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- [00:00]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Today on Ascend, the Great Books Podcast, we are applying the lessons we learned in Dante's Inferno by taking up the subject of lying as contraceptive speech. Today's podcast was recorded live on X alongside two of our good friends, Shannon from Catholic Frequency and Sean, both of whom run excellent accounts on X. Sharing lots of lessons on the Great Books and the Catholic faith, we revisit the diseased Souls in the 8th Circle of Hell to explore three main topics. First, how acting contrary to reason creates a counterfeit anthropology. Second, how the intellect suffers when it satiates on a lie and third, how to understand lying as an act of sterility. We will then apply these to the politics of our day and end on a note of hope. So join us today for a wide ranging and somewhat raw conversation on Dante, the Gospel of John, liberalism and much, much more. Foreign so welcome to Ascend the Great Books Podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. I'm a husband, father of five and serve as the Chancellor and General Counsel for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa, recording here on a beautiful evening in rural Oklahoma. If you're new to Ascend to our weekly podcast, it helps guide you through the great books. Check out our podcasts on the Iliad, the Odyssey, Aeschylus, Oresteia and lots more. There are a lot of great books that you can read with Ascend. Check us out here on X or YouTube, Facebook and Patreon. We appreciate all of our supporters and visit thegreatbookspodcast.com, where we have several written guides to help you read the great books. Today we are live here on X to discuss lying as contraceptive speech lessons from Dante's Inferno, Jesus Christ in Liberalism. So to kind of guide us through this conversation tonight and help us, we have a couple good guests. We have Sean joining us. We also have Catholic Frequency joining us. Both of them do amazing things here on X. If you're not following them, please do so always. Sean's got some really good threads that he's always posting that I learned a lot from and then every time I turn around I feel like Catholic Frequencies live on X all day long with all kinds of good content. So both of you, I really appreciate you being here, so let's get started. I think Imprimatur might actually be joining us here in a little bit, but let's kind of just jump into the subject tonight and I'll just kind of give a little bit of like short talks and then kind of break it down for some questions and then maybe at the end Just kind of open it up maybe to some others. I think this is like an important subject that I'd really like to share with you all, just simply like lessons that we can learn from Dante, something that I've really kind of meditated on in his Inferno, particularly in his eighth circle. So here we go. So, Master Adamo. Master Adamo lies a bloated mass of watery, rotten. His amorphous frame bears his diseased paunch and distended limbs as his lips curl and crack under his parching fever. Despite being a waterlogged waste, he lies before Dante the pilgrim and Virgil and explains how King Minos poured him into the last ditch of the eighth circle of Hell. He was a counterfeiter of Florentine Florence. He blurred the lines of reality and life, and now lays blurred himself a poor counterfeit of his former self. In Dante's Inferno, the eighth circle of hell is composed of 10 ditches populated by flatterers, fortune tellers, deceivers, alchemists, and other fraudulent souls. It's not surprising that such souls suffer eternal torment. But it is surprising that Dante the poet, as opposed to Dante the pilgrimage, has them suffer with greater severity than murderers or the lustful. So, for example, like, why would a flatterer, right, someone who engages in flattery, suffer a worse fate in Hell than Attila the Hun? Why would an alchemist merit greater suffering than, say, Cleopatra or Achilles? The structure of hell as presented by Dante the poet moves from the lesser sins to of incontinence, like lust, greed or prodigality, right? These sins that there's a lack of bridling of the appetite towards some good, to greater sins of malice, like violence and fraud. So for Dante, fraud is more perverse than violence because it represents an abuse of that which is highest in man, his intellect. So if you think of the structure of hell, the upper part of hell is composed of the incontinence, right? The sins of incontinence. And these are the ones that failed to bridle their appetite towards some type of good, like lust or greed, even wrath, right? Because anger is a good. But then lower hell is characterized by malice and actual evil willing, right? So let's work on our grammar. Like, what do these words mean? Right? There's a malevolency here. There's a malice, an evil willingness towards another person. And that's broken down into two categories. You have violence and fraud. And again, as I said, but just going to clarify, fraud then is worse than violence for Dante because it's a corruption of the highest in man, right? Our intellect is our highest faculty. And so when it becomes corrupted, it becomes the worst in us. And this is a really basic Catholic principle of thought that applies in philosophy and theology, that the corruption of the best is always the worst, right? Think of Lucifer. So he goes from being the highest creation, the highest creature and all of creation, to being Satan, right? So the corruption of the highest is always, then the worst. And this plays out with our intellect as well within can lead Dante into some interesting structures in Hell, like putting flatterers in a lower section of hell than, say, murderers. But it has to do with how he sees the intellect and how he sees fraud. So Master Adamo, who's down here in the eighth circle at the very end, right, He's a counterfeiter. He's someone who actually has engaged in this fraudulent act of counterfeiting. And so his suffering, which is immense, right, he's just this mass of diseased flesh. The suffering of Master Adamo invites us to three particular considerations. First, how acting contrary to reason creates a counterfeit anthropology. How if we act contrary to our own intellect, our own reason, it creates an artificial anthropology, something false in us. Second, how the intellect suffers when it satiates on untruth. What actually happens to our intellect, which is an appetite? What actually happens to our intellect if it happens to consume things that are untrue? And then third, how is lying an act of sterility that leads to a superficial embrace of reality? So if one's looking at the intellect, the next one's looking at speech. If our speech is lying, how does that sterility then impose upon us certain artificiality, certain unrealities that then we suffer? And then I think that with those three questions, I think then we have to ask another question, which is, who's to blame for these unrealities that we have in our current culture? Our culture has many artificialities that are now normative that we have to suffer through. What is the source of these unrealities? Can we at least maybe map that out? And what are the steps that we need to take to kind of purge our imaginations of these counterfeits of creation? So maybe before diving into our first part on how this creates a counterfeit anthropology. Sean, Catholic frequency. Anything on your end?
- [08:16]
Sean
Yeah, I would just say I really like to double down on that notion of lying being effectively the most grievous of sins because it is satanic, the fact that it's contrary to the logos, and therefore it's funny lying in and of itself. At first basic and seen like, oh, is lying that bad? Shannon, you had, you had said earlier, is a white lie a sin? Like how bad is it? But it reminds me of when I was reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn's the Gulag Archipelago where he was discussing, he lived through the Soviet Union in the glogs and you know, living under a dystopian regime that he considered hell on earth where everything seemed to go wrong. And he was, you know, he's years wondering, well what is making this hell on earth working? You know, what's, what's the machinery? What is the fuel? And he said this entire regime is built off the lie that you have to lie, you know, false confessions, I'm an enemy of the state or make calls false accusations. And he said the, the only way that you can resist all dystopias in human evil is to effectively say I will not lie. You know, that let you know, even if the principalities of power reign supreme, I will not take a part of it. And for him, at the very least, a refusal to partake in the lie was the beginning of the rebellion. You know, I guess a leaning into the logos that can set the world right. So I, I find that there's an interesting parallel here how what Dante is echoing in the Inferno is something that a couple hundred years later you see sort in each and pontificating on in the state, in politics. So it's just an interesting connection that I think shows that this is really grounded in reality and not just high minded poetry.
- [10:04]
Shannon
I was just going to say, yeah, I'm actually running a poll that Sean Referred to a 24 hour poll, 400 people have voted. And the question is, is it wrong to tell a white lie right now? 71% say yes.
- [10:16]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yes. Yeah, no, that's a really good point. Yeah. I think that one thing, I think that this is challenging when we have to look at Dante's structure of hell and why we find it so encounter intuitive is that typically we're, I think we're just accustomed to lying. We're just really accustomed to just artificialities and maybe not we don't think of it as like lying as being malicious to one another, but we're actually so habituated to relativism that we're just so used to people telling us things that we know are profoundly untrue, but we've kind of just eased into it and we find it okay. And so then one of the things that we tend to think of is that, you know, if we can't really disagree on truth, then violence, right. Being offensive to one another, actually having a cruelty tends to be the worst sin for us. So in a lot of ways, I think one of the reasons that I appreciate reading Dante's Inferno is that the way he structures hell tends to be a particular antidote to our own modern sensibilities, if that makes sense.
- [11:11]
Sean
That's how I've always looked at the Inferno as well as a sort of antidote, both for modern society and the individual soul. That it's sort of a reflection to me of like what you do as far as spiritual examine. Right. That why Dante has to go into the Inferno, for he can go to the Purgatoria or to paradise, is it's not just to stare in horror at these sins, but it's to really internalize. This is what, you know, this is the nature of evil that is inside of you. This is the consequence of effectively betraying the. Betraying the Logos. And so, effectively, once it seems then that the idea of the antidote to suffering begins with having a genuine repentance and penance and hatred of the. The evil that is inside of human nature. And once you have this genuine hatred, this sort of is what will set you up to properly, properly approach God via purgatorial. Right. Like more of a purifying fire and suffering that can start to sanctify you. It's, you know, hate the evil first. And this can effectively, you know, fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, is effectively, I think, what's being drawn out here.
