← Ascend - The Great Books Podcast
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- [00:00]
A
Today on Ascend the Great Books Podcast, we have a fantastic episode. We are having a conversation with Dr. Donald Prudlow on Aquinas and the Euthyphro Dilemma. So we're going to take out the Euthyphro Dilemma in a monotheistic context, see how Aquinas would have answered this, but also take a step back and see how the Euthyphro Dilemma represents a fundamental way of looking at reality. It's not just piety, it's not just religion. It is a way. It's a watershed issue of how one actually engages in the world around them. If you're not familiar with Dr. Donald Prudlow, he is fantastic. And if you have an opportunity to listen to him, you should take it. He has also written a new book, the Merchant Saint, the Church, the Market and the First Lay Canonization, about the very first layperson ever canonized in the Catholic Church. Dr. Prudlow is a theologian, but he is also a historian. So go check out this text. Also, if you have not checked out the Ascent, our sister publication on Substack, please do so. We are publishing two spiritual articles per week about sanctification, theosis, how does the soul climb the ladder of love and ascend to God. But today, join us for a wonderful conversation on the euthyphro dilemma and St. Thomas Aquinas with Dr. Donald Prudlow. Foreign welcome to Ascend the Great Books Podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. I'm a husband, father and serve as the Chancellor and General Counsel for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. We're recording on a beautiful morning here at the Chancery in Tulsa, Oklahoma. You can check us out on X, YouTube, Facebook and Patreon. We appreciate all our supporters and you can Visit us at thegreatbookspodcast.com where we have articles and guides and all kinds of resources to help you find read the great books. Today we are discussing the Euthyphro Dilemma, particularly focusing in on the Euthyphro Dilemma in a monotheistic context. Today we have a wonderful guest. We have Dr. Donald Prudlow, who serves as the Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Tulsa. He also holds the Warren Chair in Catholic Studies. He's a professor of Catholic Studies who works at the intersection of history, theology and philosophy. Dr. Prudlow, how are you today?
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B
I'm doing excellent, thank you. I'm very happy to be here. Deacon.
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A
Yeah, very good. So just tell us a little bit about your scholarship.
- [02:34]
B
I am a medievalist. Primarily I work with the Medieval Dominican order. And I've done work in sainthood, in Saints and Saints Lives. I've written a book on St. Peter, Verona. I've done work on canonization, particularly. Are canonizations infallible? I have a book on Thomas Aquinas, sort of setting Thomas Aquinas in his context. And I just came out with a book on administration, the intersection of administration and sanctity in the Catholic Church. So that's generally the area that I work on. But I teach across the whole range of church history and Western civilization. So I teach everything from the ancients to the Reformation. And it's always a privilege to return to critical texts like the one we're talking about today.
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A
Yeah, that's excellent. Do you. I think one of the reasons I always appreciate your talks, one, not to set you up too much, but, like, you're very witty, particularly for, like, an academic. Usually go to these academic conferences and they're terribly dry.
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B
It's a low bar.
- [03:37]
A
Yeah, it's terribly dry. But the University of Tulsa did a wonderful conference on St. Thomas Aquinas, which really kind of culminated in, you know, this original Dominican, you know, like, 1200s French liturgy, which was absolutely gorgeous. But you gave kind of the opening to that conference, and I greatly appreciated it because it had wonderful insights. But you also had a crowd of academics and Dominicans kind of rolling in their chairs. You also seem to always come at things from like a historical perspective.
- [04:09]
B
Well, first of all, humor is absolutely critical. Humor is a proper note of human nature. And so it's something that belongs to us as being rational. And since it is a proper note of human nature, I'm always suspicious of people that lack a sense of humor. And so it's important that we see also the humor in our lives and humor historically as well. Some say that Christ was like us in all things but sin. But one thing that you don't always see in the Scriptures is His humor. And when I read accounts of the apostles and things like that and the things that they do and the things that they say, I've got to think that he's laughing all the time. It was so common that it wasn't even included in the Gospel passages, because we know, possessing all things like us, that he had a sense of humor as well. And so I appreciate that. That's very kind of you to say that. I do approach things from an historical perspective. That's the way that I understand things. That's the way that I've understand the development of theology, the way that I've understood The development of philosophy, it makes sense to me, in my mind, more than a. Perhaps a systematic or topical presentation, which are fine, and they're suited to certain situations and teaching environments. But I've always found that history, it builds one thing upon the next. And when you're doing pure philosophy, when you're doing things like the Greeks, it can make sense to take things topic by topic. But once you get to Judaism and Christianity, it's embedded in history, and that's the way that God has chosen to reveal himself to us. And so that unfolding of history is absolutely critical in the interpretation of divine revelation. And we take that so seriously as Catholics, because that's embedded in our sacred tradition, and that's the way the Scriptures present themselves to us as well. So I've always understood things from an historical perspective and tried to get people to look at that perspective as well, because I think that even Thomas can fall into this trap where they become focused on the topic rather than on the context. That's something that, as Pope Benedict showed us, that maybe sometimes the Franciscan tradition does a little bit better in embedding things in an incarnational framework. So I'll give my one shout out to the Franciscan tradition there, because I may be talking a little bit down about them later.
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A
That's good. Now, I appreciate the note on humor, because one of the things we've been tracking as we've kind of continued on in our Platonic studies here on Ascend, the Great Books podcast, is that you actually really should laugh when you read Plato. Like, there are parts that are really supposed to be funny, and if you're really thinking of them, because one of the things that we've been talking about is how to read these dialogues. And one of the things that we've really focused on is really accepting them as a drama. Like, you need to step into the characters, into the drama. And I think Plato, you know, presents all these for pedagogical reasons, right? There's. There's a reason why, you know, he has the interlocutors that he does, that they're at the setting that they are, you know, things of this nature. You can't just simply come into the dialogue and abstract. Like, what's the cold philosophical principle that I was supposed to learn from this? And once you learn that, I mean, I think the euthyphro has some very funny parts where you realize that euthyphro can't keep up with the conversation anymore. And it's just. It's just kind of funny. Or the Socratic Irony is also very funny when he's asking to be Euthyphro's student and things of this nature. So I think you do need to laugh when you read Plato.
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B
That's what's so approachable about Plato. And one of the reasons people sometimes have trouble approaching Aristotle and we forget Aristotle wrote dialogues too, they're just all lost. And so I'd like to think that Aristotle continued this, this tradition of Socratic irony. Socrates presents himself to us as once an attractive and in a certain sense a repellent figure in these. And that's what struck me the first time, is he has wisdom and yet at the same time he seems to be buffoonish, self deprecating in an odd sense. And when you begin to see the interplay of irony and humor in these, particularly at the end where Euthypro is trying to find an excuse just to get away, he just can't take this anymore. You can almost see him looking at his wrist. Oh my, look at my wrist. Look at the time. I mean, it's. I gotta go. It's. It's really wonderful.
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A
Yeah. One of the things I appreciate too, what you mentioned is the historic conversation, because particularly if we approach this from like a Great Books. It's one of the reasons I really enjoy the Great Books tradition is because it really focuses on reading these in their historical order. Because a lot of these authors are in dialogue with one another. And you also like. It really helps me in my own thought to see how the concepts develop. So, like, for instance, one thing that I've been really appreciative of is my original Great Books formation, which I had at Ave Maria, which was wonderful. They tacked it on to a theology degree, which I thought was brilliant. But we just started with Plato. Like, we didn't read the Poetics, we didn't read Homer, we didn't read Aeschylus and these things. And now bringing that poetic formation and reading it in that kind of chronological order, it's amazing how much you see the fingerprints of the plays on Plato's dialogues. So for instance, like even in the, you know, we'll get into the Euthyphro Dilemma itself. But then one of the things that when I first read it, when I first read the Euthro, we just skipped straight to the Euthro dilemma. Like that was the crux of it. That's what we had to pull out, just get to that. And then honestly, like the first time I read it, we didn't even really talk about what Plato meant by it. We're like, well, we don't believe in gods anyway, so let's just skip to the monotheistic context and then try and figure that out. But this time, as I read through it, like, one of the things that really dawned on me is how many times the Euthyphro dilemma was already implicit in the Greek playwrights. You know, I think of Antigone telling Creon that she has to bury her brother. And it's like, well, why? Well, there are, there are laws that even the gods adhere to. There's something above the gods that even they adhere to. So there's always like implicit euthyphro dilemmas. And that's one thing that I've really appreciated on this read through, but that doesn't. That only comes through kind of stepping into the great conversation and reading them in that historical order.
