just give it up for a while and try

to pray and love Jesus, right? So we have to keep our priorities straight. So it doesn't mean everybody has to be a scholar, everybody has to be a philosopher, Everybody has to go throughout this whole realm, but you better not ignore the things that are important. And it's okay to ignore other things that are less important for the sake of a higher thing. Right. And I think anybody can do that. Let's take a break because I think that's a good place to break on. And then when we come back,

we're going to take questions from our locals and super chatters. Thanks very much. Stick around everybody. Hey, you there looking at me, you are the number one Catholic app on the app stores is Hello H a l l o w. It's a prayer and meditation app which is faithful to the teachings of the Catholic Church and is incredibly well produced. Go check them out. Hello dot com slash Matt to tease. Go check them out, hello.com slash Matt, two T's.

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they have sleep stories for kids. And so getting to play scripture to kids is super cool. Also all of my lo-fi stuff is now over there. I'm just not interested, Matt, because I can't listen to your voice on that app. Well, you could. Is that the setup? Yeah, that's my setup.

Again, you can. I don't know why you'd want to, but if you want to terrify yourself, I mean, speaking of sibling horror, this is far more creepy. If you want to listen to me, read the Bible to you like this? And, you know, I wouldn't want that. Scott also does.

Yeah. So forget about me. Scott Hans there, Jason Everett, Jackie Francois. So go go check him out. Hello dot com slash Matt. Hello. H a l l o w dot com slash Matt. It's fantastic. And next, I want to say thank you to Pala. You guys have heard about Pala. It is social media the way it was meant to be. I'm over on Pala. So if you click

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The reason is simple. They say that everyone's voices matter. So all on parla equal regardless of race, age, religion, politics or dietary choices. I don't know if that includes pineapple pizza, but yeah, it's not just like a conservative platform. It's just a, it's a platform for people who value free speech. So go check them out by clicking the link in the description below and I'll see you over there. So So So So So So so So So So So So So so so oh so

so So Now, but yeah, that's I think that's the thing that I love most about Plato is that there's really no way to understand Plato, at least to my estimation, unless you read his books. Or at least he resists being, I don't know, there's the, you were talking earlier about a philosophy encyclopedia and I was kind of feeling nervous about that because there's so many philosophers

that I've had described to me and they've gone and read them and they're actually saying almost the exact opposite of that. And, and I think Plato's one like that Like you think of like Platonism and the Platonic ideas Yes, I've not read all of Plato but none of Plato that I've read the closest thing I had to that was in the I think It's the Phaedrus. Phaedo? Yeah, the Phaedo. Yeah, where he basically has a crazy rambling character say things that kind of resemble that so just to see, yeah, I think that Plato's dialogues are the solution to that kind of modern rhetoric, not necessarily leading to the truth thing, which is that when you actually read through them, you say, wait, why is Socrates contradicting himself?

My brain is resisting what he just said. This doesn't make any sense. Fado's a great example, because in that he argues for the immortality of the soul. But when people go back and they just try to very carefully analyze the arguments that he gives for the immortality of the soul, like they're not that great as arguments.

Some of them are maybe even invalid. And so then you think, well, does Plato want us to get those arguments? Is that why he's giving us the fatal to get the arguments out? And I was sort of trained in a way to do philosophy. Or like the point was to like extract the arguments, whereas then I was taught when I was in my doctoral program by my, my, my advisor and dissertation director, Greg Beabout,

that you have to see the dialogues as literary inventions. And so, because he was a Kierkegaard scholar, what's up? Because he was a Kierkegaard scholar, Kierkegaard's famous for all those levels of authorship, right, and pseudonyms buried under pseudonyms. And so like, what's Kierkegaard actually saying? It's the same with Plato.

So I think he put those arguments in so that we could find out how they're not very good. And there's clues in the beginning of the dialogue and at the end of the dialogue, a fator that make you think the Socrates doesn't care about the arguments per se. Right? He does think there can be arguments and he thinks it's good to try to make them. But in the very beginning, he says basically the reason he believes the soul is immortal because that's what he learned when he grew up.

Right? And that holding onto that's really important and then testing it as much as we can. Right? right? And that holding onto that's really important and then testing it as much as we can. Right. And so in that dialogue, he has the stuff about, you know, the divine ideas or the, um, the platonic forms. Okay. Just to, but I, cause I don't, I did listen to the, what was the name of that one again? The fatal, the fatal. I did listen to that, but I was riding a bus and I wasn't paying too much attention. Timaeus is full of all kinds of stuff you said but when I teach to me us in metaphysics. Mm-hmm

There's there's a part and I can't cite your chapter in voice But he basically says what I'm gonna what's important in this sort of discussion is creating some kind of a plausible story Hmm, and so you already know he thinks of story components, But then I compare like our modern astrophysics, right? And certain ideas like string theory, right? Or that, you know, there's 11 dimensional strings, right? That are rooted in a B-R-A-N-E, whatever that means. And you're like, hear some of these stories, and you're like, I don't know what that even means.

It's like, it sounds sci-fi, but you know it's science, right? And it's kind of in a similar way. That's what he's doing. It sounds completely made up, but he's trying to explain certain things. So I think you're right. He knows it's not literal. Like it's not literally the fact that human beings are this circle, right?

And they get broken in half and that's where you get male and female. And that's why we seek the other half so it can be a circle again, which is a perfect shape. Like stuff like that. You're like, yeah, he doesn't literally believe that Who does he have to say that? It's the it's the playwright. Yeah, the comedic playwright. What's his name? the Greek

Aristophanes Aristophanes that's his story of love. Yeah All right, a gown what up so before we get to these questions, we got a lot of questions, got 25 questions from our local supporters. Think of this as the lightning round. But before we do that, I want to let people know that I have scoured the works of Aquinas and have put together a little devotional for Advent in which I have taken out excerpts from Aquinas on the dual natures of Christ, the mother of God and the incarnation.

And so for every day throughout Advent, along with this ebook that I've put together, will be me reading each meditation. So if you want to get access to that, as well as a ton of other things, go to matfrad.locals.com, matfrad.locals.com and become a supporter. We'd really appreciate it. It helps all the work that we do. And you'll also get these daily meditations for advent from Aquinas They're not like mushy meditations like you know, they make you feel warm and fuzzy

Yeah, they more like super philosophical and but if you're into that Matt Fred locals calm We have some super chats to do read. All right. Well only one of them was a question from Steven Wang. As a Franciscan theologian, what does SCOTUS have to say about natural theology? You're like, well, I'm not a Franciscan theologian. I would disclaim again, like you said, our scholars do that I'm not a theologian.

I think he meant SCOTUS is a theologian. Oh, I see, as a Franciscan theologian. Oh, got it, got it, got it, thanks, thanks, thanks, good. I mean, his natural theology is complicated, but I mean, I think the basic story of it is similar to say Aquinas's or Bonaventure's, where there's arguments from the nature of causation to the existence of a being that's self-existent.