- [12:14]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, well said. Well, let's kind of push into this about how kind of like unpack this a little bit about how when we engage in these lies, it's tethered to or creates, you know, an artificial anthropology, right. A false humanity in us. So Jesus Christ, right, Is the Word, the Logos, the ordering principle of all reality. He made all things, and he continues to hold all things in being. And this is a really important distinction because we hear this, but I want to make sure we understand what this means is that when we. When we build something, right, when we, like the craftsman creates, say, like a chair, there's certainly like a building of something. But then once he's built the chair, right, there's a clear distinction between him and the object, right, the artifact that he has created. But that's not how it works with God, right? He has created out of nothing and that we talk about the Logos, we talk about the Word, but he also continues to hold all things in existence. And this is what St. Paul tells us as well, right, that he holds all things in being. So, like, one way to look at this is like, as our Lord, like as our Lord. The second person, the Blessed Trinity incarnate in Jesus Christ is in the womb of Mary. He's also in his person, holding Mary in existence. Another way to look at this is like when Christ is being beaten by the Roman centurions. He's also holding those Roman centurions in existence itself. To be more Platonic, you know, he. He is the divine mind. The Logos is the divine mind. And these are thoughts that he's given substance to. There's nothing. The thought doesn't have an existence outside the mind, but he holds them in existence. I mean, it's hard for us to grasp the reality of the Logos, but this is something that I think John gives us, right? He takes a word, I think, from the Greek philosophers, and he uses it in a different, slightly different way to describe God. And it kind of unlocks this beautiful reality, I think, for us to contemplate. And so St. John, right, he uses the Greek term Logos for the second person of the Blessed Trinity. And this, according to Pope Benedict xvi, is the zenith of the harmony between Greek and Hebrew thought. So one thing we say on the podcast all the time is that Hebrew faith, coupled together with Greek reason under Roman order, prepared the world for Jesus Christ. This is how Providence brought our Lord in the fullness of time. And so John using that word logos, for Pope Benedict 16th is a certain zenith of the harmony of these. Of these two cultures coming together. And so the reason he thinks this is because the ancient Greeks, too, sought Logos, right? They sought the reason or the rational order of things, right? The Logos has. It's a multi. The valent word, but one of its meanings is it's the ordering principle of the thing, right? So they inquired about the Logos of justice, for example, the Logos of polity, right? They're trying to understand what's the ordering principle of this? What is the order of justice and the polis. What's interesting, though, is that man, too has a logos, right? He has a certain structure to himself, right? He has an observable order that illuminates his purpose and his place within the cosmos. So just like we can look at justice and say, okay, what's the ordering principle of this? What is its logos? What's its structure? And that gives us things, like, we come to understand the place of justice amongst things in the purpose of justice. Well, this is the same question we can ask about man. What is the Logos of man. And therefore we can start to understand his place within the cosmos and his purpose within the cosmos. But a distinctive character of the Logos of man, here, meaning his order or structure, is that he too can act with Logos, meaning man is a rational animal, as Aristotle observes. And so amongst all of the visible creatures of God, only man has an intellect. So here, Pope Benedict 16th, again pulling from his famous Regensburg address, uses Logos in two ways. One, meaning the structure of a thing, it's ordering principle. But the ordering principle of thing, that structure. Another way to say that is it's rationality, right? Because these things aren't chaotic, they're rational. And so he uses Logos in a slightly different way, saying that man has Logos, meaning that man has a reason, an intellect that he can also use. A lot of times in Greek, we're more used to seeing the word nous there, right? N o u s nus, which means intellect. But here, Pope Benedict uses Logos for both. So Scripture reminds us man is made in the image of God, but it is Christ, the Logos, who's in the image of the invisible God. So St. Thomas teaches that we bear the image of God like a coin bears the image of a king, but Christ bears the image like a son to his father. Let me say that again, because sometimes we don't make these distinctions. St. Thomas teaches that we bear the image of God like a coin bears the image of a king, but Christ bears the image like a son of his father or a son to his father, right? We who have the Logos turn to the Logos, Jesus Christ, for the reality of our own being, right? He is the image, right? He is the visible image of the invisible God. And so we look to him, we. And we see, like, if we try to discern what is the image of God in us, we look to that visible image of the invisible God in Jesus Christ, right? Our Logos looks to the Logos, right? We who may act with reason turns to reason itself to know ourselves. We bear that image of Logos. I mean, Sean, you know, Catholic Frequency, Anything on your end?
- [18:24]
Sean
I find it interesting. I, I like the phrase you had said that man can act with Logos. This, I think this is a very serendipitous timing for this talk, as, of course, Shannon and I, last night, we were discussing Augustine and how Plato was instrumental to Augustine finding his way back to the faith and what he was recounting in his own journey, trying to understand Christianity. He said, through Plato, I could understand. I understood the Logos, right? I understood that effectively, the truth sets you free and Therefore, I need to seek the Logos. And he said the one thing I was missing in Plato that I. That Plato can't give, that I didn't understand yet, is how Christ was the Logos. And I guess the. The difference here being that. And, and tell me your thoughts of this. But it seems then that this is really that. What Christianity added and how it baptized Plato is the notion that it's not just that you seek the Logos, but rather that given that Christ is the Logos made flesh, then what is needed above all is a relationship with Christ. Right. He wants you. He wants your love. And therefore this almost changes the, The Platonic notion of, you know, seek the Logos to try to transcend into the reality of the forms, to love God and love your neighbor. That charity seems to become the. The foundational virtue. And it's give yourself unto God and your neighbor, and this becomes transformative and helps bring out the divine in you, that it's love that gets you most fully in harmony and in the proper relationship with the Logos.
- [19:55]
Shannon
Yes. Sean, you and I were talking about last night that. It's a topic that Deacon knows very well, this, this Christian notion of Eros, where God sees us as a lover. He wants that relationship, and he's jealous if, like, when Israel starts worshiping false gods. And it's. It's such a great visual for us as we look in Revelation, in the marriage supper of the Lamb.
- [20:19]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. On both points. So going back to Sean's point about the relationship between Plato and then John's use of Logos. Yeah. I think what Pope Nick XVI there is pointing out that this really is that the zenith of that harmony. Like, if we look to where is this harmony? Like, it's most clear we look at this phrase. But I do think, Sean, which I think you're alluding to, we have to be careful about how we speak about it, because it's not simply that, you know, Plato was looking for God as Logos, and then John says, hey, look, here he is like, it's way too simplistic. To my knowledge, Plato never talks about God as Logos, but Plato is constantly trying to find the Logos of things. And so I would say that what John does there is he takes a term, the Logos, that is ubiquitous in Plato and Aristotle. I mean, this is at the core of philosophy to understand this. Right. They're trying to understand the nature of things and their causes. And this is logos. Right. This is the rationality of things. This is the internal structure, the ordering principles. And so to take that deeply Platonic principle and to Say, you know what it actually is. The Logos is actually God. And not only is the Logos God, but the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us in Jesus Christ. And this is, I think what your point was, which was, was well taken, is that then one of the things that gets. Is just incredibly transformative in the Christian kind of adoption of that Platonic thought by John is that truth then becomes not a concept, but a person. Truth ultimately is a person that we should know and have a relationship with and is a person who died for us and loves us. Right? The mind loves the thought that made it right. We come to actually know truth in the person of Jesus Christ. And that is something that I don't think is like, contrary to Plato, but it's something that I think is. Is more of a perfection. And I think that you see this with like St. Augustine, you mentioned the forms. St. Augustine will say that the Logos is the divine mind. And so it is it that is the divine mind is the Logos. And so when you say, well, where are Plato's forms? Well, they're not these metaphysical independent realities like Plato probably thought they were. But however, where they actually have their metaphysical address is actually in the divine mind of God. So God's the one that knows and has these Platonic forms in his mind, and it's those forms that he pulls from for creation itself. And so St. Augustine, I think, is this, like this beautiful bridging between a lot of the truth that I think Plato was really just phenomenally, you know, able to draw from his observations on reality and show, hey, this is how this dovetails into Christianity. It's the same thing with, like, what Catholic frequency said, it's the same thing with. With Eros, right? Our erotic love, these erotic longings of the soul. We. Plato parsed these out really well in his Symposium. But then once we see the revelation of Jesus Christ, it allows us then to see God as beauty itself. And that if we satiate our Eros and God, then that satisfaction, that happiness then cascades back down through our life. And Catholic frequency, and I have had a really good conversation on that subject. But yeah, if you're trying to kind of like grasp with where's the relationship between Christianity and kind of Greek thought, particularly Platonic thought, it'd be hard to go wrong looking at Logos and Eros and how these two things come together.
- [23:53]
Sean
I think you had also pointed out, I think I heard it from you and it fully made sense to me. There's a sort of myth that when Christ would have saved the souls in limbo. Plato was the first one who would have ran into the Christ's arms and accepted him. Right. And I. That deeply resonates. It's like when you really read Plato, it seems to me, at least by my own estimations, as far as all of the. The Greek thinkers came, Plato seems to take it about as far as you can get through reason alone to be anticipating the, well, what will become revelation a couple hundred years later. So it, to me, it's, it's quite remarkable how, how easily and how, yeah, just how easily Platonic thought synthesizes onto Christianity, as I think Augustine and the other Church fathers will do so brilliantly.