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B
Yeah, that's a great point. Because unfortunately, one of the weaknesses sometimes the great text, great books formation, is its lack of context, its lack of historical embeddedness. As if sometimes you just open these books and some sort of magical contact with the great text is going to lead to a liberal education. And it's not. Which is why. So that's why I want to say that you need the great text, but you also need someone to lead you through the great text. You need an actual appreciator, a teacher to help you with this. And so I remember this is Euthyphro. I'm so glad you asked me to talk about Euthyphro because when I was a callow 18 year old, this was the text that woke me up to philosophy. You know, for a lot of people it was apology or republic, but Euthyphro just, just blew me away. This was, this was the dialogue where I could see, I could kind of see myself in euthyphro. Right. The cocksure young 18 year old. I know exactly what piety is, I know what the faith is, I know what philosophy. And he just gets devastated by Socrates and he doesn't even realize by the end how devastated he's been. And so I really. And I did. I had. I was, you know, much like any other 18 year old, I didn't. I was just as ignorant as them all. But I did have this idea, this Socratic idea that I needed formation, that I needed to learn these things from someone who had been through them before. And so that's. That introductory freshman philosophy class was critical and it was Euthyphro that really broke through for me.
- [11:36]
A
That is beautiful. Yeah. I think in a lot of ways Plato woke Me up in a certain way as well, because my introduction to the great books came simultaneously with my conversion to Catholicism. And so as I'm reading St. Thomas Aquinas and most of my systematic classes, you know, it was really like our foray into Plato that really showed a certain depth there that I didn't realize really even existed outside of Christianity. Right. And these great books are with worth spending time. And also how the pre Christian great books are not necessarily antithetical, but how providence use them to kind of till the soil for the reception of, you know, Christ incarnate of the Logos. So no, I owe a great debt, I think, to Plato and that really kind of, I guess just to piggyback on that, to ask you kind of more broadly, I enjoy that personal story, but like you're very much associated in your own Scholarship with St. Thomas Aquinas. And a lot of times, you know, we bump into people who are like, why even read Plato? Like, why, why do that? Like, have you not read Aristotle? Like, he's just, it's like, you know, here's this point, here's three points underneath it. It's very clear. You move on, like, why wrestle with these dialogues? Like why, why should we read, you know, Plato? Do we just read him? Like historically, is this like a lesser Aristotle? And then we move on to the glories of that is the philosopher or why do we read Plato?
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B
Yeah, there's, there's a couple ways to approach this. I mean, certainly Aristotle goes off in some, some different directions from Plato, but they were always the best of friends. If you read the biographical works that remain from Aristotle and Plato, they were, they were extremely close. Plato would say that he couldn't, he couldn't begin class until Aristotle arrived. He called him the brain. And so that the relationship between the two was extremely close. And when you look at their moral teaching, when you look at their teaching on the one, on the good, I mean, it's so similar. We tend to overestimate the differences when we get to things like epistemology and theory of knowledge and soul body relations, things like that. But there's really much more that they share than is distinct between the two. And when we get to St. Thomas, St. Thomas is deeply embedded in an Augustinian Neoplatonist world. There's a fantastic book that I can recommend, long out of print, but by Robert Henley. It's called Thomas and Platonism. And it really starts the reintegration of an appreciation of Plato for the works of St. Thomas Aquinas. He gets a Lot of his Platonism from Pseudo Dionysius, the Areopagites. So there's a large measure of his notion of participation is drawn from. Even though it's an Aristotelian metaphysical framework, his notion of participation comes from Plato as well. But he draws the doctrine of the transcendentals from Plato, from truth, beauty, goodness, unity. His idea of the hierarchical structure of reality, the ladder of being he keeps from Plato. It's simply because that he accepts an Aristotelian anthropology, an Aristotelian epistemology, doesn't mean that Plato isn't absolutely essential. And we also have to remember that Thomas didn't have the dialogues of Plato that we have today. He really only had sort of an inferior copy of the Timaeus. Everything else was mediated through Augustine, through Pseudo Dionysius and through some, some the Muslim works of Avicenna and of Aroes. And he had to himself take this care to separate even Aristotle's ideas from the accretions of the Arabic philosophers. And so, I mean, confronted with Plato, I think there's, there's so much more agreement than the disagreement with, with St. Thomas and stressing sort of a, whatever you would consider to be an orthodox Aristotelianism is unuseful when approaching St. Thomas, I think.
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A
No, I, I absolutely agree. I really appreciate, you know, what you said there because I do think that sometimes, yeah, sometimes I think that there's a. How do I phrase this? You know, when you don't, when you don't read Homer and then you read Plato, you kind of think that Plato is just constantly critiquing Homer and that he doesn't have any use for him. But if you've read Homer, what you realize is how much he borrows from him. And Plato really only mentions Homer when he disagrees with him. In a lot of ways, Aristotle seems to do the same thing with Plato. Like he really only mentions Plato when he disagrees with him. And if you haven't read Plato, then you kind of just think Aristotle is the source of a lot of these core ideas. When in reality, if you're very familiar with Plato and you read Aristotle, you see Plato's fingerprints over all these things. And I think that the same thing happens, like if you read Thomas Aquinas, if that's your really only introduction to Aristotle, then you. I think it sometimes makes Aristotle disproportionate, if that makes sense. Even though obviously he uses Aristotelian jargon and his language and how he expresses these things. But you kind of miss Then where the Platonic side comes in, you also miss how he uses St. Augustine to soften Aristotle on certain points. And even, you know, to your point about the Timaeus, you know, there's also scholarship showing how little Plato, even St. Augustine probably had, right, that he had a lot of the Roman Platonists, but even, I mean, I was reading something the other day in which they think maybe the only dialogue he had was a Timaeus. And so it's been really fascinating to kind of think about how much of Plato is actually mediated through the Neoplatonics. And like our major saints, like St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas aren't actually engaging with directly. And it's. It's somewhat sad, right, because you would love to know how, like St. Thomas's commentary on a Euthyphro would be a beautiful, wonderful text to have.
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B
We have to remember, and this is where history can help us again, there's nothing wrong with the Neoplatonists. I mean, well, there's. I mean, some things, but I mean, because I think it's a very fruitful development of Platonic thought. I think Plotinus is one of the most brilliant philosophers of all time. But when we understand, what did they have access to? So, for instance, you know, this may be a little bit controversial, but as Thomas goes on in his career, he becomes progressively more Augustinian and more Platonic. I think, as you see, by the end of his life, by the Summa Theologiae, particularly the Tertia Paris, as he nears the end of his life, we also see that he has been able to incorporate the Greek Fathers and the Church Councils. It's baffling to think that he didn't really have access to the decisions of the early ecumenical councils until his stay in Orvieto, 1260s. And that's when he begins to incorporate all these Greek Fathers, thereby also encountering Plato in a secondary way through the Greek Fathers of the Church. And so Thomas is appropriate and he was excited to do that, too. I would invite anyone to see Thomas, how Thomas thinks, to look at the first question of De Veritate, the disputed questions on truth. And he defines truth, which is the first thing you have to do in any academic endeavor. And he takes, and Joseph Pieper describes this beautifully, he takes all these different definitions of truth from the ancient world, Plato's and Aristotle's and Augustine's, and he weaves them together, taking, finding the most important thing about each one, finding the true bit in each one of these, and weaves them into a reciprocal web that finally gets to this sublime definition of truth. And that is the way Thomas worked. He would take the truth wherever he could find it and he wouldn't exclude it. So he wouldn't say, I'm an orthodox Aristotelian or something like that. No, he did have to defend Aristotle very significantly from detractors at the University of Paris. And he did a great, a fantastic job because he was the first one who really delineated Aristotle for us. Before he had been quite confused with what is Averroes commentary on Aristotle, what is Avicenna's commentary on Aristotle. And even through Avicenna is another source of Platonism forehead in his idea of being, essence and existence, which is rather foreign to, not inimical, but foreign to Aristotle's conception.
- [19:33]
A
Yeah, very good. I think that kind of goes into your warning earlier that the great books, the great conversation can't be just reduced to a series of works, but it has to be read within its history. Because that is something that can really throw you for a loop, is that you read these great books in order. So you read Plato and then you read Aristotle and you have Plotinus and Augustine, but you can. But then there's a whole conversation about like, well, wait, did they have the people prior to them? So you read, you know, what did Dante have, for example, what did St. Thomas have? So even though you're reading these in chronological order, I, I've grown to appreciate this is a big question of like, okay, now I'm reading this author, I need to stop and actually think what, what recourse did they actually have to the tradition before them.
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B
Right.
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A
Because I think then you can misread people. Oh, well, see, Thomas clearly rejects Plato because he never talks about him. So you can have these.