So you have similar arguments like that, like Aquinas's, I believe it's the second way. So you have a contingency type argument, you have an essentially ordered causes type argument, so you have that way of argument which is similar. But I think what's distinct about Scotus is he takes Anselm's project of perfect being theology, and he tries to work with that. And so what he does there is when you get to the nature of God, so you've established the existence of a, let's say, a self-existent being, but there's no more specificity. So when you start analyzing the nature of that God, Scodus uses a kind of perfect being

theology to take the kind of attributes or qualities that we attribute to creatures, which are the sort that if we were to eliminate all their imperfections and corruptions, like the wisdom of Socrates, right, and then it would admit of, say, intensification to an infinite degree, all those types of qualities, which are called pure perfections, those are the ones that we attribute to God. And so now he has a way, a kind of program of how to get different attributes for God. Now, he also thinks there's an order to those attributes, so does Aquinas, but they differ, again, on which the order of those kind of attributes for

Aquinas, the master attribute is simplicity. So once you get that, then you can move to the other attributes and explain those and understand those as kind of like the centerpiece of his natural theology. Whereas for Scotus, the centerpiece is God is an infinite being, and he has a very distinct way of thinking about that. And that's how you get the, how you understand or derive to a degree, the other attributes. And so they both have a group of attributes with a master attribute, right? And they think that you can get to a fuller understanding of God's nature. But SCOTUS takes the attributes as pure perfections and those are the ones we attribute to God. And first we just, we

attribute to an infinite being, which is, which is sort of his master concept. So that, that's how I would answer that question initially. All right. That's all we're going to get time for is initial responses. I got 25 more of those, which is very difficult when you're talking about really difficult philosophical discussion. Do natural theology answer. Do you want to start doing some locals and you can get back to those if that's okay. Yeah. Okay. Lexi Freiling says hello from the Freiling family. Hey, what's up? Do you know who they are? I don't know. Okay. Yeah. Dr. Platoi Freiling says hello from the Freiling family. Hey, what's up? Do you know who they are? Yeah.

Dr. Plato, when you were talking about reason and if you grew up in another religion is how one reasons when confronting their own understanding of the world, depending on nature versus nurture. Does nature versus nurture have anything to do with the formation of reason? I hope that makes sense. That makes sense. Two minutes go. Yeah.

Um, I think that there is a nature to reason and we have access to the truth, right? So we have these transcendentals are already in our minds to a degree. We already have the knowledge of being goodness, truth. That's why we all kind of understand that there is a God at some level, even if we don't identify that as God. And so the mind already has its natural ability. It's already connected with reality. So I would put it this way in a nutshell, that the logical space of all of reality is the same logical space of your introspective zone, which I was talking about with you earlier, Matt. So the logical space is the same. There's an isomorphism between the logical space you can think about and the logical space of reality, right? So sometimes that's called the spirituality of man, which means

kind of what we, I think, that's a better meaning than rationality. Right? So spiritually we have a capacity for the truth that is anything that's knowable or anything that's intelligible or anything that even has possible being, we can know about. That's the extent of our intellectual power. That's natural. Now nurture, right? So there is a natural route to how we think. And so we can, we can always measure up to that standard. I think nurture has a huge influence on how, how we think. And I think it has a much greater influence. And I think a lot of people like to admit on the one hand,

but then I think other people that think Bolverism is the way to kachik everybody thinks it's deterministic. It determines what we think. So we don't want to say it determines what we think. And we don't want to say that we aren't influenced in ways that are hard to discover. So I think that's why I like Socrates' life as an example for philosophy, because he one says, know thyself. So there's a root in the nature right of ourselves as Rational beings or spiritual beings, but then he says he we all need to act as gadflies in the service of the God Right is in other words. We need to criticize our cultural forms Because we need to expose the falsehood that into some degree we've inherited We've all inherited certain falsehoods in our in our upbringing

So we need to think we have certain limitations and falsehoods there. We need to purify it as best as we can. Sorry, how does Bolverism differ from the genetic fallacy or is it something? It is that, but it's a very popular way of thinking. It's a term humorously coined by C.S. Lewis after an imaginary character to poke fun of a very serious error in thinking that he alleged frequently occurred in a variety of religious, political and philosophical debates. Yes, it's when we discount somebody because they're a white male or because they're a Christian or because of their eraseness, where because they're wealthier because yeah, it's completely genetic fallacy, but it's super popular. Travis says, as a philosopher, do you think the question, do you believe in God is a loaded question?

Is there a better, more charitable question that is more likely to spark meaningful conversation? I think it is a loaded question because I think when we say God in our Christian sort of roughly Christian culture, um, that we mean like the name of a personal being. Whereas what the word used to mean is something like the one Supreme being, something like that, the greatest conceivable being or the best being. An ultimate explanation that isn't explained. Yeah. And so I think that when we say, do you believe in God, we mean, do you have a religious affirmation of a personal God?

And that puts people off. Whereas I think the right way to go out is first, like, let's see if there's a non-natural reality that's beyond what we understand to be physical. And if that's the case, then I think we can go forward and then say, well, what's see if there's a non-natural reality that's beyond what we understand to be physical. And if that's the case, then I think we can go forward and then say, well, what's that reality like? Is that reality personal? Is that reality not personal? Is that reality mindlike? Is that not mindless? So you start more modestly. That's really good. And work up. Otherwise you're making several jumps, at least in the hearer's mind when you say God.

So maybe the, the, the, the mnemonic device to remember that is on the five ways Aquinas always says, and that's what we call God. Right? So if you start out the question of what we call God and the person isn't in your we, because they're not Christian or they're agnostic or they're atheist, well, it's putting too much pressure on the beginning question. Yeah. That's a really good answer.

Marcus says, what would you say to those who would cite Palomism as a better view than Thomism or other medieval philosophers and theologians in preference to those of the Orthodox? Have you been privy to the Palomism simplicity debate? Yeah, to a degree. So I think that in the 1400s, so this is where my friend Jared is really important, his work on Bonaventure and the Trinity is that the Franciscan way of understanding through Bonaventure, right, is, and Scotus after that, is by the time you get to the 1400s became of great interest to the Orthodox because the Palomites were being targeted by the Dominicans and the Dominicans wanted to crush the Palomites, right, because they're knights for the truth,

right? But Pope, I think it was Eugene IV, I could be wrong on the person, but he came to the aid of the Palomites in a certain way by saying, hold on, right, the Franciscan tradition thinks in a way that might be how we can understand and incorporate and assimilate the insights of Palomus because of their views. And so then there was a guy named Scolarius and Father Christian, Capes, who knows all about this guy. And so this guy started going around to all the studio, the Franciscan studio, like the

schools of Franciscanism and getting all their texts and learning about it. He also learned about Aquinas. So he was this avid Latin lover, even though he was an Eastern guy, Greek lover. And so he agreed with Aquinas as much as he could, then disagreed and liked the stuff the Franciscans were saying. And so I think that Palomism is not this evil, horrible thing if you see it as compatible with the Franciscan tradition, which is the opposite of an evil, horrible thing, but is a beautiful, wonderful part of the Catholic tradition. And so I don't think we need to be afraid, right? Of like the essence energy distinction, right? Or there being sort of a kind

of complex view or a subtle view of the doctrine of simplicity. I don't think we need to be afraid of that. I think we need to be careful and we need to do our work. But I think in the end, it's not something to, to get our ideological, you know, hair up about. Yeah. If people are interested in this topic, they can search Palomism in on pines for the coinist.com. I've done a couple of interviews, even with a Dominican who defends the coherence of Palomism and simplicity. Ask Dr. Plato if he had a college age Bible study type group with kids from multiple places in education, homeschool, public school, what would be a good intro or catchy ways to introduce philosophical topics to them? What resources would he use?

Okay. So wait, how to very kids to philosophical issues was that if you had a college age Bible study type group with kids from college, you know, public school, homeschool, what would be a good intro or catchy ways to introduce philosophical topics to them? Hmm. It depends on the age. I think what, when I, so when I was at, when I was an undergrad, I, every summer I taught in summer camps. So this is a little younger as kids. I mean, I taught kids from third grade all the way up to high school. So, but one thing I did with the older kids, like maybe middle school and up, I did it with some younger ones too, but I, I role played.