- [24:37]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So the. Yeah, I think with Plato there's a lot of things that dovetail in really. Well, obviously there's things that I think would have been difficult, that there's some like, antagonisms. But I think that obviously if you look at the, the first thousand years of the Church, Church, Plato was the philosopher and they found him, you know, to build a certain philosophical infrastructure that gave, you know, it gave a lot of illumination to Christian revelation. And I think that even Dante, Dante gets, you know, pegged, you know, probably rightly so, for being a student of St. Thomas Aquinas when he was in exile. We, we know that he was actually the student of. A student of St. Thomas Aquinas. So he does pull heavily from him. But also you see Augustine, Augustine's influence and the Neoplatonic influence is also very heavily present inside of the Inferno. And actually I think it is the Platonic influence that wins out on the structure of hell, which is sometimes why we today, who tend to be very Aristotelian and Thomistic, it seems to bother us at times because the overall structure of hell for Dante lines up very well with a Platonic soul. So maybe just a kind of very good thoughts, maybe just to kind of like, you know, push this forward a little bit more. We're looking at the Logos. We're trying to understand how does lying then create a counterfeit anthropology. So what we've tried to do with the Logos is just to understand, you know, sometimes we want to jump into what's wrong, but I don't want to assume that we know what's right. We got to make sure that we understand what the Church teaches and kind of the beauty and depth of the Catholic thought, particularly when it comes to Logos. So let's look and see what happens if we act contrary to this. Right. So to act contrary to reason is to act contrary to our own humanity. So those who abuse their Logos, right, the reason, will abuse the very image of who they are as human. So irrationality and inhumanity are tethered. If you act irrational, you act not like a human, right? You act inhuman. These two things are actually deeply tethered together. So those who abuse their intellects become, like Master Adamo, a counterfeit of their own anthropology. And like all counterfeits, there is some remnant of the original that simply cannot be removed, as Master Adamo, though a putrid kind of puddle of his former self, still presents as human. So acting contrary to reason is contrary to the very image of God in us. As Pope Benedict 16th notes, not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. Irrationality is contrary to both the nature of man and the nature of the divine. And this I think sometimes I don't know, because this is really ubiquitous inside of Christian thought. Sometimes we don't understand what a large claim this is that we tend to claim, not tend to. We do claim that God has a nature. What that means is, is that God has certain things that he would not do. We don't actually find his power to be his defining attribute. Other religions do, right? There are things that God can do, anything that he wills. It's very voluntaristic. God could command us not to love him, and then it would be good for us not to love him. God could command me to act irrationally, to break any of the tinker, do all these things, right? God could command me to do anything, and it would be good simply because God had willed it. That's a very common view of God, right? It's predicated on his power and what he can will. Christianity is different. God's nature becomes like a standard. He's not adhering to something greater than himself. He's actually adhering to who he is, his own identity, his own nature. But we know things about God. We know that he is loved. We know that he is also Logos. He is reason itself. And so to act then contrary to reason is going to be acting contrary to God. The claim that God is Logos is a very, very distinctly Christian claim, and one that we can't just let pass over us, but one that I think we really have to grasp and wrestle with. So acting contrary to the Logos will always deform our perception of what it means to be human. Always. And so we have to labor to be like God. And we don't. I don't think we talk about this enough. But to be like God, you need to Be rational. Yes. You also need to be loving. That's good. We talk about that. But to be like God, you should also be rational. You should also be making good, prudent decisions and choices. Right. You should be exercising your intellectual faculty. Well. And in that you are actually being like God, you are being Godlike. Right. And so we always want to be rational and to understand and act in accordance with our intellects to avoid a counterfeit anthropology. So the more we act according to reason, the more we act like God, we. More we grow in the image of God and who we are, the more we act contrary to reason, the more we kind of embrace this false irrationality, the more we erode and degrade the image of God in us. So, yeah. Any, any thoughts on that, Sean, or Catholic frequency?
- [30:03]
Sean
A few things I like there. One, to really double down on the point of, you know, how big of a deal this was of making the claim that God is the essence of goodness, God is the essence of love. I think this is another instance where it's interesting to contrast, I guess, the struggles or the limitations the Greeks had. Again, if we refer back to Plato, when I don't want to keep us stuck there, but Plato had a whole dialogue. Euthyphro's dilemma. Is something good because God loves it, or does God love something because it is good? Right. That Greek thought seemed to say that, okay, either what you were saying, that morality is just what the power of God or the good is, something that exists independent of the gods. And you see this play out in Greek mythology too, as this sort of tension in their literature that never seems to get solved. Because the gods in Greek myth, they're not the good, right? They're just more powerful. And oftentimes they are meddling with the affairs of mankind and making their lives more miserable. There's this weird tension that Greek culture celebrated glory, but at the same time there is this implicit warning of piety, of never go against the gods. Yet the gods aren't just so. It seems like within Greek culture there is this tension and this uncertainty of what is our relationship to the divine, what is our relationship to the gods, what is our relationship to fate? And I think this is why when you're reading Greek myth, it's very rarely that you see like a complete hero's journey or a complete happy ending. There's this sort of consistent tension or unease in Greek thought for the simple fact that they. They can't comprehend the gods as anything more than more powerful beings than them.
- [31:51]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I really, I really appreciate you Bringing up the Euthyphro Dilemma, I, I cannot tell you how eager I am to launch into our study into Plato. For those who aren't familiar with Ascend, we actually record very far ahead of time, mostly this. This actually, this space will actually come out as a podcast only here in a couple weeks. But most of our recordings actually don't come out for about eight to 10 months. So we actually were, we've actually, I think, are recorded 12 or 15 episodes on Plato, working through his dialogues, usually about two episodes per dialogue. I, I have learned so much and I'm. I am so excited to actually share those, you know, with everyone. But on the Euthyphro, which is a dialogue by Plato that Sean mentioned, it really has to do with the question of piety. And probably the most famous section of, of the Euthyphro is the Euthyphro Dilemma, which is, you know, basically whether or not the gods are adhering to a standard of what is good or is what is good willed by the gods, which one is it? And the problem is that both of them are problematic, right? So if the good is something that's willed by the gods, then it's voluntaristic. It's just whatever they will to do. And this is also terribly complicated in a pantheon because you've got multiple gods willing different things. Think of the Iliad, where the pantheon splits, right, with the Achaeans and the Trojans. So what does the pious man do right, in that? And so it becomes very voluntaristic and very chaotic and actually relativistic. You can actually apply that to our day and age, where just everyone becomes a God in and of themselves and everyone has their own truth, right? So therefore everything's not rooted into intellect, it's rooted in the will. And then if everything's rooted in the will, then everything just becomes about power because there's no way for reason to actually engage with one another. But on the other side of the dilemma, say, no, no, no, the gods aren't willing what's good. They're actually adhering to a subject of a standard of goodness. Well, that sounds better. So now we're not voluntaristic, it's not chaotic. But the problem is that where does that standard come from? And if the gods are adhering to something above them, are they really gods? Are they really divine? If they're obeying a law, you know, how does that actually resolved? And so this is what Plato presents in the Euthyphro Dilemma. I think Plato himself could have gone much further in that dialogue, but because he's, you know, predicating it upon his interlocutor, he doesn't push it much farther than that. But we see then, I think the answer to that in Christianity, which is what we've already alluded to, is simply that the answer to the Euthyphro dilemma is that it's a false dilemma. That it's not that the good is either what's willed by God or the good is some standard that God adheres to that's higher than him, but rather that God is good and he is the standard himself, as I mentioned earlier, right? We believe that God is true to who he is. He is the standard. But the standard is not some kind of voluntaristic, chaotic willing, but rather that he's good and he's true and he's the Logos and he's even beauty itself. And this is what I mean by he has a nature. And I can have faith in that and I can trust in that. I know who God will be today and forever because of who his nature is, right? I don't have to worry about, you know, amongst the Greeks or even monotheistic religions where God ends up being very capricious and I don't know what he will ask me to do one day or the other. So, no, these are very good thoughts. I appreciate you kind of tethering those in, but if we look at, you know, the first question was like, how does this, how does lying, right? How does it acting contrary, at least in irrationality, cause a false anthropology, right? Now let's look particularly at the intellect. So we've looked at anthropology as a whole, but now let's just kind of whittle it down and look at the intellect. What happens to the intellect? So the intellect seeks truth. So you need to look at the intellect as an appetite, right? It wants to discover truth. That's its object. It wants this, it seeks it. That's how your intellect wants to satiate is in the object of truth. But truth is the conformity of the mind to reality. So we want to work on our grammar. We know that the mind moves from grammar to logic to rhetoric. We have to know terms before we can apply them, before we can talk about them. So if we're going to have conversations like this, we need to work on our grammar. And so when we talk about the intellect, right, we're seeking this appetite that seeks truth. It's the highest faculty in man. And then if we say, okay, well, then what is, what is truth? Well, truth is the conformity of the mind to reality, that there is a harmony between the mind and the world around it. And so, as St. Paul notes in the beginning of his letter to Romans, the world's intelligible, and man is held culpable to the truth that he may observe therein. The intellect strives to align with the contours of creation. Man may use his Logos to discern the Logos of particular things, right? So we can use our reason to discern the rational structure and order of things around us. I can use my reason to understand what an oak tree is. And I know an oak tree is distinct from a raccoon, which is distinct from a duck, which is distinct from a chicken, right? I'm out here in rural Oklahoma. Why? Because all these things have a particular Logos. They act a certain way, they look a certain way. They have a nature, right? They have a certain structure of what it means to be, say, an oak tree or say, to even, you know, be a raccoon. And because of the all of the visible creatures of God, we're the only one that has an intellect, right? We can actually use our Logos to discern the Logos of things around us. So, as noted, the Greeks sought the Logos of, say, the polity, right? The polis, the political reality. They discerned its order, which allowed the mind to conform to what was real and true about communal life. So here we see why Christ refers to himself as the truth. And I think this is incredibly important. Christ refers to himself as the truth. Not a truth, not I came to bring truth, but rather the truth. And if he is the divine Logos, the rational order of all reality itself, then to know him is to conform the mind to the ordering principle of all creation. In him, we know the truth. I want to make sure we understand that if truth is the conformity of the mind to reality. Okay, well, how do I discover truth? Well, you know, if I study the oak tree, there's a Logos to the oak tree. There's an order to it. The more I come to understand it, the more I come to understand the truth of this particular oak tree. Now, the Logos of the oak tree doesn't tell me a whole lot about the Logos of justice or maybe the Logos of marriage, or any other truths that I might seek in this life. But what if you could seek the Logos of the truth of all things, the truth that actually underpins reality itself? And this is who Jesus Christ is in the second Person of the Blessed Trinity. He is the Logos of being itself. He is the Logos of All of creation. And so this is why Christ will say, if you come to know me, you're knowing the truth. Because in coming to know Jesus Christ, everything else in reality is illuminated. Everything else because you're seeing the Logos, the ordering principle of reality itself. And this is, this is a certain wonder, right. To the Hellenistic mind, we talk about Plato, right? This is one of those distinctions that the Logos was a person and not simply a principle, that the principle was someone to be known and loved in the person of Jesus Christ. The cosmos itself unfurls before us as an intelligible narrative. It's a narrative that we can come to understand in which nature, revelation, history, etc. Teach us about man and his place in reality. Any thoughts, Sean, or Catholic frequency?