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B
Yeah, this is why you need, you actually need teachers and not just like discussion leaders. You need to have people that have actually studied these texts. I think another thing I worry about the great text tradition is just, oh, you just need a discussion facilitator instead of someone who is, who is deeply formed in these works, but also not just in the works themselves, but in the entire context of those. In a little bit. Yeah, in, in the scholarship, you have to know a bit about the, the secondary literature of these, these texts, which is why, why, why we go to, to college. I mean, the good things about college in, in the people are actually working on these texts and have spent in some cases whole careers and their insights are quite valuable. Sometimes people want to come at them. Well, I want to, you know, they'll do the, the, what was that movie with Robin Williams, the Dead Poet Society, where he says, you know, take it and rip out the introduction to the book. We don't want to have you any, any preconceptions. And that's useful in some cases, but in other cases what you have, what it ends up being is, you know, sort of 18 year olds throwing around ideas which they don't have any formation or background to, to address, which might be useful in, I guess, forming a type of civil discourse. But, but isn't going to get to any depth really.
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A
Yeah, there's a danger that the great books simply just become a collection of signs and symbols to facilitate some type of almost. Yeah, they facilitate some kind of subjective conversation. You know, here on Ascend, you know, we've kind of stressed that, you know, we don't read the great books to become, well read relativists. Oh, I've read, I've read all these great thinkers. They disagree. Therefore, what is truth? And therefore like, you know, I'm just cultured. I'm cultured because I've read Plato or Kant or whatever it is. And no, there really has to be a truth. There has to be a conforming of the mind, you know, to reality. And so, you know, we look then, I think in the Great Books tradition, right, we look to the church, we look to Jesus Christ as the truth, and that's the light that then illuminates all of these texts. And so as we're reading Plato's, reading Aristotle, we're saying, okay, you know, what is true here? Well, it's the standard is Christ. And we look through these. And in the Catholic tradition, right, the pagans aren't something that we see as being like a threat to our faith, but actually I think in a lot of ways can embolden it and enrich it.
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B
And then the modern great books, right, they challenge the faith as well, and we're forced to respond to that, right? They have excellent points, they have excellent arguments. And if we can't address those, just as Thomas did at the beginning of each one of his articles, listing out all the objections, giving the best account of the objection that he possibly could. And I tell my students, if you cannot articulate your opponent's position as well as they can, then do you really have the business of presenting your own first, you haven't really understood it.
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A
Yeah, there's a, you know, we don't straw man things, we steal man things, right? That's what St. Thomas does. He actually presents like the best that he possibly can of the other side. And I think too that one thing about the Summa that Plato's dialogues have in common is, you know, the question answer format is the natural way that we learn because it's a conversation with a person. And Plato captures that as the drama of a dialogue. But, you know, St. Thomas does it as well. It's not a dialogue, but his question answer form format and the responses is really mimicking a conversation that you would have. It's in a conversational order.
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B
It's the. Modeled on the disputation format. The medievals would have viva voce discussions, disputations where the professor, the bachelor would have to get up and he would have to defend his position against all commerce and it would be a discussion. So I think that's very useful. I think Pieper might have. Might have pointed that out, that we really should read the Summa more as a Platonic dialogue and not sort of as a dry manualistic text. And I think we bring it to life like that, if we imagine it. And this is what the disputed questions are excellent for. And they're not as well appreciated because they are more abstruse, they're much more difficult than the Summa. But they are presented in that way. These live issues, these matters of pitch and moment that people are addressing in the medieval schoolrooms, in the medieval lecture halls. And that's a remarkably vital intellectual life that I tried to evoke in the Thomas book, for sure, that how when we think it's not, you know, just some professor droning on and on about something, that it's a real dialogue that's happening, that's transpiring sometimes with hammer and toms at each other, with, you know, brutal back and forth. It's a really academic battle. It's what it was like.
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A
But there's such a beauty to that though, right? Even if you see that as like a microcosm in like small groups that people host at their house, that, you know, the more of these intellects that you bring together, iron sharpens iron. You're actually in pursuit of a real truth, not simply just some kind of like, you know, relativistic pursuit. It's amazing how much you can grow. Like, one of the reasons I tell people, like when you read the great books in a group, you know, you gather with eight guys to read, you know, the Iliad or the Euthyphro. It's like you've read it eight times because they're all coming with their different, you know, perspectives. And I think Then if you do it in a more academic setting. And the fruit of that can be tremendous.
- [25:24]
B
Absolutely. And it is exceptionally valuable to. You know, I've been thinking about this. You know, we had a question by a potential student who had gone to a classical school and had read many of these texts before. And their parents were asking, well, why should they come to the honors college and then read them all again? And my first question is my first thought, which I sometimes say to Susan. I didn't say this to this group, but I think I've read the confessions nearing on 40, 40 times now, and it's ever fresh. I see something new. I come at it from a different direction every time I read it. And, you know, I even rereading Euthyphro, I saw new insights that I hadn't considered before. These texts are just evergreen. And then further than that, when you take it out of. Maybe you were a Catholic classical school, maybe you were at a Christian classical school and you had sort of general agreement. When you come to a broader place, a place, you're going to have multiple viewpoints. You have Catholic, you'll have Protestant, you'll have non Christian, you'll have atheist viewpoints. And they're coming at it differently, people coming at it from different places in their lives with different life experiences. And that at the end of the day, only enhances the readings of these texts. And any opportunity to introduce these people to the great search for truth is just a massive privilege. That's one of my favorite things to do. And so don't worry about that. You're going to read a text that you've read over again. There's some books that are worth only run read. Most books are worth no reads, and some books are worth one read. But these books, we call them great because they're worth rereading our entire lives long.
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A
Yeah. Someone asked me one time, like, what's the best commentary on like the Iliad? And I was like reading it a second time because the first time you read things, you're just trying to track the literal, what actually happened, what went on, you know, etc. The second time I read the Iliad, it was like the whole thing came alive for me. I was seeing the moral reads, these kind of social critiques. Like what? Because I think Homer's a teacher and what he's trying to teach people. And yeah, I think there's a lot of things. The great books, they're great because they're worth reading multiple times. I think they also change according to your age.
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B
Right.
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A
Your own experience. When I read, when I read certain texts that I read as a young man, they hit me very different. Now as a father of five, there's, there's things that I think are quite distinct.
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B
Absolutely. I did not get Lear when I was younger and now all of a sudden reading King Lear as I, as I approach my half century mark and now being a grandfather. Yeah, it starts to, starts to read. It starts to hit in a whole different way. And then it works that I thought were. You're absolutely right. I mean, at different stages in life, at different periods in life. And that's what a wonderful thing too, to be able to know that I'm going to pick up a work that I didn't find. Like I just read, reread Moby Dick for the second time and I hated it when I was a teenager, just hated it. So I think that made me put it off. And Dr. Christopher Frey @ the University of Telford said it was his favorite book. And I was like, what is wrong with you? What is this? This is crazy. And then I came back and read it and how powerful is that text? How wonderful. And the. Now I could have done with cutting out maybe some of the whale glossary, the glossary of whale bits and whale parts. But the story was exceptional and that's what the great books do for us.
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A
Yeah. Someone told me one time Moby Dick was, you know, basically a 200 page novel, but then the author had done about 200 pages of research and he wanted to make sure everyone knew that he had done that research. And so he just showed all of his, all of his research right in the middle of his novel.
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B
He showed the receipts.
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A
Yeah, it was great. So I'm just kind of curious as we talk about the historical, this, the historical conversation around these texts and their significance before we kind of get into the text of the Euthro itself. Any, any comments on just the importance of the Euthyphro dialogue in kind of the history of philosophy?
- [29:23]
B
Well, Euthyphro is always, it's right there. So you read it right before the trial and death of Socrates, and that's where Plato situates it. It's likely that the Euthyphro is one of the more stylized dialogues by Plato. We don't know whether Euthyphro was an historical character. Maybe I kind of inclined that he might have been a historical character. But Plato wants us to say that this is what Socrates is thinking about as he is going into trial. And that's, that's, that's quite powerful. Right. He's about to be put on trial for his life and he's thinking about piety and he's thinking about the gods. And he is. And he throws us for a loop in this one. Because you would expect Socrates to be sort of in this pure Platonic way, like on the side of justice. Yes, and justice. The guy killed someone and so therefore, you know, it's just got to be done. Justice has to be done to him. And instead Socrates is shocked. He gives us an idea of piety that is embedded in the community, that's embedded in family, which, which doesn't sound very Platonic. Right. I thought we were supposed to be freed from all these earthly, earthly concerns and just pursuing the pure idol, the idea. But so Socrates throws us for loop. Plato helps us, helps throw Socrates for loop in this, in this initial dialogue, which I find great to read this dialogue with students. The Euthyphro, the apology, Crito, and then at least the death scene in Phaedo, if not the whole of Phaedo. But it's a wonderful continuum of texts in one of the most axial moments in history where you have, in a certain sense, Socrates as kind of a, kind of a secular saint, a secular, if it's not too blasphemous, a secular messiah treated as by some of the early church fathers, sort of a proto saint, a proto Christ figure, a Christ before his time. And that's exceptionally powerful to know the history behind it.