So especially if they're already Christians and they're raised a certain way, then your role play, you pretend like you're not a Christian and you ask honest questions. And so that engages them to respond with reason, right? Not being able to help themselves to certain terms like grace. I mean, what's that? What being able to help themselves to certain terms. Yeah. Like grace. I mean, what's that, what's the word grace mean to somebody who's never been raised Christian? That's like a weird word. Like it's not a normal word.

Here's something I've done with a group of people before I gave a talk on logic. I would put them, they would all stand in the middle of a room and I would say, okay, that side over there, let's say the left side is the affirmative and the right side is the negative. And I'm going to make a statement and you go where you think the truth is. And then I'll start with something that's, you know, pretty, uh, easy, like, um, Chick-fil-A is better than McDonald's, right?

And so they never all go to the affirmative side. So it's not a great example, but point is at that point, someone from each side can make the case for why Chick-fil-A is not better than McDonald's. And at that point, people are free to trade sides. And then you also have people in the middle who are kind of choosing to refrain. It's just a nice, easy way to get that's great. And I think what both those those exercises have in common is that they're engaging the student in the dialectic, give and take of reasons and objections. Because what I think happens in a lot of religious upbringing is we just hear the

answers. And so then when somebody comes along and gives objections, it like it like crushes us as opposed to you gave them the objections and you gave them the counter objections and the counter counter objections. And they've got this articulated dialogue back and forth. And so you start them in, I would say using their creative imagination, or I called it earlier, that your conceptual imagination. It's not picturing things, but like imagining responses and imagining reasons from a different point of view. I think that engages the philosophical, one part of us philosophically. I would also say read poetry and reflect.

What's that? I would also say read poetry and reflect. Yes, good idea. Right? So you engage not just the dialectical thing, like the give and take, but like the depth dimension of reality, you're trying to understand the depth of things and not just why to believe things. So I think both of those would be good. We have a super chat here from John Mott who says, do you know who that is? Yeah. Do all people deserve respect? No. Next question. Is it, that's honestly his question. Do all people deserve respect?

I mean, I think maybe he's talking about in this kind of dialectic where we have people that we disagree with or whatever. I think to a degree, I think if we're all practicing, you know, common decency, but one thing I noticed that my old mentor, Doug Guyvitt at Talbot, I watched him discuss things with students. And when there were students which exercise

a kind of pretense, right? Or they tried to catch him in certain ways. He's smart enough and ahead of them logically. So he would call them out morally in a discussion. And I used to never do that because I thought maybe I had a kind of overly tolerant view of respecting people. But I think he actually did respect the person.

How would he do that? Right, so he would say like, you're only saying this because you think this and that's why you're doing that. And so you need to admit that that's not a good motive. Right. But if you want to ask your question, honestly, I'm right here to hear you. Yeah. Like he, I mean, he would call them out morally and it would do it in a loving way. It was very calm. So respecting people can entail calling them out. Yeah. Respecting people can include approaching them. Yeah. And I find Socrates is also a model of that. Cause he says, as I was telling you, Neil, like in those dialogues,

he'll tell Calicles or other people, you don't believe yourself. You, I know that you think that there's higher goods than wealth, honor, and reputation. I know you think that even though you just said the opposite, you've lied to yourself. And so I think respecting people includes, right, calling them out at the right moments. Right. But that's with the right attitude in the right way. It prudence. Yes. You don't want to shame them. You don't want them to be embarrassed and right. So it's not hard and launch to just start being an asshole, right? Can that be just a, so I

don't know if I address John's question, but I think so. Is it possible for to prove God's omnibenevolence using philosophy? I quite a certainly thought so. Absolutely. I mean, I think that that's the best concept to think about God to begin with. Right? He's the good, like that's Plato, right? Like the good, right?

That's what we're all looking at. That's the source of everything, right? So I think that if we think of God as a being, right? Who's perfect, then I think we have to attribute to him all the kinds of perfections, which could be, yeah, all the great making properties, which we could imagine to the maximal infinite degree. And one of those would be his, his goodness. Right. And so I think so it would come along with trying to argue for his perfection. Yes. Being the full fullness of being, if God is this way Bonaventure puts it, if God,

if God is right, then God is the best. Right? I mean, because his being is infinite and perfect, right? So he's gotta be the best or the, the, the goodest as it were, right? He's gotta be the highest. That's what it means to be supreme deity. Do we have any other super chats that I've missed? Yeah, there are a couple. We have one from Xavier Jimenez,

which I think you already answered, which is, can you talk about Palomis? Yep. And the essence energy distinction, it's placed on the Catholic Church and being a bridge from Thomism to Palamas. We kinda did that. Can already address that.

And then just some, just donation ones, a big one from Daniel Born, he was just saying thank you. Man, that's very kind, thanks Daniel. From his colleagues and things. Oh, here's a new one right now from Bridget and bull We got any jokes got any good jokes Hi guys, I'll tell you Peter Kroft's joke. He told me the other day which people have heard if they watched it It's very funny. Yeah, I thought it was funny

So this man walks into a bar and he's got a banana sticking out of his ear And the bartender says mate you got a bloody banana sticking out of your ear and the fella says what's that? Sorry, I can't hear you. I have a banana sticking out of my ear That's pretty good. Do you have a good joke? I have ones about that good My favorite joke my favorite joke is what's green and has wheels Let me try You have to try that's part of the job. What has a green? What's green? It has wheels. I have no idea like a green car almost everybody guesses a green car

Some people guess like a pickle with wheels. Sometimes. I don't know why a tractor. Okay, that makes sense, right? But do you give up? Yeah, it's grass. I was just kidding about the wheels I have a whole series of light bulb jokes, but I don't know if I should spend that time on that. If you. Yeah, well, are they worth spending time on? I guess that's rather subjective. I like this one, right? This is a shout out to all my new polity friends.

So how many government workers does it take to change a light bulb? I don't know. Five, four to form a committee and talk about it. Why the fifth guy screws it into the sink That's very good that was the I think that's number three on the build-up to the final one Okay, and again, maybe this I think this is fun But so the final light bulb joke of the four I only did a couple of them

Is you know, how many surrealists does it take to change the light bulb? I don't know. Fish. That's all I got for you. It's great. Yeah. All right. Good. Is there an explanation or reason as to why we need or cannot be without an institution that can teach no objective truth? That is the Catholic Church. I would say, can you say that one more time? Is there an explanation? Give us a reason why we can't be without an

institution that can teach no objective truth. Let me, let me say I can teach the can't I'll say it one more time. So is he saying what's the reason why we have a church? Why do we need a church? But it seems to be a little more pointed than that. Is there a reason we can't be without it? Okay Why do we have to have it in other words? Yeah, I mean it seems to me we if Jesus Christ right is authorizing the teaching of himself Right then his teaching is infallible that's his his own teaching.

And so the office, right, the teaching office that has that would be, you know, he's prophet, priest, and king. So that office would need to be perpetuated. Now, what are those propositions? I mean, that's a complicated question, but I think at a surface level we can get that, right? Obviously scripture, in scripture it's a lot of that, right, but that came through the apostles and came into the church and the church validates that. And then there's the various ecumenical councils and other councils

and other levels of statements and blah, blah, which gets complex quick. But there's an office that is Jesus teaching office because he's the teacher. Can I give you a better answer with a meme? Yeah, go for it. All right. You have Boromir who is solar scriptura saying I swore to protect you from heresy and man-made traditions and Frodo says, can you protect me from yourself? That's good. That's good. A much simpler way of saying it is that text is tone-deaf.