- [39:38]
Shannon
I just for as you're talking, remember the famous question from Pontius Pilate, what is truth?
- [39:44]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Really?
- [39:44]
Shannon
The real question is, who is truth? You were saying to be like God, you have to be rational and loving. The cardinal virtues really help us with, with that rational part, right? Prudence or wisdom. You can't be wise or prudent if you're not, if your mind is not conformed to reality, if you don't know the situation you're in, if you aren't being honest with yourself, it's very hard to be prudent. Temperance. Right. We need to rationally know that if I lose my temper at work, I lose my job, possibly. So I think the cardinal virtues that the Church teaches really help us on that. That part about being rational.
- [40:23]
Sean
And I think to go off of that, because you're 100% right, Shannon.
- [40:30]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
The.
- [40:31]
Sean
Cardinal virtues, that's effectively the use of reason to know the world. And as we discussed Even yesterday, Romans 1:20 discusses how reason can lead you to certainty that God exists, that the truth exists, that you know the Logos can be known through creation. And I guess let me be clear, not you can come to know Jesus Christ through reason, but through reason you can be certain that the truth and God exists. But again, then there's this notion of, well, there's a limit of reason. This is, I think, where you see the Church Fathers talking about faith is that which perfects reason. Where Augustine is always talking about I believe so that I may understand, and this is why I believe Aquinas, who says that charity, you know, love, that the divine love that is the essence of God, the essence of Christ is the foundational charity that perfects the soul and informs you of all the other charities. And so if faith perfects reason and love is the foundation, this ties back to your relationship with Christ. And this is echoed in Scripture quite frequently. You have the notion of the Psalms consistently saying, blessed is the man who meditates on, you know, bird, you know my law, and keeps it in his heart day and night. This is the. The Blessed Virgin Mary is considered so holy because she holds the Word dear in her heart. So again, it seems then that what's going on here with the Logos, as Christianity understands it, is it's no longer an idea to be studied, but it's a person to be loved. Right. The Word made flesh in Christ and to hold him near and dear to your heart. And I don't want to get too far ahead of myself or off the ranch here, but I think this is part of what leads to the significance of the Eucharist as well. Right. We're ingesting Christ, we're ingesting the words and welcoming him into our being, into our hearts. So again, that above all else, the Logos is a person or a being to be loved.
- [42:28]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. So many. So many good thoughts there. Yeah. Just to reiterate a few of them. Yeah. Faith perfects the intellect, and we need to understand that. So if you think of the soul, like, let's just use the Platonic structure of the soul, so you have the intellect as your highest faculty. And then you have, you know, this noose sometimes Logos, then you have the thumotic, right? The spirited. So the intellect seeks truth, the spirited seeks a certain nobility, right. And excellence. And then you have your appetitive, which isn't necessarily bad. Right. The appetitive seeks pleasure, but there's plenty of great pleasures in life, right? Yes, there's good food and drink, but there's also good friendships. There's a spouse. There's all these good things that are pleasurable in life. Right. It's certainly not bad per se. And so then you can line up the cardinal virtues with these. Right? That prudence perfects the intellectual, the spirited. Right. That helps us with nobility. Well, that's typically difficult. And so courage perfects that part of the soul. And then the appetitive that seeks pleasure is perfected by temperance. Obviously, we have to kind of bridle that. Right. We're always in danger of overindulging. Think of those sins of incontinence and upper hell. And where's justice fit in in the Platonic side, right. This Augustinian understanding of the soul? Well, justice is the virtue that helps everything be well ordered. Right. There's a certain beauty that comes in with everything being proportionate. To one another. And so justice then is the adornment of the soul as a whole. It helps everything within the soul operate proportionally and in order, right? Is the hierarchy of the powers of the soul operating in order, right? Is your intellect guiding not your appetitive, right? Your pleasure seeking is not actually what's guiding your life. And then are you loving each thing properly? Right? Truth, nobility, pleasure, etc. So justice is like this adornment, this beauty that is laid upon the well ordered soul. And so one of the things too though to look at is then the theological virtues then can also in a lot of ways, you know, be mapped onto this along with other things too. Like even spiritual disciplines like alms giving and prayer and fasting can be mapped onto the soul as well. But particularly with faith, right? Faith perfects the intellect. And that's something I think we really have to understand because again, as Catholics, we're going to hold that faith and reason are in harmony with one another. Philosophy and theology are in harmony with one another. The same God who died upon the cross is the same God who gave you your reason. There shouldn't be antagonisms between these things because a lot of times we have to be careful because we, when we speak of faith, we often speak of. There's a. There's a way to collapse it where we almost speak of it, like hope, like I have faith in this thing, which is kind of like a blind belief, like I hope this thing is real. That's not really how the Church holds faith, right? Faith is a perfection of the intellect. And so, you know, for instance, you know, you might be able to observe from the world around us that there's a monotheistic God, but you're not going to deduce from nature that the God is a trinity or that God came incarnate as a Jewish carpenter. These things have to be revealed to us. And it takes faith as an ascent of the intellect to revealed truth to bring these things then into our mind. But then once I think what's really important, what's unique about Catholicism, is once they're revealed to us, even though they could not be discovered by reason alone, once they're revealed to us, we can rationalize about them, they are in harmony with our intellect, right? We can talk about the Trinity, we can talk about the Incarnation, and even though those two, you know, there's the central mysteries of the Catholic life do ultimately terminate in mystery because we can't exhaust them, we can think about them, we can philosophize about Them. And so I think there's, you know, several kind of unique things here about Catholicism. I also think too, just kind of going back to the cosmos being ordered. You know, one of the very first pictures we see of this is actually the Shield of Achilles in the Iliad. I think that's where you see Homer as his most philosophic, where we see the Shield of Achilles is a microcosm of the cosmos. And it presents. It presents a world that's ordered and intelligible and in balance. And it's one of the very first notions in the west, at least on the Greek side, that this world is a cosmos. It is ordered, it's intelligible, it's rational. It's something that we can simply discern. But what happens if a lie enters into this? Right. So these are all positives, which is good. We have to build up a kind of a beautiful picture to understand what is good and true and beautiful. But then what happens if a lie enters into this? Right. What does this actually do to our intellect? So, you know, as the beauty of man blossoms by understanding his relation to the Logos, so too does the depth of his depravity when man acts contrary to it. So such depravity invites deformity in both who man is and his relationship to the cosmos. The intellect, which again is an appetite for truth, suffers when it attempts to satiate on untruth. Right. You're literally feeding. It's almost like if you could feed yourself anti food, if you could feed yourself things that are unfood, right. It's not going to be satisfying for your hunger. It's going to actually. It's not simply going to be unsatisfying. It's going to cause certain deformities. It's going to warp the appetite itself.
- [47:48]
Sean
Right.