- [31:29]
A
No, I very much agree. I think the Apology is a really jarring text, particularly if you're used to reading Aristotle. Aristotle, to my knowledge, like, you know, Aristotle never talks about, like, this is what God has told me to do. He doesn't talk about God in very personal ways. He's associated with the unmoved mover. And so I think Plato's apology and the way Socrates talks about God there I think can be very jarring to people because their only context for someone who speaks like that is a saint. So I think some of your titles that you used are actually very apt. And my read through on this time. So for those following along in our Platonic studies, next week we're taking up Plato's Apology and we're going to be talking about it with a Dominican out of Providence College for the next two weeks. And one of the things that I think I want to explore with him as I've gone through the Euthyphro and now the Apology this time, is it occurs to me that the Apology in a lot of ways is the answer to the Euthyphro, maybe not necessarily the Euthyphro dilemma itself, which I think kind of poses unique questions. But towards the end of the Euthyphro, on the third definition, Euthyphro talks about in service to the gods. And now by this time in the dialogue, I think Euthyphro's brain has melted and he's just desperately trying to keep up with Socrates. And I don't think he's actually doing very well, you know, because Socrates is like, you don't mean, like, service towards cattle, do you? And he throws like, yeah, totally. That's what I mean. It's like, no, you're. We're. Now we're just. We're just firing at the wall now. We have no idea what we're doing. But, you know, Euthyphro takes the wrong route and then he leads him all the way back to. Okay, well, now we're just getting into the fact that piety is, you know, what's pleasing to the gods. And, you know, Socrates tries to start over and Euthyphro has to leave. But what really occurs to me is that I think, if you take Socrates correctly, that kind of vadimacum, right, he's leading him by the hand, that Euthyphro is getting close to understanding something, that piety is a species of justice, and it does have to do with something of service to the gods. But you don't get a clear answer on Euthyphro. But then you go to the apology when he's being tried for impiety, and what's he talking about the whole time? That he's in service to the gods, right? He's in service to, excuse me, the God. Right, the monotheistic God. And what occurs to me is that what Euthyphro doesn't seem to get at the end of this dialogue is that it is a service to the God, but it's not to their benefit. He keeps trying to figure out what kind of benefit the God gets out of this service. And I think what Socrates shows us in the apology is that the benefit is for the servant and for those served, right? So the benefit is for Socrates in that he's been assigned and has a vocation to use that word, to Athens. And so I think as I step back and read him this time, one of the things I'm interested in exploring as we read through the apology is to what degree is the apology an answer to the question of piety?
- [34:08]
B
I mean, Socrates enacts it. I mean, that's what it is. I Mean, it's his offering his self oblation to this mission that he's given by the God, which, you know, some readers will say, well, he's just talking about Apollo or something like that. But I mean, that definite article there. The God is evocative, certainly, and to his particular genius, personalizes it in a way that, yeah, sometimes the unmoved mover leaves us a bit cold. But then, you know, I think when Aristotle gets to the end of the Ethics and he talks about contemplation and contemplation of the One, he's kind of looping back around to where Socrates is getting. And the way, for instance, the Neoplatonists talk about contemplation of the one. I mean, seems to be getting back to the way that Socrates envisions, envisions himself in his life of contemplation. And since you're bringing Dominican on, bringing the fruits of his contemplation to others in the city of Athens is spot on. That's exactly what, that's a great way to just use the. That Socrates enacts what he's trying to prove in the euthyphro. And actions, as always, speak far louder than words. That's why we pay attention to Socrates. Right. The man who gives his life for what he believes becomes very compelling indeed.
- [35:30]
A
I very much agree. Okay, let's look at the text then. So let's look at the euthyphro dilemma. And so this is found in the Euthyphro at 10a. And so in the dialogue, you know, where we are is there's different ways to structure it. When we talked about, we basically looked at three different definitions that euthyphro gives. And this is kind of the second one. The first one he gives is kind of a categorically wrong answer. It's like, what is piety? And it's like, well, it's what I'm doing. And you know, it's like, well, there's. I still think there's a lot. And we did on the podcast in previous weeks, there's a lot of depth, I think, to mine out of that because we have to be careful. Just because someone looks like an idiot in the dialogue doesn't mean that that idiot cannot teach us a lot of things in the hands of Plato. Right? So we got to be careful not to just skip over him like, oh, he can't even give a categorically correct answer. Because I think that as we talked about, like, he actually talks about, well, I'm, I'm being like Zeus, because Zeus is the most just. And philosophically, that's a fantastic or interesting question because it's like, well, how did you make that determination? So you're judging the gods according to some kind of idea, right? Justice. And this is the good one, because he's the most just. You actually, I think, can see in Euthyphro an openness to the Platonic ideas, even though I don't think Euthyphro understands that, but I think the way he thinks, right, because we always have to ask ourselves, like, why this interlocutor, like, why. Why is it Euthyphro that's chosen for this conversation? Why not a priest of Apollo? Why not? Why not? Maybe a more orthodox Athenian thinker, right? Why is it Euthyphro? And it's not just because he's an idiot and Socrates wants to stomp on him. I think Socrates has an authentic desire for Euthyphro to have a metanoia. And so you see him throughout the dialogue and he's pushing. And so finally, I think Socrates distills the question and what is now famously called the Euthyphro Dilemma. And so Socrates responds, is the pious being loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is being loved by the gods? Now, these are typically structured, at least I've seen it as, like, there's a first horn and a second horn, right? Of the. Of the limit, right? So let's look at the first one, right? And I think what's important is before we jump to, you know, a monotheistic context, because I think that's what everyone wants to jump to quickly. It's like, okay, well, let's. We don't believe in the gods anyway, so let's just jump to God. I think it's somewhat important to understand what it. What is Plato actually doing here? Like, what's he trying to do? Because I will posit, and I think, which is a fascinating question, is that Plato had the capacity to put this in a monotheistic context. If he wanted to put it in a monotheistic context, he could have, because Socrates adheres to the God. He doesn't. Which is an interesting question in and of itself, but I think that at least this question in a. In a plural gods is somewhat of an appetizer, if you will, to the monotheistic side.
- [38:18]
B
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. That's. And. And people get frustrated, as. I think Euthyphro got frustrated. They. On the first reading of this, they can think that this is just word games. And so some of the charges later in the apology, and particularly as portrayed by Aristophanes in the clouds, is that Socrates is just a member of the, the wordsmithing sophist guilt, that he's logic chopping here, that he's just, he's just, you know, making, you know, he's making absurd paradoxes just to just irritate people. And Socrates can be irritating. And I think he's irritating on purpose sometimes because when people are uncomfortable, that's when they take action, that's when they begin to think. And so that's what's happening here with this. But it's right at the high point. This is at the middle. And another thing that frustrates first time readers is that it ends so unsatisfactorily that there is no final definition. Well, you know, students will, well then what's the right answer at the end? Socrates doesn't tell us. And I said yes, that's kind of the point. He wants you to think about that. So right here at the center of the text, he puts the key passage and forces us to consider it from that perspective. Now some will say, well then, as we run into the danger of others, people who love the great books and love Plato, certainly they'll say, well then what life is is really about just the Socratic questioning. Right. To put it in sort of secular terms, it's, it's not the destination, it's the journey that's important. It's philosophizing that is the end. And no, I mean, I don't think Socrates would have been doing it if that was the end, just asking questions eternally if he had no love for the truth. I think he wouldn't have done what he did in the apology if he approached at that, because then he would have found a way to continue the journey, which he kind of thinks he will in the afterlife. He's going to continue bothering people in the Elizabeth Fields at the end of the pestering them in the afterlife. He thinks that's heaven.
- [40:20]
A
Right?
- [40:21]
B
So, but, but yeah, so he creates this dilemma and in a particularly polytheistic format, Socrates is always attentive to the, to the beliefs of his interlocutors. He doesn't, he doesn't mock them, though he will softly, ironically state his, his opposition to them. He never, he never mocks them for this idea. And so he approaches them on their terms, which is such an important tactic for teachers as well. They need to not say, well, here's the definitive truth. There's a great saying by St. Thomas is if we didn't tell people how we arrived there and just told them the answer, they would indeed possess the truth, but the truth they would possess in empty heads. And so they need to know the why, the how it comes into about. So in putting it at the middle, he challenges us this, and he sets up this dilemma, the two horn dilemma, which is a great way of putting it. And is the pious love by the gods because it is pious, or it is pious because it is. Is it pious because it's love? So the first horn would be what comes to be characterized as sort of the intellectualist position, a rationalist sort of position, that the gods, the polytheistic gods, are conformed, conforming themselves to some external moral norm, something that prescinds from them that is superior to them, that they have to obey that not even. And we see. And if we go back to the Iliad, right, we can say, well, what is this? Well, it kind of seems like fate, right? Even Zeus is not able to. He can sort of play with the pieces a little bit on the way to fate, but he can't really even change it. So we see this even in Homer. And then the second horn of the dilemma is that pious because it's loved becomes. Well, it's determined by the will of the gods. And so this comes to be known as the sort of the divine command or the voluntarist way. And it proceeds basically on the two parts of the human soul, the two parts that make us human, and that's the intellect and the will. And so is this truth, this moral truth, this piety, determined rationally, or is it determined through an act of the will? And so that sets up the dilemma exceptionally well.