How many times have you texted someone or written to them? They've got the wrong impressions. Yeah. Anyway, I think I want to make it a distinction on that regard. So I think that so oftentimes that when I was a solo scripturist, I said things like the Bible sort of authenticates itself, right? Or interprets itself for those kind of ideas. Right.

And I think I understand what that means. If you're talking about an individual person who encounters scripture and God uses that to save them and lead them to Christ. Absolutely, the Bible can do that, and it has done that to many people. But when we're talking about the revelation of God being entrusted publicly, right, with public ministry and public liturgy, right, and public teaching, right, to hold us together as a communion, Yeah. Right, to me, it seems like that's not sufficient. That's like a different discussion. When it comes to the social, right, and not just the individual, there needs to be this office.

Right, and it has to be entrusted, right, to the church as a mystical body, right, which has an institutional manifestation, or it's not the mystical body as we understand it, right. Clem Harold, who we both know. Hey, what's the super chat Clem. He says why is making bread a properly human act? That's a good question What is a really human act? What is that? What is a property? I mean, there's something I would say this that so making bread is You're taking material

things from this world, right? You're taking water, flour from the grain that's been processed in a certain way. You're taking something that God made that you can't make, which is life itself, which is the sourdough culture, right? You've got the yeast to living organism and the bacteria, the lactobacilli, just like yogurt, that's a living thing, and they're in a symbiotic relationship. We can't create that. Nobody can create life.

Right? We haven't figured that one out. Evolutionists say somehow we get from non-life to life, but nobody actually knows. And so we take something God made, right, that we can't make. We took something we can kind of participate in, which is grain. We take water, which again we can't make, right, and we take some salt. So we're, it's like, take all those things and put those together, right? And I think we're participating in the created material world using God's gifts, right?

To make something of our own design, right? That can give God glory, right? And also it's us participating in His works as the kind of apex. I mean, could grains of grass ever get to an apex like that all by themselves? No. And then, of course, you have the idea of bread itself being what's transubstantiated, right? Yep.

That the appearances of bread, so I think even in higher. So naturally, we participate with God to make bread. And then supernaturally, we have the whole sacramental ministry right uses that that that substance follow-up question Is it a properly human act to make bread on Minecraft on? Minecraft you can make bread on Minecraft. Yeah, okay. I didn't know that no that wouldn't if it's not actual bread with actual Yeast and bacteria. No, it's not what is the simulation make is a simulation of of what's being done on Minecraft then I'm a monkey's uncle okay Isabel says does he have any kind of philosophical approach to parenting to parenting oh my gosh no not particularly but I do I I do talk with my son very

philosophically he really likes that. He really likes logic and puzzles. And I think that engaging children in great questions, where they're both the kind of puzzling kind and interesting kind, and kinds like I remember one of my friends, Jay Hawthorne, his son, when I went over there one time, he was talking about his son and he asked his son, do you know anything that's not physical that exists because God is not physical and he exists? And his son clapped his hands and went, that feeling, I mean, this is like, I forget how old his son was. I want to say six.

So like the feeling, the sensation, the quality of that experience was non-physical. What an interesting. And so, I mean, I think when you, when we talk, this is my view of parenting, this doesn't tell you how to do it, but if you talk at a higher level than your kids can understand, they pick up so much language

and their mind is getting smarter and smarter and smarter. If you just talk articulately, I try to speak with the highest vocabulary I can until they need write me to clarify and and we use we listen to audiobooks a lot Yeah, and they listen to like, you know, Winnie the Pooh and wind in the willows You know for the Lord of the Rings and Narnia and they have vocabulary and understand at a very high level so they're like educated just by the in the vocabulary environment being high

right educated just by the vocabulary environment being high. Right? Here's another thing I like to do with my kids, which gets to the same point is to the game 20 questions. Yeah. It's an excellent game. It's a very philosophical game. It's a game of deduction. So you come up with an idea, you might think of an elephant and then your child has 20

questions to figure out what it is. And so of course you start categorizing from the outside in. And so a bad question, the bad first question is, is it grass? Far too specific. So you have to start very general and then work your way in and kids learn that quickly. I remember I was playing this with my son, Liam, and then he did one. I could not for the life of me get it. He was thinking of blood vessels. I'm like, dude, it can't be that difficult.

Anyway. Parenting is very difficult. Parenting is definitely a crucible of sanctification because you realize that what Chesterton said, like your kids, students don't learn what you teach. They learn what you assume when you teach. So kids don't just learn what you say. They learn about life by your behavior.

They copy you in every way. Like they do certain things that are bad and you're like, it's like a mirror for yourself. And so I guess my only practical advice would just be to be very humble and to thank God that he knew ahead of time that you would be a broken instrument, but he's gonna use it for good anyway. And to be forgiving of yourself,

but, but realize that it's ultimately your character that is going to teach them more than anything you can say. This is a very good question. And I've thought about this question before too, looking forward to your answer. Father bolts asks, are a person's particular parents, the necessary material cause, i.e. particular sperm and egg for their existence? Or is it ontologically possible for a person to have different parents?

In other words, I know you know this, but just so I can flesh it out, if your parents didn't exist, is it possible that Plato, Alex Plato, the man I call Alex Plato could have existed in a different body somewhere at some time. I guess I have conflicting intuitions about that. Um, I mean, I mean, our, our anthropology is going to have some play here and that's what gets engaged in this discussion. Yeah.

So I mean, one way that say SCOTUS and Aquinas and Bonham should think about the person, the person is the composite of the soul and the body, right? It's properly a name for that composite. So if you had a different body, you wouldn't be you. Yes. But on the other hand, like the, the person, the person is, is transcends that composite. It's not just merely right. The sum of those parts, right? It's like a more fundamental principle, like God creates, right? The soul out of nothing, right? And the body is there too, right? And so there's some act of God that's individualized.

So there's a, what do I call it? Maybe an individual essence, I could say. So yes, there's a kind of thing we are that's a human, but then it's like an individual essence there. So if I understand person in the one sense, it seems like you've got to have the parents you had. But if I understand it to be sort of this particular thing that God creates, right?

Then it seems like I can imagine that with a different, a different body. I don't see why God had to make my soul connected to this body. Now, I don't know. So I take it, it's the ambiguity of the idea of a person, right? So like maybe we could reflect on the separation

of the soul and body, right? So when the soul goes, right, there's no body, but presumably, like if, if we just assert that that survives existence, is that a person? No. Um, so in one sense, no. Right. But on the other side, we want to say as well, like half a person, something that seems weird to say, it's half a person, but it's not completely a person, not person the proper respect of that person, but it is, is it you? That's a good question, but it's not completely a person, not person, the proper respect of that person. But it is, is it you that's a good question. Maybe it's not you. Yeah. So it seems to me, it seems to me like whatever it is,

it bears the individuality, right? That is what we align with person. Yeah. So to me, I like thinking of it that way. It's, it's good. You're, you are, you have a soul there. So the, you, the individuality part is still the same before and after death Right didn't go away or getting reduced but it's activities and powers and potentialities are all limited now because there's no body It's like but cut off your arm and I cut off your other arm and cut off your leg and I cut off your whole body Like you're getting more and more debilitated. Mm-hmm, right? So we also make that a short

When he says that if I cut off your arm and I cut off your arm and I cut off your leg and I cut off You just make that it's like a three second clip. I want to see all right that he says that if I cut off your arm and I cut off your arm and I cut off your leg and I cut off, just make that it's like a three second clip. I want to see. All right. That he says we as Christians tend to reconcile the problem of evil by interpreting it as a privation on the good. I wouldn't say we wrecked try to reconcile. I think that's just how we explain it. However, many evil things or things of disvalue seem to be more than just mere privations

and seem to have a positive reality Thoughts on that Yeah, so maybe we could make a distinction between Material evil and moral evil so obviously material evil would be like say You know a dog is born without legs, right? There's like something missing there. That's material evil would be like say, a dog is born without legs, right? There's like something missing there that's material evil, right? And then there's moral evil,

which doesn't have to do with material evil per se, right? But it's the lack, it's the will is deformed, right? The will somehow is not as it should be, right? So that's the thing that's lacking in what it should be. Now that's different than all other material realities because if I'm right about the analysis I gave earlier of like the affection for justice and the affection for self-perfection are both part of the will, right? Then there's a part that in order for the will to be properly itself, it must be in proper relationship to God, right? Because God's the highest good that you love for his own sake.