- [47:49]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I guess as a tortured analogy, you could see this in some of the foods that we eat today that I'm not really sure our food, Right. They're just kind of these chemical, you know, industrial sludge byproducts that we package and we eat and like, is that really food? And what does that do to your body? Right. Is that really a satiation of your hunger? Well, in a certain way, we can take that as an analogy of what happens if the intellect, as a hunger tries to satiate on something. That's not true. If this happens. Right. Man ceases to know who he is amongst the ordered whole of creation. Yet the satiation of the intellect upon unrealities is not simply a depreciation of truth. It also suffers from the effect of untruth. In other words, to decouple our logos from reality, to unhinge our mind from reality itself, is to accept the fiction that we, each of us is a God, each person is the truth, a logos unto his own. The intellect, deprived of the satisfaction of an observable reality, falls into an unreality malleable to man. What does that mean? It means that instead of looking at creation as something that's intelligible in order, something that we can observe and philosophize about and understand and strive to know, if we give all that up, then it's not that we see. We stop believing in a logos that's in reality, and we become the Logos. Reality becomes something that's malleable to our own wills. Something in this world is going to give meaning to the world around us. And we're either going to find that objectively in things that we observe, or we're going to kind of implode and hijack that and say, no, I'm the one that brings meaning to things around me, right? These are two very different and distinct movements. So the various strands of our ordered cosmos, right? So there's many things in this reality that help guide man, right? Think about nature, history, revelation, reason, even your own body, right? These are things that are in the cosmos that help you better understand the reality around you. These are perverted pursuant to the whims of each person. If we lose faith in the Logos, all of these externalities that are supposed to help guide man in this pilgrimage on earth, they basically become plastic. They become malleable and subject to the human will. Like Master Adamo, we praise our counterfeit realities, while in actuality we suffer the disease and rot of our own making. So think about that. Think about we. We praise ourselves as gods. We praise ourselves as being able to take reality and say, no, no, no, this is not something objective that I receive, but rather this is something malleable that I give meaning to. And all of these things, God, religion, nature, the church, history, even reason, and also our bodies, these are all things that are malleable to the will of man. I can shape these things as I will, and I can make them into whatever I want. And this is like looking at Master Adamo in the eighth circle, diseased and rotten as a counterfeit of his former self in thinking that this is good, thinking that this is actually something that we should praise. And both are. Pope Benedict 16th and Pope Francis have noticed this. They've both said that we live in the Age of sin against God the Creator. It's something unique to our modern age. We live in the age of sin against God our Creator, because we fancy ourselves gods. We live in the age of the anti logos, which is, I think, is a good way to express this. Right? We live in the way, the age of the anti logos. To each person a reality to shape as his own with the promise of a heaven and the certainty of hell. Let me say that again. To each person a reality to shape his own, with a promise of a heaven and the certainty of hell. What does that mean? It means that when we try to become God, we will create hell for ourselves. I don't, and I don't simply mean in that statement that these people would like merit hell. I mean that they turn their lives here on earth into hell trying to play that role of the divine right, that they're going to bring meaning to man. Because the thing is, is that reality is not actually malleable to the human will. And so you get these frictions, these antagonisms when you're fighting against reality itself, when you try and warp reason into something that's not there, when we warp our bodies into something that's not natural, when we warp history into trying to teach something that it's not. When we try and say we've conquered nature, we don't really conquer these things. It's an artificiality, it's a counterfeit, like Master Adamo. And they grade against us, right? There's an antagonism of friction when you fight against reality itself. And it. It creates a very pitiable hell in people who attempt to do this. Right? If truth is the conformity of the mind to reality, then we must reject counterfeit realities for our good, but also for our neighbor. We have to invite people to kind of step out of these counterfeit realities and say, no, the world is intelligible, it's ordered, and it has something that we can know about it. And the truth that you see in these things has to be offered to the intellect. And the order of reality and the order of your intellect need to align. And, you know, a lot of times on X, I'll praise a book called the Intellectual Life. And this is really a huge part of that. It's a little small red book written by a French Dominican in the early 1900s. Probably one of the best books you can read if you really want to take your intellectual life seriously. Like, I just want to study well, I want to read well, I want to live my life well. Like, how do I do this. And it's not just for academics. He writes for everybody. But one of the things he's very clear in there is that when we study, we're trying to align our minds to the order of things, that the order of things and the order of our mind need to align with one another, that truth is the conformity of the mind to reality. And we need to try and do this. But that's a lot of work, and it's a work today that a lot of people are told that they don't have to do, that they bring meaning to reality. And again, this creates a certain counterfeit in artificiality to our modern world. So. Sean, Catholic frequency anything?
- [54:44]
Sean
Yeah, there's so much I'd love to respond to there. It's. It really is that the point that seems to be driven home here is that the Logos is, again, whether you accept it or not, basically predetermines your entire reality as far as how you understand existence. And to the extent that he will flourish and discern your true sense of self, or to the extent that you will act irrational and have a miserable life and be promised hell. I'm particularly thinking about this encyclical from Pope Pius X. I think it was called the Errors Against Modernism. And he called Modernism the synthesis of all heresies. And he said that the. The foundational aspect of Modernism that leads to this now. Now this age of antilagos was agnosticism, basically the divorce of faith and reason and stating that reason cannot know objective truth. Which is another way to say that. Well, the mistake of modern thought is saying man cannot know the Logos, at least not as something that is external to him. Right. There is no, you know, external, independent truth in reality that can be known. Therefore the, the reality of that then is that truth becomes something that is just confined to ourselves. As you were already pointing out, we have my truth, your truth. But with the, the re. The. The age of the Antilagos, there's no longer an ability to have a shared united truth in which we can have a shared sense of culture, a central animating principle that can build civilizations. Instead, we tend to be, you know, replacing the Logos with things like the social construct. Right. That this is effectively, and I don't want to get too far ahead of us here, but this is why instead of having a logos centric understanding of reality and what the truth sets you free and love and charity gets you in harmony with the truth. And therefore reality is about perfecting your relationship to your Creator and your relationship to your neighbor. If there's an age of antilogos where you can't know any truth outside of yourself, then you're just trapped inside of yourself, right? You're. You're anxious. I had tweeted this yesterday, but there's a very interesting fact. If you look at paintings of medieval thinkers and theologians and philosophers like Aquinas and Augustine, and contrast it with modern thinkers who live in the age of antilogos, you'll see a difference in the tweet. If anyone looks it up, you'll notice in Augustine, who's portrayed, like all the medievals, he's looking upward, he has this light shining on him, and there's a softness to him, there's an east to him. And then I contrasted that with Kant. And Kant is someone who's looking down and looking away from the light and frowning and thinking very hard. And Kant's one of the fathers of modernism and denying that reason can know truth. So it's. It's funny, it ties to the idea of you can judge a tree by its fruits. That even someone like Kant who was religious, if you deny the. The claim that reason can know truth, it leaves you trapped in your head and effectively divorced from reality and effectively stuck with yourself. And, you know, hence the anti logos, the great divorce from your creator and then from any true connection with your neighbor.
- [58:14]
Shannon
I'm reminded of a few years ago, there was a official that required up for an appointment for Senate confirmation. And they were asked a question, what is a woman? And they refused to answer. And it's just exemplary of this lack of courage, of fortitude, to say what we all know the definition of a woman is in our society that is embraced untruths, that they would rather pursue freedom over what's true.