- [42:44]
A
It's interesting that you mentioned, I think the drawing in of Homer and Zeus and fate is a really fascinating comparison because I think that Homer shows us both sides of the dilemma, right? So on one hand you have where Zeus seems to be adhering to this nameless fate that seems to give everyone their proportion. And if Zeus doesn't shepherd this in the right way, chaos will occur, right? One of the most famous examples is when Sarpedon is going to die, right, son? He thinks about saving him, even though fate has deemed. And Hera gives this warning like, well, you could try, but it will bring absolute chaos. And so I really like that idea that you can maybe see even that intellectualist position in Homer, because you definitely can see the second horn, right? Well, what is good? Well, what did Athena tell me to do? What did Apollo tell me to do, right. There's not a whole lot of, like, rationalizing the commands. It's just simply like, your piety is an obedience to the gods. And actually, in a lot of ways, because Euthyphro's already admitted that he agrees with the Homeric tales, you know, they're not consistent, right? One of the big problems with the pantheon, right. I might. One person might be adhering to. To what Athena says. You think. You just think of the Trojan War overall. The other one is adhering to, say, Apollo or Aphrodite and supporting Troy. And so then all of a sudden, like, well, what's pious is completely fractured. It's completely voluntaristic according to, like, the individual gods. And I think Socrates does a good job of showing Euthyphro, like, this. This isn't consistent. Like, this doesn't actually work, right.
- [44:13]
B
He leads him directly through that in the second definition, right, where he says, well, pious is what is left loved by the gods. But then they disagree. They're fractured, as you say. Well, then we'll. We'll modify it. You'll say all the gods. When all the gods love something together, then it's. Then it's good. Which, which then comes closer to a. To a monotheistic viewpoint, right? With all the gods collapsed into the one God.
- [44:35]
A
And it's funny that he. He tries to make that argument, right, because that's. He says it earlier, like, well, they. They all agree that murder is wrong. Okay, well, murder is. Is judged according to justice. And Plato's already told us, and Socrates told us in First Alcibiades that, you know, the entire Iliad and Odyssey are conversations about justice. And so then you just get back to the exact same problem, right? They can't decide what's just the due of Troy. So. So just maybe to kind of give a high level of this. Yeah. That force, that first horn. Then, like, if you look at it from, I guess, a historical standpoint or like, why is this important? Because sometimes we're downstream from these thoughts, and so we don't. We don't actually see why they affect us.
- [45:11]
B
Right?
- [45:11]
A
But you know, my understanding there is like this, this horn, the first horn, right? It says the gods are basically, you know, adhering to something external to them that's good, right? There's something external to the gods that is actually good. Again, think of Antigone again, saying, you know, there are laws that even the gods will not trespass. I mean, this is really an introduction, right, to a realist metaphysic that the cosmos is Ordered, it's intelligible, that our minds then, right, can look at the cosmos. They can look at the world and say, okay, well, there's an order and a structure to the world. I can start to discern this. I can start to think this. And you can see then why someone like Plato, right, Or, you know, Plato, Socrates, a philosopher can come into this world, right? No, this is something to know. The world corresponds to my mind and my mind to the world, and I can know things. Truth is the conformity of the mind to reality. And then the second one is the exact opposite. And you mentioned kind of both those keywords. It's voluntaristic coming from the will. It's divine command theory. It's. No, no, no, it's that fracturing again, where what's pious is what's simply willed by the gods. And what you see then is. Is that you see it's very difficult in say, Homer's Iliad for someone like Odysseus or Diomedes to be a philosopher, because they're not trying to figure out the eternal ideas, right? They're not trying to figure out what is justice as a principle. All they're trying to figure out is what does Zeus or Athena want me to do? The entire impetus of what is it that I need to do to be pious, which is then, you know, my piety gains me favor and war and, you know, etc. Is literally just trying to understand the will of the gods. And not even plural. Sometimes it's just one particular God. And hopefully my God's will trumps the other God. So I think that, like, taking, like, the historical context, why is this dilemma important for us is because what Plato gives us here really is an introduction to a realist metaphysic. And I think in a Platonic context, you know, what he's trying to introduce is the ideas, the eternal ideas. There are things that we can know that even are above the gods. So even if Zeus is the most just God, Zeus is adhering to the concept that is justice, which then starts to raise the question of, like, well, why do I want to be like Zeus? Why can't I just be just. Right on? I just adhere to the same idea that he's adhering to.
- [47:22]
B
Right.
- [47:23]
A
But in our world is slipping, plummeting, falling into the abyss, back into a voluntaristic mindset.
- [47:33]
B
Yes.
- [47:34]
A
That the world's not intelligible and that I find meaning, maybe not in the will of the gods, but, you know, in the modern age, the man becomes God, our Pantheon is us. And so I, I create reality from my will, right? So truth is not the conformity of the mind to reality, but rally, rather, reality has to conform to my mind. And so I think that there's really, you know, I agree with you. You first read this, you're like, what, what is this? Like, there's two, like he says pious too many times, like, where's the causality? Like, this is just word games, right? But in reality, I actually think at the heart of this is a real conversation about the modern era.
- [48:09]
B
You're absolutely right. That's if we want to telescope sort of to the end to the modern period. MacIntyre gives such a. Such a good account that really there's only two camps, right? There's just Aristotle and Nietzsche, and those are the two. Which team are you going to be on? And of course, he includes Plato on the Aristotelian side because it's, you know, it is that conformity to truth, the conformity of our minds to reality rather than forcibly using our wills. The valorization of the will in the absence of God has been catastrophic and horrific for the modern. We see it in nearly every area of modern life, this valorization of the untethered and absolute will. And that's not something that I can maybe directly blame the partisans of voluntarism for. I desperately want to, but you can see the trajectory going towards that in the modern world. And so that when Nietzsche comes along and says, you know, God is dead and I have killed him and exalts the will to power and the voluntaristic mindset, you know, I always picture a debate between Nietzsche and an Enlightenment thinker. They're going to argue whether or not murder is moral. And the Enlightenment thinker goes first, he's older and gives all of these rationalistic reasons, some of them which would echo things like plague Plato and Socrates would say. And then Nietzsche says, well, all of those are very interesting arguments. And then he takes a baseball bat and bashes him in the head and he says, guess who won the argument? And it's power. Power. At the end of the day, the will to power will trump that. And so if you don't have an argument, and the Enlightenment I don't think has a robust enough argument against that to defend from Nietzsche, then Nietzsche will take over. And you see the horrors of the 20th century in macro and then transferred into the horrors of the individual in terms of human anthropology in the 21st century. And that is directly result that Plato saw this four centuries before Christ as The crux. This is actually the most important question, I think, the Euthyphro dilemma in Western philosophical history, by which I mean in reality, in the struggle between these two opposing worldviews. I take very seriously Richard Weaver's arguments and ideas have consequences. That this voluntaristic strain has been the unraveling of the west, for sure.
- [50:51]
A
It really is a watershed moment. It contextualizes whichever way you go on one of these horns. It then characterizes the entirety of your thought. Am I trying to actually discover some type of objective truth? Am I looking for a realist metaphysic? Do I believe in the ideas? How does this work? Or is everything just simply reducible to the will? And whether it's not the gods or it's me? But you still see, then what if you look at the Iliad again as an example, Homer is a teacher. What does this lead to? It just leads to chaos and violence. I mean, think of. Think of how unnecessary the Trojan War was and how many people died. And even, like, you know, characters like Agamemnon that have at least the glory of taking Troy. But then he's, like, killed in the bath by his wife. I mean, at the end of the day, you know, Odysseus, you know, crawls back up on the shore, you know, and he makes it. But then there's even kind of caveats with him as well. And so you kind of look at like, what was this war even for? Well, it's because it was about a beauty contest and three of the goddesses got angry with one another other. And so I. You know, you can see that as, like, comical. Like, oh, the Greeks, they're. They're dumb and they're pan. In their mythology or whatever. Like, this isn't. This isn't much dumber than what we see today, where we see people that are completely imploded. The Greek gods are completely imploded. Characters, they're caricatures of, you know, some type of power. They're incredibly selfish. They can really only see through themselves. They're obsessive. They're very petty, and we mock them. But like a lot of us, right as moderns act just like them. And we're basically. There's no. When there's no intellect, there's no way to dialogue, there's no reason. And so when everything gets reduced to the will, you can see why violence occurs because there's no way to actually dialogue if it's. If it's a culture of the wills and it always leads to power. And whether it's you're looking at Nietzsche or you're looking at, like, the gods and Homer. I think this lesson's pretty clear.