So if you don't love God for God's sake, then your will is disordered. Right? And so that is a moral evil. Right? So of course, with other acts too, like when you, when you prefer wealth to friendship, right? You've messed up the order of this. Well, wouldn't you say like with all evil acts, there's a lack of a good that ought to be there. So if I do, I do say that. So both material and more, right? But then you could think about this. When we,

when we say when an animal experiences pain, right? I mean, is that, let's say they even suffer from the pain. Maybe it's so painful. They can't walk properly, right? Is that a positive evil? Some people would call it that, right? Because obviously the sensation, right? Is how, is like a physical reality in them, maybe electrochemical signals or something that, right? Because obviously the sensation, right, is like a physical reality in them, maybe electrochemical signals or something that affect their joints and stuff positively, right? And so then you explain the lack of their motion, right, of walking by this positive

pain, these like neurological impulses that are out of control or whatever. So that looks like a positive material evil, right? It seems like the effects of evil Press upon us Such that they feel like a positive thing though. We can describe them as being a lack So there's a lack of a thing that ought to be there namely health of the body Yes, but what results from that lack is something that feels like a gigantic positive thing. Yes, no, I think that's the case too. Like, I mean, my colleagues at Franciscan, Pat Lee and John Crosby have a famous series of articles

back and forth about this issue. Wow. So John is defending the view that maybe this questioner was implying that there's positive evils that can't be assimilated to the evil as privation view, whereas Pat's defending, Dr. Lee is defending the view of the privation view of evil. And I'm more sympathetic with Pat's view,

but I see, and John will talk about these sort of physical pain or psychological pain, right? It seems like you can't capture that reality that we're describing unless you use a physical positive, not physical, if you use a positive description, I guess I don't have a clear answer to that question, but it seems to me like you can explain it as a privation, right, because you ought to be in a certain condition,

which you're not having all this massive physical pain, right, and that could be the effects of other people's sinful, unformed wills, which are privation. Is it just the way that you're explaining it? You know, like because I think that like when you say like, what is evil? Yeah. What is what does evil mean? I think a quick answer is it's the way things shouldn't be. That's what that's exactly my gloss on it.

Yeah. It was not to be physical or moral. So if a father neglects his children or he physically harms them. Yes. But if you give that definition, then all evil is going to be assimilatable to a privation. Yeah. Right. Which to me makes sense. That's Anselm's understanding. And others as well. Right. Hey, you've mentioned your colleagues several times now. Why is Franciscan a good school that people should consider coming to? I mean, Franciscan is extremely unique. I mean, I think it has its sort of byline, right, is passionately Catholic, right, academically

excellent. So I think you've got a really great faculty, right, in different departments, which are doing as good as work as they can at the highest levels, right? And so you've got a great faculty. And then on the other hand, you have the passionate Catholic. The faculty themselves are passionate. Not every single one of them is Catholic. There's a tiny percent that isn't, but they're friends for sure. They're fellow Christians.

But you have the student body has this Catholic experience, a Catholic life. And I think making the distinction between, well, university is only about learning stuff, or university is only about the experience. I mean, obviously those are both false, right? University these days is about both those things. And Franciscan has a unique, Orthodox Catholic environment with a Franciscan charism. Right?

And I think that that among the Newman guide schools is a unique thing. It's a unique size as well. So it's not too small, right? It's not too big of a student body. I think it's a great size for the kinds of things we're doing. And so I think it's a great place to send your kids, right? To a safe place that's not obviously heterodox, right? It has some plurality of views, which is important, I think, as I said earlier. And you're going to get a great

education in terms of the level of of understanding and expertise So we just had father Dave the president on a few weeks ago. Yeah Man, that was interesting wonderful chat. I mean, he's such a great guy loves our Lord Absolutely doesn't like love Lord of the Rings, which is very unfortunate doesn't love Lord of the Rings No, I'm gonna have to talk to him about please do that Yeah, cuz he texted me the other day is like I just flew home from Austria Tried to watch the Lord of the Rings ten minutes in something like that. Oh, it doesn't like the movies. He's a reddit He's never read it. Okay, he sat in front of me across this table went for what's the guy's name?

I'm like Frodo. Maybe I know yeah, I think that's his name Maybe if I agree to make an audiobook for him, he wants to listen to me for like, you know 20 hours No, he would. Nobody should. But he's philosophical. So maybe he'll listen to a philosophical argument in favor of Tolkien. Kyle Whittington says, how do you Alex keep your humility? Being both a philosopher and a basketball legend. Don't try to deny it. I saw the trophy in Abbe Alex's room office. What's this? Does that mean? So, uh, so I don't know what the trophy is in particular Alex's room office? What's this?

Does that mean? So, uh, so I don't know what the trophy is in particular, but you know, um, I did have one game right where, where, where I, um, did really well in high school, um, scored 35 points. I don't think he's referring to that particular game. Um, but there we did play basketball when I was at Francis DeSales in St. Louis, and that's probably what he's referring to. I don't remember the trophy, but yeah, we had like a league in our own little church, we had a little gym there. It was an oratory of Christ the King.

And actually Canon Avis, who's here at Precious Blood now in Pittsburgh, was there and he married my wife and I. He was the priest there. And anyway, so we played basketball in that little gym and that's what he's referring to. And how do you stay humble? You know, it's's really difficult being as good as I am to be humble. But I manage, I don't know if I do, but Bill, Bill Wynn says,

is culture the kingdom of man? Is culture the kingdom of man? I guess I don't know exactly what he means by kingdom of man. If he means like not kingdom of God, then I don't, that's right. I mean, I think culture is a really fascinating topic. I think reading Christopher Dawson is a great place to go for that. Reading Joseph Peeper is a great place to go. Culture is a very interesting phenomenon. But if we mean by like the sociological thing where there's an individual culture, whether that's primitive or all the way to advanced civilizations, right? You've got a kind of spiritual knowledge or

spiritual understanding. And this is borne out by historical examination, and that it's man trying to understand God in the place that he is, right? To some degree. So all the social functions of what it has these kind of three, this is what Dawson teaches and I agree with this and I think this is really good, that in primitive societies there's kind of an idea of sacred kingship, there's an idea of a priesthood, there's an idea of prophets and divinization, so these three kind of offices ought to sound familiar, right, prophet, priest and king, and that advanced civilizations have these very clearly and each one of those, there's a class of people that are kind of known or attributed by the people to have kind of a special mediatorial role.

And so, the whole purpose of building culture and building civilization is for man to get to God. And so, there's something right about that, because man is supposed to get to God, but the question is, right, we can go completely astray and become idolaters and tower of babble people or we can do it the right way and right with, with the kingdom of God. So kingdom of man is bad, right? Kingdom of God is good, but they're both cultures, right? And of course, this one can be right, simultaneous with this one, right?