- [58:48]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, that's a great example, and it's actually a wonderful segue because, you know, where. Where are we in this talk? Well, we've talked about, or we've warned, right, that lying divorces us from reality and that. That we look at Dante's Inferno, that there seems to be something particularly evil about fraud, that there's something particularly evil about man corrupting that which is best in him, that which reflects God himself. Right. The imago dei, that we have an intellect. So I really like what you say there about speech because we've looked at then how this is corrupted in our anthropology overall, how this is corrupted then in the intellect, this appetite that seeks truth. And now we need to look at how's this corrupted in our speech, right? How's this actually Corrupted in our very speech. Before I get to that, though, I do, I really just want to reiterate an excellent point that Sean made, which is that, yes, this has profound, profound implications for politics, for our communal life and the Catholic life and the pursuit of truth can never be atomized. Everything around us in the modern age tries to atomize us, to break us apart, to live individualistically, to tell us that we can simply be ourselves. But even Aristotle, right, Observing as this virtuous pagan said, listen, if you, if you're living outside a society, you're either a God or a beast, because it is natural to man to be political is natural to man to be social and to live, to get live together. But if we can't share truth, if we can't share in a Logos, if we can't use our Logos to actually communicate with one another, to find truth together, then what exactly is a community at this point, right? Are we just kind of an economic zone that has access to Amazon and we try and maximize our happiness? What does it actually mean to be a community? And so, no, I think that's. We'll get to that in a little bit, to a certain degree, but I think it's an excellent parallel to a lot of the conversations today that these can't be reduced to an individualistic concern. But rather than how do I live communally in the pursuit of truth with my neighbor and how do I help my neighbor maybe draw out of these artificialities to really have an intellect that seeks truth so that the anthropology, the human right, the humanity in us, can really start to reflect that divine, the image of God. But let's look at speech, right? Speech, and particularly the sterility of our speech when lying occurs. So we have this pattern going on where first we look at what's good and then we kind of look at what is bad and what's the corruptive agent of it. So we think we know what speech is, but let's make sure, again, we work on our grammar. The mind moves from grammar to logic to rhetoric. So let's make sure our grammar is good here. So the purpose of speech, right? It's telos, right? What is the purpose of this thing and why do we ask that? Just as a side note, right? Because one thing I really want to help. I mean, I'm a student of Augustine. I'm a student of Plato, I'm a student of St. Thomas Aquinas. I'm not the teacher. I'm certainly a student of Dante. I'm trying to pass on Truths. I certainly don't want to create truths. These aren't Deacon Garlic's cool ideas that he came up with last week. I mean, God forbid I ever do that. And so when we look at these things, why, one of the things that's on my heart is to help give principles. So not just like talks, but like principles, right? So, for instance, what's a principle? Well, we've looked at the. The corruption of the best is the worst, that the mind moves from grammar to logic to rhetoric. Why do I reiterate these things? Because if you pick up these principles, then you can start thinking through things yourself. You can really start thinking through a lot of these things, right? I don't want to have, you know, some type of monopoly on these things. I think helping each other learn how to think is incredibly important. And so one of these kind of principles that we have is why are we constantly asking the purpose of the thing? Oh, the purpose of the intellect is to seek truth. The purpose of speech. What's the purpose of speech? Why do we do this? It's because when you look at a thing's teleology, right? That's a fancy word for telos is its purpose or end. Ology actually comes from logos, right? That suffix actually comes from logos, right? The order of this thing, the rationality of this thing. So teleology then is right? It's the order of the end, the order of purpose, or really the study of things. Purpose. So when we look at the teleology of a thing, when we ask, like, what's the telos of speech? The reason we do that is because the purpose, if we understand the purpose of a thing, we understand almost everything about it. What do I mean by that? Well, in the beginning of Plato's Republic, he makes this same point, right? He uses his kind of proverbial example as a knife. So if I know that the purpose of a knife is to cut, if I know that's its purpose, then immediately I know many other things about it. For instance, I would know that a good knife would be sharp and a bad knife would be dull. And why would I know that? Because I would know that it would have to be sharp to fulfill its purpose. And if it couldn't fulfill its purpose, if it was dull. So it tells me both immediately, if I understand the purpose of a thing, then I actually know what is what a good and bad thing is. I also then come to understand what is good or bad for that thing. So I would understand that, like the whetstone would be good for the knife, because it sharpens the knife to fulfill its purpose. I would know that, you know, grinding the knife on the concrete outside is bad because it makes it dull and it can't fulfill its purpose. It's a simple example, but we often type, we oftentimes think, talk about things that are good or bad, but we actually don't know what the purpose is. And Socrates, Plato, Socrates is excellent at pointing this out to people that oftentimes we have whole conversations about things. But if someone said, hey, what's the purpose of that? We don't know. If we don't know its purpose, how do we know if it's good or bad or not? If I didn't know the purpose of a knife, how would I know that a good knife is sharp? So the same thing is that when we say, what is the purpose of speech? The reason we ask that is because I want to know what good speech is and bad speeches is. I want to know what is good for my speech and what is bad for my speech. And to understand all of these, I have to understand the teleology, the telos. So this is a fundamental philosophical and theological question that we have to ask ourselves if we're going to be students, right, of the truth, if we're going to try and conform our minds to reality. So the purpose of speech is to convey truth. And I think that seems really simple, but I want to lean into that because I would argue that a lot of times we would hold speech as neutral. That speech is just like a function. It's just, you know, we give some kind of scientific definition, right? Well, it's just that I make sounds and things come out, and these are symbols and other people understand them. We give this kind of like, sterile, flat, scientific understanding. And the problem is there, right, is that in that scenario we make room for lying as a legitimate use of speech. Speech is not neutral, but rather speech has a certain teleology to it. And so the purpose of speech is truth. And so our minds conform to reality, and we can then share that reality with others, right? So if truth is a conformity of the mind to reality, how then do I share the reality that has conformed with my mind with other people? Well, I speak, right? I have a purpose in my speech is to help others find the truth that I have already found, right? To share truth with others. This is the actual purpose of speech. So we gather together and discuss the observations of our existence. And as. As iron sharpens iron, like we're seeing in this conversation that we're having tonight. We use speech to pursue truth alongside our neighbors. So speech bears a certain natural fecundity that allows the intellect to root deeper into the thickness of reality. However, like contraception to its act, lying distorts the act of speech by impeding its very purpose. So the purpose of speech is to lie. Or, excuse me, if the purpose of speech is to tell the truth, then lying is contraceptive speech. It is a speech that is actually sterile, that is impeded from its actual act. And a lie then divorces speech from truth and the receptive mind from reality. The sterility of lying then leads to a superficial embrace of what is real, particularly in the receptive mind. So think about this. When you lie to someone, they think you're telling them the truth, and they think their mind is conforming to reality. And that's the natural fecundity that's supposed to happen with. With speech, is that you share that truth. That truth roots in their mind and allows them to have a better understanding of reality. When you lie, you're literally in. You're not only are you impeding the very purpose of speech, but then what you offer to your neighbor is something that is actually artificial and sterile, and it helps their mind to conform to something that's not real. They think it's real, but it's not. And what this does is, and why it's so pernicious is that it divorces the receptive mind from reality and they start operating with inside a fiction, a malicious fiction. Keep in mind that all lying, right? It's the. It's a very pit of hell, for Dante is the worst of the malicious acts and evil willing towards our neighbor. Our age, however, unfortunately has become very well versed in this contraceptive speech, right? Many words such as man, woman, love, life, marriage, family, freedom, even science, now convey counterfeit realities, right? So it's not. Not only so, see what happens. Not only can you participate in a lie like I tell a lie, but also you can gut entire terms of their actual meaning, right? So a word conveys a certain truth, right? We connect it to a certain reality, and when we say that word, it's supposed to convey that reality, and that helps the other mind conform to that reality, which is truth. So notice then how pernicious it is, how evil it is when the words that we think we know get gutted of their meaning and then kind of pumped back up with these certain artificialities. Think about how evil that is to the mind and how lost the mind then can become. And Kind of just, kind of collapse amongst this chaotic artificiality that's not real. But we do this all the time. As the intellect falls into unreality by a lie, so too do entire societies fall into unreality. When contraceptive speech becomes culturally normative, entire cultures, entire societies will fall into artificialities, entire cultures will fall into an unreality will be divorced from truth if they use a language that is gutted from its purpose of conveying truth. Here again, the Logos is instructive. Aristotle will speak of the Logos in his rhetoric as an appeal to the intellect, a reasonable argument, a communication of reality to the other. So two, the translation of Logos into word, which is typically how it's translated in the Bible. The translation of Logos into word is particularly illuminative of the communicative aspect that logos has, a communication aspect that we're supposed to share this Logos with each other, right? So it's through the word spoken by the Father that reality was made and held in being. So again, remember, it's by a word, the Logos, that the entire structure of reality is actually formed, right? This is why Christ again is the truth. So the divine speech communicated reality to existence, and our speech communicates the truth of this intelligible reality to others. And so we have to understand, then here is that lying is directly contrary to the Logos, the second person of the Blessed Trinity. It is an act of anti Logos. It is actually an antichrist act to lie. And Dante the poet then places ladderers, soothsayers, alchemists, counterfeiters, and others like Master Adamo lower within the pit of hell than, say, murderers. Because to lie, to be fraudulent, is an act of malice, directly contrary to both human nature and the reality of God. Contraceptive speech leads to contraceptive intellects. And this is why it's so dangerous. Because that contraceptive speech, that's a lie, that's supposed to convey truth, but actually conveys some type of just desiccated reality, then creates intellects that themselves are contracepted. And what I mean by that is that their very purpose of satiating in truth is impeded and they feed upon false realities. And that doesn't. That doesn't just cause them to not know the truth. It causes them to implode inside a lie. And we see people like this, where they talk and you're like, what. What ideology have you swallowed? I mean, what. What thing have you just lie that you have saturated in? And they're angry and they're imploded. Why? Because the mind has basically just been Saturating in false realities, in these unrealities. And the mind can't do that. And it not affect the soul as a whole, it affects the entire human person. Just like Master Adamo. It creates a counterfeit anthropology of a human that though they exist in the world, their mind is divorced from it. And so the mind that satiates an untruth and not the truth, God, the unreality separating the soul from God, is that the sordid heart of why Satan is the father of lies. And this is what I think Sean mentioned earlier. To lie is to mimic the great deceiver, whereas to tell the truth is to mimic the word, the logos, truth itself. The maliciousness of a lie will deform who we are and how we see ourselves in reality, Whereas the charity of proclaiming the truth will set people free from the unrealities that bind them. And this is the. This is the fork in the road that's set between us. Right before us is that on one side there is acting according to our human nature, which is to tell the truth, which is to convey that which is true, to help our neighbor's mind conform to reality. And in this, we act godlike. We act like God. We're being rational in observing the world that he made. He is the author of both our intellect and of its telos, truth and of the world around us. Or when we lie, we mimic Satan, the great deceiver, the one that can simply. He can't create something, so he simply apes God and he creates these false realities, these artificialities that then cause the intellectual to implode, to rot, to be unable to find the nutrition that it really needs to have with inside of truth. So maybe I'll stop there and see if Shannon or Sean have anything to comment.