- [52:44]
B
And that's just what Benedict was getting at the Regensburg address when he was addressing the Islamic world. And he said, look, if we want to have dialogue, and we want to have dialogue, but that dialogue is rooted in our common human nature, which has its characteristic note and rationality. And until the Islamic world can retrieve its tradition, which it has, a real tradition of rationality, there can be no dialogue. And then, unfortunately, factions in the Islamic world then went on to basically prove Benedict's point by reacting with willful violence. And that was exceptionally unfortunate in that term. But we see that, and I think if we look at previously the trajectory that you were talking about back to Homer, I think Homer tends towards a voluntaristic view because that's the only way that he can kind of make sense. I think that leads to the valorization of some of the Odysseus deceitfulness in the Odyssey, because that's the only way to survive in that sense. Then we see it in the playwrights, like you said, Aeschylus, who tries to maintain this idea of divine justice, and then we see it slipping as we get to Euripides and Aristophanes, which become essentially subjectivist accounts. Well, there's really no way to adjudicate this. I mean, Antigone is that great character of moral probity and conformity to a rule. But then by the time you get to Electra, it's just moral relativism all the way down, because they can't articulate the principle necessary to have that to hold more to that first horn of the dilemma, which I don't want to minimize. It's still a dilemma that needs reconciliation because the first horn has problems with it as well.
- [54:29]
A
Yeah, I very much agree with. Yeah. So maybe let's push into taking the Euthyphro dilemma in a monotheistic context. Right. Does that solve it? What does that do? So maybe just to kind of reframe it so we can look at it as whether it is good and just because God wills it, or whether God wills it because it is good. And just. So the exact same dilemma that we have, just simply putting it in a monotheistic context. I mean, maybe. I don't know if this is a fair question to you, but how would Aquinas answer this?
- [55:03]
B
Well, I mean, before we get to sort of Aquinas's answer, I think we need to sort of rehearse the tradition, the monotheistic tradition. If I can go back just a little bit before I get to Thomas, all three of the monotheistic religions recognize this problem. And it becomes a fundamental problem for the thinkers of all three major religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And they all deal with it very, very seriously.
- [55:25]
A
And.
- [55:26]
B
But Christianity. And one of the problems is because they believe in an omnipotent God. They believe in a God who is all powerful. And when we see God fulminating on Mount Sinai and issuing these laws, it can look very voluntarist. It can look as if God is simply issuing these laws. And then you get to difficult passages in the Old Testament, Thomas. To get back to Thomas for a second, he identifies three critical issues in the Old Testament. And that is the God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, the spoliation of the Egyptians by the Hebrews after their exodus, and telling the prophet Hosea to take unto himself a wife of fornications. These are really difficult issues to try to explain, particularly in the context, context of the first horn of the dilemma, sort of a rationalist, perpetual moral norm. Because it seems like in these three cases especially you could point to others, but these are the three that are the classical, the loci classic that God dispenses from the moral law at those three moments so that you can. So that Abraham can kill, so that the Egyptians can steal and so the Hebrews can steal, and so that Hosea can kill, commit adultery, essentially. And so it can be easy to slip into a voluntarist mindset in the Jewish tradition by saying that, well, God simply provides a moral exception at this time through his omnipotence. And then the situation becomes even more difficult with Christianity because Christianity asserts that God is love and we know that love is the highest act of the world will, and the charity is the greatest of all virtues. And if charity is the greatest of all virtues, and it is, and it belongs to the will, then you can see how from a Christian perspective, a voluntarist reading could be. Could be plausible that God. That it's not through mere rationality, but God is through his love, through his charity, governing the world and gives us these laws. And so Augustine generally espouses a voluntaristic mindset because it solves those difficult passages in the Old Testament rather neatly and because it valorizes charity and the will, which is a perennial concern. Even Thomas, even though he's going to defend the opposite position, it's still got to deal with this fact that the charity is, is the fundamental primary Virtue. And so as time goes on, Thomas, as he inherits this Aristotelian tradition, has to confront this issue. He's an Aristotelian, he inherits this, I think the best parts of Platonism in answering this question, conformity to a moral norm. And he answers that no, that he leans more, more towards an intellectualist or rationalist, that God commands these things because they are good. And that what that means is he's saying is that God could not dispense from these because it would be a contradiction. And contradiction does not apply to omnipotence, doesn't detract from omnipotence. CS Lewis has a good line about this. That nonsense doesn't to seem cease to be nonsense just because you put the word God in front of it. And so that God's power doesn't extend to contradictories, right? The very law of non contradiction is embedded in the God. And he's tracing that from the Johannine tradition. God is Logos, that God is reason or wisdom, rationale, order himself. And so Thomas essentially cuts through this discordian knot of the dilemma because he recognizes the problem. On one hand, remember I said that there was a problem on the first horn of the dilemma. And the problem with the first horn of the dilemma is if that God loves these things because they are good, doesn't that suggest in a monotheistic sense that there is something besides and superior to God himself? If he can't prescind from these moral norms? And that's a problem, that's an issue. But Thomas wants to avoid the opposite horn of the dilemma by saying no, that God issues these things because they are good and couldn't change them if he wanted to. And so what he says is, look, in God all things are identical. God's intellect is his will, is his love is his charity is his goodness. And so God himself is the moral norm. He isn't subject to a moral norm, he is the moral norm. And so when God says thou shalt not kill, more accurately translated Thou shalt not murder, he cannot say thou shalt murder because that would mean going against his very nature. It would traduce his very nature just contrary to who he is and a an impossibility in that sense. And so Thomas weaves a middle ground between the two and says that no, we know that there's nothing superior to or besides God, and we know that God wouldn't change these things. God can't change these things in the second one. So therefore cuts right through the dilemma and says, look, God is the moral norm. And therefore, when he issues these laws to us, they are good because he himself is good. He issues them because they're good, but he issues them because they conform to his very nature. In giving us these moral laws, he's in a sense, giving us himself, his justice, his goodness, his way of acting.
- [61:19]
A
That's beautiful. I really appreciate you sketching that out because I think that would be fair to say. As an attorney, I am particularly somewhat sensitive to the fact that the person who frames the question wins the argument. So if you, if you can be the one that actually frames the question, like, you typically win the argument. So in certain ways, as I've kind of wrestled with the euthyphro dilemma, I've come to see it as a false dilemma because it has the presupposition that the God and the good are two separate things. Right? Because that's actually, that's. That's what the dilemma is, is how do you solve this? And so just to kind of re. Articulate what I heard you saying is simply that one of the things that Christianity takes into account is what is the nature of God? Who is God? And we typically, you know, whether it's Judaism or Islam or even like the moderns, we tend to be really hung up immediately on power. So if you say, like, what is God typically, almost immediately, the first answer you get is, well, he's the person who can do anything. Right? There's nothing that God can't do. And yes, CS Lewis is a wonderful example. Right. I appreciate you mentioning him because he talks about what shape is blue? Can God, Can God make blue a shape? No, it's illogical. Right. So there's, there's certain God's power seems to be contextualized, or dare I say limited according to his nature. So then you ask, like, what's the nature of God? And this is, well, he's good, he's love. He's also logos. And so in certain ways, I think you can look at this as a false dilemma because it separates God from good. And so the reason that he can actually, we can still have this realist metaphysic is simply because there's not a distinction between the two. And so whatever God tells us is going to be good, not because he's adhering to some standard that's above him, but rather because he's acting in accordance with his own nature. Is that, is that kind of fair?
- [63:12]
B
Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, God. God is the good. And so when he tells us these moral norms, he's pointing to himself. The moral norms conform to God himself, which is why it's absurd to suggest that he could change them. And then Thomas says then he's got to deal with those difficult cases, which is sort of interesting how he does that. And he says that God is the absolute author of life and death, death. And so in a certain sense, you could say that God kills everyone. And so when they die, it's up to him. So God can bestow that authority in a limited sense on a person, in which case it would no longer be specified morally as murder, because murder is unjustified killing. And so God could authorize his vicegerents to, as he does in the Old Testament, in terms of capital punishment, he authorizes them to inflict this in his name. Same things with John Paul II talked about the universal destination of goods. God owns the universe. And therefore if he wishes to appropriate something to another group, like the Egyptians, the Egyptians goods to the Hebrews, he can do that in that case, making reparation for the things that were stolen from the Hebrews. And so Thomas says, look, we have to. His favorite activity in mind is making distinctions. And so once you understand the distinctions properly, you can understand what's God doing. And he's not changing the moral law. He's merely exercising his authority within a certain context, which goes back to history, which helps us to understand how he. How he acts and legislates in different times, in different places for people.