And so that's Augustine city of man, a city of God, where we're weeds and wheat. Yes. We should be pushing more and more and more towards the city of God and away from the city of man. But in history, there's like in different even in our Western civilization. There's there's kind of a play back and forth, but culture itself to me seems like Inherently good right but can be that can be corrupted just like the body is inherently good But we can be corrupted and used for evil purposes So it's not itself the kingdom of man, but we can corrupt it. So it becomes that and that's really dangerous Then you have I would even call it an anti culture like I think in a lot of ways our culture right has this quality to it where

so culture in one sense of the meaning of the word is Like agriculture or like it there's a petri dish in a science class and you put you culture a bacteria It's a place for it to flourish and grow That's what the culture is and so human culture in that understanding of the word culture is a place where there's soul food So that would be like it's its traditions, right? It's literature. It's poetry. It's philosophy. It's theology. It makes the soul actually grow And so I think our culture is we're materialistic in that sense, not meaning just we care about luxuries only, although we do care about that too much, but that we're just fixated on material, physical comfort and security, right? And not these

higher goods. And so I think we see that in higher education. Higher education is not contemplative, like back to Franciscan. So we are a liberal arts tradition, so we're trying to inculcate that in our core classes, right? This contemplative nature of learning, this philosophical and the broad sense of learning and contemplating higher things, whether it's poetry, literature, history, philosophy, theology, all the different disciplines, right? You can have that deeper soul food within that, right, and therefore frame yourself or train yourself to become the person who is open and receptive to that all the time. If people are doing that on a large

enough scale in a society, then I think your society has a culture in that positive sense. Our society seems to lack that in many ways to me. It seems like that's a, in some sense, maybe one of the biggest problems in our, in Western civilization is the kind of collapse of that contemplative element to our life. We're in the rat race, right? We're in the, we're in the, we're in the world of work, right? That Piper talks about becoming more and more total, right? Where what makes something valuable is the end that you get out of its utility. And Where what makes something valuable is the end that you get out of it. It's utility. And so what makes it valuable to go to college is you get a degree and so you

get a job. You're like, what about becoming a person that can receive higher truths from God through contemplation, right? Isn't that something we should also try to be doing? And those kinds of the people, the people we want to be leaders to be parents, to be teachers, to be the people that have that contemplative mindset. So as a long answer, that's a deep, deep, deep topic. I don't know who it was who said a good

society is one which makes it easy for its citizens to be good. There you go. That's really helpful. Yeah. Dr. Plato, what are your thoughts on divine command theory? Can this moral philosophy play any role in Catholic moral teaching or does it? Yeah, I mean, in that debate, I mean, I think you have an unsophisticated view would be like Occam, let's say, which would be God can command anything he wants, period, right? Even you to hate him. So there's no nature of God that constrains what God could command prior to his commands.

Right? So that's one view of divine command theory. That has no place to me. That must be rejected. That's completely false. That's Bonaventure, Aquinas, Scotus, all agree, get rid of that. But then the question becomes, well, what sort of things in God's essence are the things that constrain what he can command, given that there are things? Yeah. Right? So then I think the first step, of course, is the first table of the Ten Commandments. So God can't command, you might say, the opposite of those.

Right? Now, when it comes to the second table, I think the issue becomes more complicated. And so this is where you're going to get a disagreement between Scotus and Aquinas. So I think on that score, it becomes a very complicated dispute about the nature of the created order. And so then when we have the divine commands are given in this order, the question then becomes one of,

again, that creative imagination. Is there some imaginary scenario where God could dispense with some of those commands and it still be consistent with the love of God and neighbor? And so that obviously is something that every medieval scholastic had to deal with because there's cases that seem like that in the Old Testament. And so when Scodus and Aquinas are doing this debate, you might say about the Ten Commandments and whether or not God can dispense any of His commandments. And they've said, no, not the first table. So let's call that natural law in the strict sense. What about in the second table? And so Aquinas is going to interpret things like,

let's say... Adultery? Or theft is a good example, because that's easier to work with for me anyway. It's like, you know, theft is taking somebody's property against their will. So then when God commands us to take certain people's property against their will, the idea is, well, He transferred the ownership. And so when it looked like theft, it looked like stealing, it looked like He commanded stealing, it wasn't actually stealing. So that kind of is a paradigm for Aquinas' strategies. Everything that looks like a dispensation of a command, like an exception

to it, is just that the act underneath is actually not what you thought it was. And that's the strategy he employs, where Scotus seems to want to say that with certain acts, like with Isaac, that when God commands Abraham to kill Isaac, right? He's commanding him to kill an innocent person. And if that is a paradigm underlying description for murder, then he's just commanded murder. Right? So that seems like one where it's hard to divorce the higher level meaning of murder from the lower level description, intentionally killing an innocent person. Right? Now, one route you might try to go, and some Thomists pursue this route, as far as I know,

is, well, he's not really innocent, because nobody's innocent. Right, but to me, that seems like kind of an ad hoc solution. Yeah. Because the notion of innocence, when we think of the paradigm of murder, isn't like innocence before God, like we don't have original sin or actual sin.

It means you're not actively harming anyone. So like the non-civilian in a war is innocent in the relevant sense, which is why Catholics say, right, you can never intentionally kill a civilian, right? Because they're innocent. They're not threatening harm, right? If they're driving a munitions truck, right? Or they're like manning a gun, right? Or like helping feed the bullets. Well, that gets ambiguous, right? But if're like manning a gun, right? Or like helping feed the bullets. Well, that gets ambiguous, right? But if they're innocent in that relevant sense, that's the sense it seems we mean here. So then it seems like that's a really difficult case. So Skotus accepts that those are dispensations. So then he has to go back and interpret from his understanding

of revelation, these difficult cases, that the second table has these kind of things that God himself as the lawgiver at this level, right, could have commanded something different. So he could command somebody to murder him, but it wouldn't be wrong under the same description that a moment ago was wrong. So that is maybe you could call it something like a modified command theory. It's not that absolute kind of re-reject. So it seems to me like that's important, but I think there's one level of command theory that we should all admit, even I think the strictomists, and I think they do.

For example, Elizabeth Anscombe, who I studied, this is where I got this idea. So when she's examining Plato's famous dialogue, the Euthyphro, which kind of raises this issue, right, she says it's very important for God to command things that are just, because if He didn't command them, then you couldn't obey them as being commanded. So he might say, for example, it might be that we all know we should honor our parents. We already know that.

It's just to do that and unjust not to. But when God commands it, now you can obey God as commanding it. So now that makes possible another level of act, an act of piety. So God has to command it for it to be an act of piety. But of course, he can't command any act of piety that's already unjust.

So I think the commands are important because then we can obey them as the person. It becomes personal now, not just following our own understanding of the law from within. Marcus Levy asked if it'd be possible to have you and Jonathan Pagio on an episode of pints for the coin us, you know who that is? No, I heard the name, but he's an Eastern Orthodox icon. Carver. Okay. I think he's a pretty interesting thinker.

Cool. Icon cover. Okay. I think he's a pretty interesting thinker Cool Please define these this is the problem with doing a Q&A on philosophy. None of the questions are like do you like red? They're always like what is red really and then good luck answering that quickly. Yeah, I'll ask it Do you like red dr. Plano actually when I was a kid, that was my favorite color. Is it? Yeah. But now I'm at the point where like if it's colored, it's good. So not white. I like color. I like color. Yeah. I'm a fan of all colors.

Primary or secondary colors. All of them. Yeah. I still have a special place for right in my heart because yeah. Now you homeschool your wife does specifically. My wife does too. Yes. How to incorporate philosophy in homeschool asks Haley Kason.