- [74:54]
Shannon
I really like how you frame this entire discussion, even the title of the space, Lying as Contraceptive Speech. I couldn't help but think as contraception. In the physical world, couples that use contraception, they're not fully giving themselves to each other. And what have we seen in society? The family, of course, is the foundation of civilization. But as couples have embraced contraception, we've seen a great rise in the divorce rate because they're not fully giving themselves to each other. And I just can't help but think the same thing is true with contraceptive speech. We're not. When we're lying to somebody, we're not giving them the truth. We're not really giving them ourselves intellectually. And just look at the bonds in our society, how divided we are the propaganda in the media that brainwashes the entire society. Because I think we're. Just by our design. I think you alluded to this, Deacon. When we hear something, we sort of expect it to be true, right? That's the purpose of speech, to convey the truth. So we kind of are inclined to believe the first thing we hear, right? That famous quote from Mark Twain alike and travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. That's why when people have a disagreement, I think sometimes they want to be the first one to go tell other people about it because those people are going to be inclined to actually believe the first thing they heard. So I'd love to hear if Sean had any thoughts on any of that.
- [76:34]
Sean
It's funny, Shannon, I feel like you and I are on the same exact wavelength tonight. Every time you, you bring up a point, I'm like, yes, that's exactly where my mind was going too. And I just want to double down on this. I too, I love this term contraceptive speech. I think it's really hitting on something important here. A conscious option, right? This is like sterile, therefore anti life. And in a sense anti logos. Then it points to the idea then that, well, really this notion of, I think the nature of evil, right, that evil is a deprivation of the good and that lying being, anti logos, is leading towards non being. Hence you get again the notion that the deadly sins, right, that sin leads you towards nine being and fully consummated is death. I think one of my favorite books of all time is Tolstoy's Anna Karenina because it really highlights this point vividly. There's a couple characters who. I won't give spoilers in this conversation, but there's certain characters who commit egregious acts of immorality. And to the extent that these characters are saved or have a miserable downfall is to the extent of whether or not they can repent that those who hold their lies to their heart unto the very end lead to something very much akin to death or a non existence or non being. So lying sin itself, anything that is anti logos is evil. Evil being, a deprivation of the good that is pointing you towards death or at the very least, non being. And this can be true psychologically. I think this is effectively why Plato always discusses the notion that the. The tyrant is the most miserable and most imprisoned of men in society. Because the tyrant, though he wields all the power in the world because he is wicked, he must live in a constant state of paranoia. And so, yes, he's living in a palace, but he's effectively enslaved into that palace. You know, he. He's paranoid. He can't connect with people. He's trapped inside of his own head. And the last point, I. I really would love to tie this back to, again, the notion of speech and rhetoric, and that rhetoric must be tied to the truth. Something else that Plato has another entire dialogue on, right, the gorgeous Gorgias. You can correct me, and I can't pronounce these things right, but it's an entire dialogue about Plato having this discussion with a. A student who says that rhetoric is an art, and it's an art of power and manipulation, that it's good because it's. It can be used to manipulate and deceive. And if you're good in rhetoric, you can get what you want and get ahead in life and that power. And Socrates dismantles this by saying, well, actually, no, rhetoric that is divorced from truth, that is divorced from the logos, is bad because it corrupts your soul, it hurts you, it divorces you from reality, and you don't even realize it. And this leads him to his effectively remarkable conclusion that actually when you realize that the truth exists and the logos exists, then punishments for injustice are good for your soul. Because though it hurts, it's. When you punish the wicked, this is curative. It helps lead your mind back to the logos, back in harmony with reason. So I. I think I've rambled around that a little bit, but I just really wanted to hit back the point that logos gives life and vitality to speech itself into our understanding of reality. And the minute that you divorce logos from speech, or just like everything else we've been discussing, it's really the collapse of reality as we know it. Everything devolves back to a. A will to power. And I think this is why, when you see, quote, unquote, debates nowadays, maybe in politics with people who you can tell don't really have a relationship with the Lagos, it's not so much two souls coming together united in truth and believing the truth will set you free. It's far more screaming at each other because, you know, it's. If you don't believe in the truth, there's just my power and your power, my truth and your truth. Therefore, you attacking me is not just you attacking my ideas, you're attacking my. My being. Right? You're trying to eliminate me or destroy me. We've heard this sort of rhetoric before. So with that, I land the plane.
- [81:06]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Golly, that's so tempting. The gorgias is. Is one of my favorite dialogues, as I mentioned earlier. Send. We record usually well ahead of time. And so I actually just recorded three episodes on the Gorgias. And it's a dialogue that when I first read, I kind of liked, but then as I kind of talked with others, again, that iron, sharpening iron, it's just become almost one of my favorite dialogues. In a lot of ways, it's a republic without all the weird politics. It kind of covers the same subjects, but, like, one of the things of that is there's a myth at the end of the Gorgias, and it's. The image of it has not left my mind since I read it, in which basically the unjust man beats his soul like a tyrant beats a slave. And so at the end of our life, we present our soul to the judge in the. In the Gorgias. It's. It's, you know, these kind of three pagan judges, but we present our soul, naked, as it were, without a body, to the judges. And what they see then is our soul bruised and battered. Because I was unjust. Every time I commit an unjust act, right, I. I beat my own soul. And this is what he's arguing here, like you mentioned, is against Calicles's inclination to be a tyrant, that I should just go out and seek pleasure with everything. And he's trying to show Calicles, like, why. Why is this a bad life, right? Or at least he's. Callicles is his interlocutor, because it's a weird dialogue because there's actually a crowd of people listening to them, right? So Callicles might be very recalcitrant to this, but he might be trying to save the souls of the young men, you know, who are listening. But it is really. It's an important dialogue here, and it dovetails in. Well, because on its surface, it's about rhetoric. It terminates then in what is the good life. But it begins about questioning rhetoric. And what we see here is something similar to what I think Dante teaches us about speech. And this theme of contraceptive speech is that if rhetoric, right, if our speech is divorced from the truth, in the Gorgias, we would say divorce from philosophy be. Then it becomes tyrannical, and all it wants to do is satiate the lower passions, right? That's. That's all it is. It's. The speech is just simply there as a means by which I can manipulate and lie and do whatever I need to do to get more to satiate those. Lower those passions and appetites, right? The tyrant would be the best of all lives because he gets everything that he wants. He has the power. He can do all these things. And so I use my rhetoric to secure some type of tyrannical place in life. But then there's also philosophy, this philosophy that tries to understand the nature of things and its causes by its own etymology, right? It loves wisdom. But what's interesting in the, in the Gorgias, and maybe what we're trying to experience tonight is that philosophy, right? You could say, oh, so rhetoric needs philosophy, right, Philosophy. Rhetoric needs philosophy to guide it, to orient our speech not towards what's tyrannical, but towards what's true, good and beautiful. Okay, good. I think we can agree to that. However, I think what a lot of people miss is, is that philosophy also needs rhetoric because philosophy without rhetoric is impotent. No one's going to listen. And so, like to give an example of this, like, you know, I would hope, right? Like, you know, we have several projects on here, right? We have Ascend, which is my project. We have Sean, who has his project. We have Catholic, you know, Shannon, with Catholic frequency, that has his project. Hopefully, what you're seeing there is that what we're trying to do is take, I guess, philosophy, broadly speaking, and we're trying to use a rhetoric to express what's true, good and beautiful to people in a way that is intriguing to them, that says, hey, there's a life worth living, hopefully. Like, when you listen to us, you say, hey, you know what? That guy, he actually has an eros, a love, an erotic longing to understand what is true. And when we have that longing, that proper erotic love towards wisdom, it's diffusive. We want to share it with other people. We want to invite people into that, if that makes sense, right? However, if philosophy, though, can be impotent, if it's divorced from rhetoric, and this is where you get like, you know, you go to like, a university class and they teach you Plato and, or Scripture, and it's the driest, most terrible class you've ever listened to. Like, no one's soul is going to be inspired by, by this. And so I think the Gorgias, golly, I'd like to talk about that more, but I think the Gorgias is. Dovetails really well in here because what is the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric? It's not simply that rhetoric, right, our speech has to be obedient to philosophy, that our speech has to find its teleology in what's true, good and beautiful, or it falls into a Certain tyranny. But also that philosophy needs rhetoric. It has to be able to communicate to particularly young hearts and minds that this is a life worth living, that don't seek the path of the tyrant, seek the path of the philosopher. And again, as Sean has mentioned, and I would also lean into. You can see very quickly then, why so many of Plato's conversations tilled the soil for the coming of Christ, right? Why there were so many similarities between the two. Again, not a perfect match. Obviously, there are things that, that we would disagree with in Plato, but for a pagan who's just simply trying to extract truth from observing reality without the benefit of grace and divine revelation, there are some really tremendous insights that he has. You know, I want to. I want to push a little deeper into this, into. We kind of. We've looked at a contraceptive anthropology, we've looked at a contraceptive intellect, and now we've looked at contraceptive speech, right. In this. These kind of how this disorder gets kneaded into humanity. But I also think, though, we have to look at how. How has this become normative in our culture? And I want to kind of push into this and see