- [64:54]
A
I like that a lot, it seems to me. What occurs to me is that the danger there is that we anthropomorphize God, right? This is. This seems to be a danger in almost every time we do theology. You see it a lot when we talk about God and his providence, right? We. A lot of certain theological strains or other religions put God within time, even if they don't realize that's what they're doing, right? So if I'm. If I'm going to do A in the future and God knows that I'm going to do A, then I have to do a. Right? And so they accidentally put God within time because they treat him as a being actually somewhat similar to Zeus, right? All the Greek gods are kind of creatures with inside time. I really like that as a moral framework too, that sometimes when we're trying to talk about what is just when it comes to God, we accidentally treat him like a creature as opposed to the Creator.
- [65:43]
B
I mean, it's. CS Lewis has another good idea in the discarded image where he says that we need to avoid the anthropocentric worldview, which, which is the worldview that's sort of generated by the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. It becomes intensely anthropocentric, whereas medievals viewed the world as anthropoperipheral, which is one of my favorite words, that we are at the edge. We are at the furthest edge of that Boethian wheel where God is at the center, seeing everything as one in one simple act. And we see things in this rapidly spinning edge of the rim of the wheel. And, and once you understand the Boethian definition of eternity and how God sees things, then, then your, your view is shifted and you, you start to see, okay, you can sort of see things from, not to put it, you know, too, too bluntly, but from God's perspective instead of, instead of, from a human perspective.
- [66:42]
A
I want to go back to something you said earlier. You mentioned in passing, Aquinas somewhat pulling from John in the opening of John that the, the word, the Logos, is God. And so my. Let me give you kind of like my elementary understanding here, because I think it kind of dovetails into the euthyphro dilemma and how we see the nature of God is that one of my understandings of the contributions that St. Augustine kind of gave, you know, to intellectual history, to, to theology is to root, you know, Plato's ideas in the Logos in the divine mind. Because to my knowledge, Plato never really actually explicitly states how the ideas in the one God relate to one another. And he seems to very much present the ideas as having kind of like separate, independent metaphysical realities. And so the Church then, through Augustine seems to pick up like, well, no, these, these ideas exist. These, these eternal ideas, but they exist in the Logos. They exist in the divine mind itself. And then this makes sense why John uses it at the beginning of his Gospel. It makes sense why St. Paul talks about that, like in him and through him and for him and by him, you know, all things were made and held in being because all these things are participating in the ideas that are in the Logos. How does that play into, though, the euthyphro dilemma? Because I don't think that, like, solves it, but it shows that the idea, the relationship between the ideas, the divine.
- [68:07]
B
Nature, well, the Logos saves early Christianity from a pure volunteerism, I think, from going entirely voluntaristic. Because if we're tied to rationality, order and purpose from the very beginning, and that Jesus is that rationality, order and purpose, that we can't go entirely to the way of saying that all of these are Arbitrary decisions on the part of God, that there's a reason for all of these things and that that reason is intelligible. And if it's intelligible, that we can know it and understand it. And in so doing so. So we're not, at least we're able to stave off pure voluntarism at least until the 14th century. So it inoculates Christianity very significantly from that, from that tension or no, it leaves attention, but from that, from that going pull that other direction. And so we see this great tradition from, from Justin Martyr and then from Origen and then Augustine in appropriating this realist philosophy that Thomas, you know, modifies, certainly, but that, that idea, the existence of the ideas in the divine mind helps to root Augustine very significantly root the Western tradition in the idea that there, there is permanence, there is order, there is intelligibility, without which, by the way, I mean, the scientific revolution never could have gotten off the ground, I mean, without a belief in an ordered universe and the reliability of the senses that were given to us by God himself. So all those things are, as you say, were very critical to the Christian project.
- [69:40]
A
It's interesting is that if you look at the first horn and we say, okay, of the actual euthyphro dilemma, and you say, well, this is the horn of the realist metaphysic. This is the idea that the world is intelligible. There's just like such a beauty then about understanding that the ideas then, that Plato thinks are giving structure to this reality, that it's actually intelligible, that we could discover them, actually find their metaphysical location and address in the divine mind, the Logos, the second Person of the Blessed Trinity. Because then what that means then is that the pursuit of truth, the pursuit of understanding reality, ultimately terminates in understanding God, because that's where all these ideas are going to rest. So no matter what idea it is that you start, you know, to pursue its ultimate location, it rests within the divine mind. And then you find God. And I think you see this very much in the tradition that sees, whether it's faith and reason or theology and science, these things can't actually be contraries to another.
- [70:41]
B
And actually, when you think about it, the. The severing of this dilemma by Christianity, particularly by Thomas, has the effect of essentially liberating God. So God is freed from the constraints of the first dilkhorn, and at the same time he's also liberated from arbitrariness on the second half. And so God is perfectly ordered, perfect reason and also perfect Freedom, which gets to the Christian notion of freedom. Freedom is the ability to do the good because we know in God truth and goodness and the transcendental, they're two sides of the same coin. So in knowing the truth, we pursue the good at the same time. And it resolves. It resolves everything in a perfect symmetry.
- [71:27]
A
Yeah, it's beautiful. There's just so much packed into this dilemma that I think we can so easily just skip over. But it's like historical impact in the west and decide of Christian thought is. Is really hard, I think, to actually exaggerate. And unfortunately, it also tends to be a dilemma that we're seeing have a certain revival today as a man lives his life. Are we living a voluntaristic life, or are we actually living a life of the mind?
- [71:55]
B
Yeah, and it's. And it starts. There's a long genealogy to this because, I mean, I hate to say it, but it sort of all starts to fall apart after Thomas Aquinas. And I promised at the beginning I was going to throw some. Throw some shade on the Franciscan tradition. So let me start doing that a little bit. Bonaventure reacts significantly against Thomas's valorization of Aristotle by really sort of denigrating pure philosophy and saying that we need to rely on divine revelation, divine truth, and many of the things that Bonaventure says are absolutely beautiful. But that Franciscan tradition that foregrounds the will at the expense of the intellect leads later followers of Bonaventure, starting with Duns Scotus, in a more voluntaristic direction, because they want to preserve the liberty of action and the voluntas of God, from which we get the voluntarist tradition. So Duns Scotus is still realist to the extent that the first three commandments are absolute, they conform to the divine nature. But he is willing to say that, well, that the moral law, the second table of the law, these could be modified. Once again, he's sort of seduced by this idea that they can be used to explain these traditions. Sorry. These instances, these hard cases in the Old Testament where it seems that God has changed the moral law. If we say that, well, the moral law can be changed by God, then maybe we can do that. And then 20 years later, 25 years later, William of Ockham just goes whole hog and says that, no, even the first three commandments, God could change because it's all about his absolute power, his absolute potency. And so God, for instance, William Bauckham just says, God could command us to hate him because he is will. I mean, the will predominates. And then this feeds in especially with, when you combine this with nominalism. It becomes especially difficult when there are no universals, when there are no real ideas or real fixed natures. Then it becomes entirely about the individual. There are no groups. The ideas like the Church become sort of notional and acts accidental. And we see voluntarism and nominalism in spades in the Protestant Reformation. Right? I mean, the, the idea of forensic justification is radically nominalist. It's. And then with John Calvin, salvation becomes a radically voluntarist right with God simply electing, prescinding from, from any merit or consideration whatsoever. And then as you, and as you accelerate, there's a little bit of a reaction against that in the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, I like to say, is really a reaction against Protestant theology that happens to target the Catholic Church, which is really unfortunate. They missed their target because the Catholic Church was visible. And so it was easy to attack the Catholic Church in that sense. And there were some things about the Catholic Church that needed attacking at that time. But we have lots of baby and bathwater situations in the modern world. And then you get to Nietzsche and Nietzsche brings that voluntarist tradition to its apex by saying, well, we're just going to remove God from the equation. And that if everything is radically contingent, if everything is dependent on will and absolute power, then the person who possesses the power is the one who's going to be able to make the definitions and make the will. Now there's no direct line between Nietzsche and Hitler. I think Nietzsche would have radically disdained someone, you know, Vietnamese painter like Hitler with his, with his racialist ideas. But it kind of follows, right, if you're a radical voluntarist and nominalist and God is out of the equation and universal natures are out of the equation. Well, if I have the power, then I can redefine the concept of what it means to be human. If I decide that, well, human, humans are all non Jewish, homo sapiens, then, and I have the power to execute it, then do it right. That's, that's the final end of volunteerism. And then once you get past that, the volunteerism becomes embedded in the west in a very different way, in a way that exalts personal autonomy to the extent that I can remake not only my, my nature around me, my surrounding world, but even my own body in my own image that, in my own mental image. And so I think that sort of trajectory, that genealogy makes a lot of sense to me. And that leads us to current for sure.