You know, um, my wife, uh, really likes the, the, the, the homeschool educator and philosopher Charlotte Mason. Yeah. And so she's in a group where they read Charlotte Mason. I've read Charlotte Mason. She's a, she's a legit serious philosopher too, not just a home educator doing sort of practical stuff. But her education is all about virtue formation.

And she has a very important place for being in nature, which your son Peter is very much in nature. And that's something that's forming him in a good way. How do you know that about him? Well because he's a beekeeper for one and I've seen him outside running around barefooted, right, so he's like a fairy. Yeah. And so I think that her understanding of being out in nature is a really important part of a child's education. So maybe if we took that to the extreme, we could call that what some people call unschooling,

which is a philosophy, which is when you're in school, as we do it conventionally, you're kind of killing the wonder, right? And so we need to get them out there where the wonder comes alive. And of course that is, as Plato and Aristotle say, the beginning of philosophy. And as Pieper reminds us,

it's also the sustaining fuel of philosophy. You continue to wonder, it starts you there and it keeps you going, right, till the end, when you finally learn the stuff you wanted to know. So being in nature is really important, but then also coupled with that is reading, reading and reading what they like to read. And so I put stuff forward for my son to read

and he picks up of all the good selections that you throw at him, anything you want, it doesn't matter. Follow your own desires, right, that are good. If they're good, then just stoke it. Stoke it. Don't make them do one thing or another. And I think that's a good philosophy for kids because they have,

different kids have different personalities and different interests and they need to be pushed, right, to pursue excellence in whatever domain, right? At the same time, they're learning the general things of virtue and being out in nature and wondering. So I think I like that philosophy and a completely approve of, of, of what my wife and her, her group of homeschool co-op people are doing. Right. So there's a lot of singing as well and a lot of dancing and those things

to me are moved to student. Yes. I mean, I think those are amazing parts of education. Cause my wife's in the same co-op every Tuesday, they go into the wilderness and dance. And it it's not it's not a thing where they they're like only humanities and science isn't done because they have science too and I think that it's important to have all that why in your estimation is Harry Potter not evil and not something that parents should necessarily keep their kids away from. I mean, you know, you started talking to my brother when he was here about that. I mean,

he's the expert on that. I kind of came to Harry Potter late. And so I'll tell this story and I'll be a Harry Potter heretic in a way that we can laugh at. I remember when it first came, I didn't read any of them, I didn't really care about it, because it was all about allegiance to Tolkien. And people like comparing this to Tolkien, I'm like, no, I was like a complete Tolkien nerd. Like this is not comparable, I can't abide this. And so I didn't read it.

And then I remember my wife and his brother were reading them constantly as they were coming out and the seventh book came out. And I just went straight to the end and I knew the whole thing about Snape with everybody just waiting to see what happened. I just went straight to the end and I knew the whole thing about, you know, Snape with everybody. So I went straight to the end and read. Okay.

I haven't read it yet. I didn't tell them the answer, but I said, I know what happens. Of course, you know, they, they, they naturally hated me for that. But then I actually, when I married star star just absolutely loved Harry Potter. She read Harry Potter as they were coming out when she was about the illiterate woman. I mean, she reads more liter, more literate than I am. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Yes, they're in a book club and they're reading all the great books.

I wish I could read them all. They're reading Dante right now. Wonderful. So, she read them all. So after we got married, we read them all out loud and I really enjoyed it. And then I saw, of course, all the movies and the movies in reading the books and hearing about the books from my brother and then from my friend Jared and his wife also read them and then my wife and I compared them with the movies

and of course I love the movies and enjoy them, but there's certain elements that are just not done to the books. So I think that the books, I would say this, the books have a level of depth in their composition based on the form of their composition that is belied by the level of language in the books. So the level of language is not like Tolkien.

So you open up Tolkien and the language is like archaic and high language. The language itself is interesting. But in this, it's all just kind of normal old conventional language. So it's not interesting, but I think that belies, right? The depth of her composition of the plots and her, the way she makes characters. And again,

this is something that I've heard about. I haven't read this. Like people have written about the kind of literary alchemy that she knew about. And so I think there's a real serious depth in them, right. Um, that have levels of philosophical and theological meaning that are really important. And of course the, the confrontation between good and evil really important. And of course, the confrontation between good and evil is central. And of course, the priority of sacrificial love. I mean, I see the obvious Christianity behind it. And so, I think a lot of the complaints that

I've seen lodged against it, right, to me seem like they're from people that haven't really read it, except there's one figure I think it was, is it Michael O'Brien who wrote a book about that? I think so. So if I remember my brother talking with him and Jared and my wife, he's like the only person who has a sophisticated kind of attack. All the other things that you hear from popular Catholic

teachers and priests and stuff to me are people that didn't read or are ignorant of the story or don't look at these other deep levels. So oftentimes the complaints to me seem surfacey like, well, the children are rebellious and that encourages rebellion. Or there are spells and wizards and witches. But then they like Tolkien. And so I'm like, that's a double standard. I mean, or that these spells are Latin and so that's sort of what like demons use or something. I'm like, okay. But yeah, I mean, I, we look at Latin all the time.

Or that the protagonists use their magic to do nefarious things because they're lazy or something. Yes, I just think that to me, there's no good argument that I've heard to get rid of it. I think it has the good things in it are far greater than any of the negative things that people have mentioned. So you could say that Harry Potter doesn't need to be nearly as good as Tolkien to be OK enough to read. Exactly.

But obviously, Tolkien's the king and superior in the standard and far above. We just make you all in could dream of. We just met Tom Bombadil last night in my reading with Peter. Yeah. I love Tom Bombadil. Amazing, amazing part. Fearless. Yes. So fascinating. amazing, amazing part. Fearless. Yes. So fascinating. And he comes right, I mean, just the contrast between the evil woods, the suffocating with Mary or Pippin or both. And along comes Tom Bombadil, who is, he acts the way around the evil forest, the way Christ must act around the demonic. Like it's not a problem. Yeah.

I know. I love it. It's great. It's great. So interesting. I got when I was in high school, I was a complete nerd on this stuff and I got I had like a Tolkien Atlas, right? Good. And so all the lands like drawn maps and how long it would have taken them to ride and it's like all amazingly consistent what he what he did is a great YouTube channel called nerd of the rings. Okay, I would highly recommend people check that out. There's this great YouTube channel called Nerd of the Rings. OK, I would highly recommend people check that out. There's this great video. I think it's got millions of views. It's called What Would Have Happened If Gandalf Took the Ring? And it's done so well.

You know, there's Tolkien's letters are really interesting. He asks one point, there's a fan that asks him about the failure of Frodo at the end. And he and he has this amazing letter. I forget what number, they're all numbered in his letters. I wish I remember the numbers. I could tell you where to find it. But he talks about what he calls the logic of the story

and how he's like, I didn't like make it this way. Like it made itself, like I was sort of listening, you know, that kind of thing. And then he imagines what would have happened if things would have been different in the end, right? If there was a different kind of logic of the story. And that's a really fascinating element about the nature of story. So if I was going to talk to Father Dave again about Tolkien, I would talk about his famous

essay, right? The On Fairy story. Yes, and just so everybody knows, this is going to be an audiobook this month on Locals, matphred.locals.com. We've got an audiobook on that coming out. Awesome. And so I think there's something deep, deep, deep in what Tolkien is doing and Lewis both, right?

I think they are restoring, and again, back to my Franciscanism, is they're restoring the importance of what Augustine and Bonaventure called memoria, that element of our kind of, we would call it consciousness, which includes maybe subconscious, like it's a bigger reality than we think of, right?

And they're restoring, I think, the importance of that through what they call the creative imagination or sub-creation. And so when we bring this stuff out of the depths, there's a lot of it that's connected to the metaphysical and moral nature of reality itself that you can't get away from. And when they're doing this in their imaginary worlds,

it creates a kind of depth and ability to see things in our world. So Tolkien talks about how this fantasy can tell the truth. Absolutely. Right. That's why when I put my head into a subpar novel or a video game or a movie, I come out and ready to connect with the world again, I guess. When I read Tolkien, I come out and I see the world as I should have been seeing it before I read Tolkien, but I wasn't able to. Yes, absolutely. It's beautiful. The world is so much bigger.

Yeah. So I think, I think rolling, I think, I think she does fit into that camp, but I don't think she, she does what Tolkien does at that level, because he talks about how we create you. The point of this fantasy for adults is to create a secondary world that's believable in a certain way it's believable. And I feel like the way she has magic, right, in her world that's in the same world, it's like the two worlds are a little too close, right? Whereas with Tolkien, it's like our world in aeons

in the past in some other form of the earth is that it'd get different shape, right? And so it's like far enough away where I think that makes it in a weird way more believable. When it's too close, it's less believable. So I would, I would say that about in some ways about Narnia too, like in some ways it's, it's less close than Roland. So maybe like we have Tolkien, it's, it's far enough away from our ordinary world that it's, but it's still close enough, metaphysically and morally that it's believable. And then there's Lewis and then there's, there's rolling. Yeah. I mean, that's me just, no, I like shooting, but they get swept up into the other world. Yes. Um, and being in the other world is crucial to being in a fantasy, right?

Yeah. Um, so. Are you reading any books right now? And we'll end on this question. Any good fiction you were reading? I used to read only philosophical theological books, but I used to always go, we know, go to a bookstore. That's exactly where I went. And that's what I'd read. But I would say the last six, seven years, all I want to read is fiction. That's great. I think that's, I think, I don't know if it is or not, but that's just how I feel. Literature is literature is very, very, very philosophical because you're presented with a

whole world. Yeah. Even're presented with a whole world, even not a fantasy world. So Tolkien in that book I mentioned by Baxter, Jason Baxter about the medieval mind of Seelus talks about that he kind of toyed with this idea that one of the purposes or points of a good story or effects of a good story is its atmosphere or the world that it makes.

So he, for example, just to illustrate, I'm not necessarily agreeing with him, didn't like the three musketeers. It was like all action. Right. And when you look at some of them, like the Hobbit movies, for example, they destroy the world that Tolkien made, right?

The seriousness and depth of the world by the action kind of fun stuff going on, which he actually predicted himself. He said, if they make shows of my thing, this is what's going to happen. The world will be lost, right? That metaphysical moral atmosphere. So Lewis was saying that's one of the points

or effects of good literature. So I think when you encounter good literature, you're put like crime and punishment is a great example. I know you know that love the Russians. So that world where you're in Raskolnikov's head, right? But you're also in this world where there's all these amazing characters, right? It's a, or notes from the underground.

Yes. Right, those are the two I've read. Beautiful. And so you've got this environment, this moral environment that's true. And that's what's made by a good story. And literature conveys that. And I think that that's why it's so,

one of the reasons why it's so important. And so, but to answer your question, even though I just said all this stuff about literature, right? I've been, I've been not reading much literature recently. I just always ask my wife for the Cliff Notes, but I've read that. I've been reading that book by Lewis. I mean, Baxter about Lewis. And I've been listening to Consolation of Philosophy, which to me is so beautiful.

Beautiful book. Yeah. Lewis and I've been listening to Consolation of Philosophy, which to me is so beautiful. Beautiful book. Yeah. Um, do you feel like there's some kind of parallels between the Platonic and Franciscan tradition and the Aristotelian and Thomistic? Because I get the same level of excitement when I read say Pascal, yes, Plato, Bonaventure and Selm, right? I kind of put them in a category. They're most, I don't know what it is. Maybe I'm completely wrong, but my feeling is similar.

Yeah, like they belong in their own story and it's more mystical. Yeah, whereas you've got Aristotle and Aquinas and these other thinkers who are very deliberate and are more natural. The others are more biological, maybe scientific, maybe. I mean, I think and then take it one step further. You look at the Latin mass and that kind of feels more in the Aristotelian to mystic tradition and how precise the whole thing is. Whereas if you go to the east, it's very. Yeah, it's more circular, round, motherly.

Yeah, that's a tumultuous. Yeah, less. Yeah, you've got the Greek and the Latin, right? So the highly ordered pristine. Maybe that's what I mean. Imagine Gregorian chant versus Eastern. You know, they're very different, but they're obviously both chant. Yeah. Yeah. But I know, I know thinkers have made that basic, that basic kind of camps, right? Yeah. Morrison. But I like to always say that after Aquinas, to a degree, everybody was Aristotelian because he introduced that synthesis at that level.

Everybody then was being trained using all of Aristotle's books, right, for their training. And so everybody, in some way, like, you know, Scotus has his own synthesis with Aristotle. I mean, Occam has his own, I mean, everybody has some sort of use of Aristotle synthesizing it in some way. Whereas Bonaventure definitely is sort of the last great,

as they say, the last great conservative, but he did. And one thing that my friend Jared does in his book is talk about how in the disputed questions on the mystery of the Trinity, it's a book weirdly that was lost the second generation after Bonaventure and wasn't rediscovered until the 1800s. And nobody had written an integral thesis on the book

as a whole until Jared wrote this book. Oh wow. Right? But he deals with Aristotle the most in any text in that text of the dispute question of the mystery of Trinity. So he himself has a kind of encounter with all of Aristotle as well in his own way.

But you're right that when you look at that tradition back, it's sort of more platonic. But again, that's just rough. Broad. Yeah, broad, rough. Yeah. Broad, rough, yeah. If someone wanted to get into the Franciscan intellectual tradition, dip their toe in it, where would they start? What's a nice, easy introductory book?

I mean, I think that little tiny book I gave you, that's kind of my apostle, the prim around the absolute primacy of Christ. It's really short. It's like the biblical passages, the basic arguments, right? I think that's beautiful to give you the kind of theological heart of the Franciscan tradition. I think if you've got that, right, then you will see the connection to all the other things and you'll have it as a theological tradition in school rather than just this weird philosophical competitor to Aquinas.

It's its own animal and its theology is the heart of it. And so I think that would be a good start. There's also a little book. Did you find that, Neil? Did you find that? A Primer on the Absent-Primacy. And then there's a little book about Scotus himself. Okay. By Minnelli is I think the author. And it's just a tiny book again about who Scotus is. And there's a movie, right, about Scotus. I can't do it. I can't do any Catholic saint movies. I tried watching it after

you told me about it. I still couldn't do it. Yeah, that might be a good way to introduce yourself to this guy though. Okay. And that's cool. I think so one of Jared's mentor, his mentor was father Peter Damien Fellner. Yeah. And so he has a translation of Bonaventure's Triple Way, which was Bonaventure's spiritual theology. And I think that's a very beautiful text, but it has a very, the beginning part of it, I want to say over a hundred pages maybe, is Felner's introduction to the work, but it serves as an introduction to the Franciscan school itself. That may be a little higher level, but the text of Bonaventure's Triple Way is accessible

and beautiful. Like there's a way he examines the conscience and the way he talks about how we move through the spiritual life, which Fowler called the summa of spiritual theology. Like a lot of other mystics after Bonaventure use this text as their inspiration for their mystical and spiritual theology.

So those are a couple of things maybe. That sounds great. Yeah. Thank you for being on the show. Sure. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. I loved it. Yeah, good. Me too.