- [76:38]
A
No, I agree. I appreciate you. You kind of sketching that out. Yeah. Like I mentioned earlier, right. Truth is the conformity of the mind to reality. But modern man wants reality to conform to his mind. And we've been taught. And we could, you know, have some debates about who's taught this. Right. But we got. We've basically been taught, we've been habituated now to the degree that basically anything that opposes our will. Right. Any. Anything that actually tells me that I'm not free. Because we see free as a satiation of desire. It's actually not a discipline to pursue the good, but rather modern freedom tends to be satiation of desire. Anything that impedes my satiation is oppressive. And, you know, I would point to. Then I think liberalism has promised us that we will be free, that it will come in and remove all of our oppressors. And, and so now we're seeing where reality is an oppressor. My body is an oppressor. And it's. And so now you know these things. You know, it's interesting to live in an age that finds reality to be a tyrant. And so we're going to kick out against it, we're going to fight against it. And this should be malleable to my will. If it's not, then I'm not free. And, you know, we're pushing into such dangerous areas because now it's not only that I can do this, but like, you have to participate in my unreality. I have to. You have to be invited into my fiction. And if you don't, then, you know, you're a bigoted or whatever you are, and you can see, then that's oppression, right?
- [77:59]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [78:00]
A
Which is a. Which is a real oppression. Right. In the reverse, that those who tried to adhere to reality are being dragged down into an unreality by others. And so I think you can see really clearly, even in the Euthyphro dilemma, as Plato presents it, that like a culture that starts to war over this dilemma, we live in a realist metaphysic. Are we actually pursuing an intelligible reality? Is the intellect actually conforming to what we see in this ordered cosmos? Or are we simply voluntaristic? Like, this can't just simply be reduced to some kind of, you know, cute philosophical conversation that we have, but rather this is actually what informs the way people live. And they might not be able to articulate it like most things, but what we see in the Great Books tradition is that people are downstream from Philosophies and ideologies and philosophers that they've never read, but they're their disciples. And one of the reasons I tell people you need to read great books is that you actually really need to reclaim your intellect because you have all this strata. You have all these things that have been built up from other thinkers that you think are normative. You don't actually really know where they came from. And so I do think we're, you know, somewhat in a sea of voluntarism right now, and we have little bitty pockets and islands of realist metaphysics, but I think our default cultural standing is very voluntaristic.
- [79:17]
B
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's. That's what it is. And the more that we can get people to realize that, or at least to show them the trajectory, because then it becomes incredibly mixed up, right? They take ideas from here, ideas from there, and they create sort of these ad hoc metaphysics, which they don't even realize that they have. So, for instance, you have this sort of Baconian idea of our mastery of the natural world. And when you combine that with volunteerism, well, then that means that I can conform the natural world to my will. And you can create your own bot. Right? I mean, you can. You can create your own. You can modify your body in such a way. Though I do think it's rather interesting that when people say I'm born in the wrong body or something like that, maybe there's a door that's possible to get them to see through that. Well, then you obviously consider that there is something in you that is separate from your body. And what is that? What is that thing? Is it. There's obviously some spiritual principle within themselves that they consider that their body does not conform to. And so if you can start to get them to admit that, then maybe that's a wedge in the door to show them that there's. There's something that. That's more than their body. That's simply more than an experimental table to do testing on.
- [80:41]
A
Yeah, I really.
- [80:41]
B
Maybe that's. Maybe that's too hopeful. I don't know.
- [80:43]
A
No, we have to have hope. I actually really enjoyed the phrase ad hoc metaphysics. That's a wonderful phrase. No, and I think that, you know, kind of pastorally speaking, I think the problem is, is that, you know, this really is a cave wall. And so the problem is that you have all these adolescents, you have all these young people that in a lot of ways are growing up in a culture that I think is an absolute meat grinder. To their own self identity and imagination and self worth. And there's no, there's no surprise that so many of them are coming out wounded and victimized, not like in a false way, but in a real way and trying to find out and tell them, like, listen, you are, you are loved by God. You are made in the image of God. You know, here's something that's real and true and beautiful, and it doesn't originate with your will, but rather originates in God. I think is a, it's a difficult, it's a difficult path, but it's certainly a labor of love, right? And I think this kind of goes down to this contrast of like, okay, well, how do those of us who adhere to a realist metaphysic that adhere to an ordered cosmos that is intelligible, try and reach those who simply think that everything's chaotic and meaning comes from the will? And I agree with you, you have to find these little inroads. You have to go to coffee with people, you have to love people, you have to invite them and you know, everyone. You can't detach from reality completely. So there's got to be some window, some tethering, some sinew that hasn't been severed yet by which you can kind of pull them back in. Because we're made for God, we're made for truth.
- [82:15]
B
I try to tell them, right, that in certain cases, submission brings liberation. And so as soon as you submit to the law of gravity, all of a sudden you're more free to do the things that you can do, right? If you think you can run full speed off a cliff and defy gravity, or you're not going to, going to be free for very long, that autonomy is not, is not going to last. It's actually by conforming yourself to gravity, conforming yourself to the laws of physics, that we can build bridges and airplanes and things like that. And it's, it's, it's similar to the laws of mathematics. Once you submit to the laws of mathematics, you can do astonishing things with it. And how much more so when you start to consider metaphysical realities, once you start to conform your mind to the truth of things, to the truth of human anthropology, it's actually going to be liberating to you. And I tell people that some of the freest people I ever met live in monasteries and convents and are the saints of the church that you think could be this oppressive people, they don't think about these paradoxes though, because they stop at the paradox and they never penetrate through it. That's what somebody like Chesterton is so good. He just throws paradox after paradox at you and forces you to confront them and sees that a paradox is not necessarily a contradiction. That in fact faith and reason can. Can be. Can be cooperative because you have a lot of half answers, right? I mean, and that these half answers lie in things like fundamentalism or scientism, and they grasp a portion of reality. And that's another thing, another strategy to use is with heresy. Heresy is not falsehood. Simply put, it's a truth taken too far or it's a truth that is embraced to the exclusion of another truth. And so you build on those areas where they've got things right and they can see things so that you can begin to build the case and then also show them through that this is not just an abstract life. This is not just an abstract. So, I mean, I want to push back a little bit because you keep calling us realists. I want to make clear that I'm a moderate realist. I'm a mystic Aristotelian, but to show them that this is precisely where they need to be going and it's going to lead to their flourishing and it's going to lead to their happiness.
- [84:44]
A
Dr. Prudho, I think you've done a marvelous job of helping us navigate you through dilemma, kind of seeing it and its impact even in our modern age. Any other kind of like final comments or thoughts on this conversation?
- [84:58]
B
This has been a great conversation. I appreciate it so much. I appreciate you doing this in the small groups. The things that you do are great. That's what I love to do. I mean, Newman has this, his motto, right? Corad core loqu Heart speaking to heart. And it's not in these YouTube channels with a million people. It's those going out to have coffee with people every time. On Wednesdays, after my Introduction to Catholicism class, I always go to Newman and we have pipes with Aquinas and whoever wants to come. It's an open discussion, whatever questions you have. And there's some food and there's some tobacco. I continue to have my Socratic efforts of corrupting the youth with good ideas and tobacco. So that's. But that's. I think that's my job. That's what I'm supposed to be doing. So it's precisely those things that are going to do. It's going to be. It's going to be person to person. And that's. And that sometimes can get discouraging given the. But it's the marketing, I think that's discouraging. It's the sheer weight of the media that that tends to tends to get us down. But when you could sit down and talk with with someone, you can see the value. You can see that you know another person who's creating the image and likeness of God, even if it's St. Athanasius says that image is smudged a bit, but just because it's smudged and not shattered, as some of our fellow Christians would say, we can, we can use some spiritual intellectual Windex and clean it off.
- [86:24]
A
No? Very good. Where can people find more of your thought?
- [86:27]
B
Well, they can get they can find my book books on on Amazon.com that my recent book came out with St. Augustine's Press. And so actually I have a couple books from St. Augustine's Press, one of which our own bishop was good enough to write the forward to translation of St Bartholomew of the Martyrs book on being a pastor. And so it's available on Amazon. I have talks from the Thomistic Institute that are available online. I don't think my talk was recorded reported at the that you were so kind about at the Thomistic, but I gave a very similar talk in Rome that they can find through the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas if they'd like to listen into that.
- [87:06]
A
Very good. Well, Dr. Perlo, we appreciate it, everyone. Next week we are going to be reading the Apology with Father Brophy from Providence College and we'll continue in our Platonic studies. You can check us out@thegreatbookspodcast.com and we will see you next week. See you.