what we can make of this. Right. I guess to be somewhat provocative, right. Who, who can we blame for the unrealities of our age? How is lying particularly, like, through the restructuring of grammar to not actually convey things that are true? Like, how has that. How has this actually become ubiquitous in our culture? And so one of the things here, again, I want to do a little bit of grammatical work, is I want to talk about liberalism, but I need to make sure we understand what we're talking about. Because a lot of times as Americans, when we talk about liberalism or liberals, we think of, like, left liberals. We think of progressives or woke. Right? We think of, like, Rush Limbaugh, like, quote, unquote, the liberals, right, The Democrats. And while that's true, it's not complete. Liberalism would also include our Republicans. It would also include most of everyone who considers themselves conservative. Inside of America, basically, the entire American political system is a liberal system, right? Liberalism is ubiquitous. Ubiquitous for us, it is simply what we find normative in politics. And so why I want to parse this out a little bit is because when we talk about liberalism, sometimes we talk about left liberals. And that could be like, you're more progressive, you're Democrats, et cetera. But then we also talk about right liberals. And sometimes it's a phrase we're not used to hearing, sometimes. But that's like our Republicans, most conservatives, et Cetera. And the reason that they're both liberals is because they both pull from the same presuppositions about who man is, the purpose of the government, the purpose of the state, and how we're supposed to live together. And, yeah, there might be distinctions between the two. You know, one side thinks this about taxes, the other side thinks this about guns. You know, we kind of break it into some topics. But the end of the day, there are fundamental presuppositions that are shared by both parties. And the reason this is lost in America is because we really don't have parties that are not liberal, as opposed into Europe and other places where there's kind of a more diverse political thought and different political parties are allowed to take root. So sometimes we don't have a clarification by contrast. So we talk about liberalism, you know, broadly speaking. You know, you could parse it out by a lot of its traits. It focuses on freedom over the good, right? So we don't talk about, like, the good. We don't talk about a common good in our culture. If you think about political debates, we don't talk about that. Everyone seeks their own good. It's a particular good. We talk about freedom, right? Freedom is our highest good. It's a opportunity for the individual to choose. And so when we talk about liberalism, one way to look at it is if you go back to say, like John Locke, what you look at it is, is that man is, we would say, you know, naturally a political animal, that he operates under natural law, that there is a common good, right? You kind of think of like this, like, thick Catholic political teaching coming up through, you know, Plato and Augustine, but Also Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. What liberalism does is it reduces that. It has a reductionist anthropology in which man, even in the most conservative sense, right? So this is John Locke. This is like under our founding fathers. This is supposed to be the classical liberalism, the conservatives. Even for Locke, he reduces man to a very atomized state, right? It's not really clear that he's even political by nature. He lives in isolation, and he only comes into community because he has to protect his own property, and he only comes into community. And so him coming into community creates a social contract, if you will. And so politics. The reason this is so pervasive, but also pernicious is that what ends up happening to politics is that our politics are not a reflection of nature. They're not a reflection of the reality, but rather, we believe that politics is a social contract. It's a. It's not a taking nature. And how can we live together according to say natural law or natural principles, but rather we have these collection of wills, right? These individual kind of atomized peoples. What kind of like compromises can we have and come together to form a certain society? And so it reduces man's political capacity and his nature greatly and kind of reduces him to simply an agent of freedom that has to give up certain freedoms to live together. And so this is really at the heart of liberalism. And then what ends up happening over time is that more and more things about who we are as people simply fall away, if that makes sense. So Locke will say, well, I'm not sure if we're political by nature, but then Rousseau will say, well, I'm not sure we're rational by nature. And then by the time you get the Kant, it doesn't matter what we are by nature because everything is going to be determined according to the social contract. And so you think about this today like what would be like a practical, mundane example. A practical, mundane example would be that we, that we've created a social contract that doesn't have any bearing in reality, would be say when the Supreme Court rules on something, right, it says like, oh, this is marriage, or this is abortion, or et cetera. You'll see people then say like, okay, well that's it, like the ethics are resolved, like this is a moral act. And you're like, wait, wait, wait, what, what do you mean it's, it's now moral, right? What about nature? What about this? No, our, our social contract, our structure, our political system, right? We've passed a law on this or we've had a law interpreted and it now says that X is moral, therefore we can do X. Now there's nothing outside the social contract that can inform how we live, if that makes sense, right? So if I am trying to dialogue with someone else in culture, you see this very clearly. Like when we had, our culture had like the big marriage debates about, you know, whether, you know, gay marriage, same sex marriage was actually marriage or not. You saw this because like people would appeal to scripture, they would appeal to nature, they would appeal these things. And very easily those things all got wiped away because it's like, well, what does that matter? All that matters is whether or not this right is in the Constitution. And so what you see then under liberalism is that it tends to flatten the entire political spectrum into a social contract. And then the realities of morality, politics, how we live together, are malleable terms of the contract. Just like Two attorneys would get together and hammer out the terms of a contract. So can we as a people come together and kind of hammer these things out? And whatever we decide is moral or good or just is, are those things. That's what happens. That's where these realities come from. And so I mentioned that, because when you say liberalism, it can be confusing. But I think that to kind of press into this, the thesis here is that this contraceptive speech, like, how did this become normative in our culture? All right, There has to be some kind of vehicle for it. And I really think the vehicle here is liberalism. And my point here, actually, I'm going to be harder on the conservatives than the. Than the progressives, because I think in a lot of ways we immediately accuse the, quote, quote left liberals, the progressive right, the woke, we accuse them of smuggling in this contraceptive speech. And that's true to a certain degree. Right left liberals are probably the most apparent practitioners of this language. You know, being driven deeper into unrealities. You know, we must not only tolerate certain contraceptive speech, but we're asked now to agree to it and praise it. Right? We're actually asked to praise counterfeit anthropologies that it signifies. In other words, what ends up happening to us is we're actually asked to lie. We're asked to look at Master Adamo and say, you know what? All is well, you look good, buddy, like, things are great. The question, however, is whether contraceptive speech is limited to left liberalism. And though the speech of progressives is often criticized by right liberals or classical liberals, it's arguably the conservative side of liberalism that habituated us to lying, that habituated us to this error. And what do I mean by that? I was like, well, before left liberals had contracepted the term woman, which has already been used as an example, right Liberals had done the same to terms like man, marriage, freedom, nature, rights, law, and common good. And we have. I mean, this is something that we need to push into ourselves on and say, when I say freedom, when I say common good, even when I say marriage or man, do I mean it the same way that my ancestors did? Do I mean it the same way that like St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas did, or do I mean, a definition that came up sometime in the 1700s or the 1800s or five years ago? Where does the definition of my word actually come from? And what a lot of people don't realize is, is that our conservative liberalism, our right liberals, our classical liberalism, you look at like someone like Locke, they took the words of the ancients and gutted them and changed them into something completely else. So let me give a practical example of this to show you what I mean. And you can see how contraceptive speech gets smuggled in in the most pernicious ways to change our logic. Because remember, your mind moves from grammar to logic to rhetoric. What that means is, is that if they can change your grammar, they'll naturally start to change your logic. And that's what happens. The definition of words are changed first and then the logic changes later. So, like, what's a good example of this in a more classical, liberal sense? I think a perfect example is freedom. Freedom went from the ancient notion of self discipline in order to choose the good. So when you are free, what does that mean for Cicero? What does that mean for St. Thomas Aquinas? Freedom was the capacity to choose the good. I was the most free when I was educated, when my mind had conformed to reality and when I had disciplined my passions. My soul is well ordered. I'm engaging in reality. I'm loving Jesus Christ. I'm living a virtuous life, a life of arete. That means I'm most free. That is not what we mean by freedom today. That is not at all what we mean. What do we mean? The liberal notion is a lack of restraint in order to satiate desire. Right. We think of freedom like the more free I am means that I have more choices. So the more choices I have, the more free I am, whether they're good or bad. They're my choices to make and they're not yours to determine whether it's good or bad. So we look at freedom today, as moderns, as like a plurality of options. And we get very angry if someone takes some of our options away. Right. I'm being oppressed. I don't have a certain freedom anymore. But this freedom, our modern notion of freedom would be completely alien to our forefathers, both our pagan forefathers, our virtuous pagans, and our saints. But what ends up happening is that you have to. You have to really start to look and see how this contraceptive speech is not simply like a lie I tell someone. But the most transformative lies in culture are the changing of our grammar. And then think of everything we just talked about, about how our anthropology changes. Our. Our intellects are imploded, our speech becomes sterile. All of these things happen when we start to satiate on lies, but we don't know their lies. We don't know that our grammar has been gutted and this causes so many problems in our society. Right, so like classical liberalism, you know, the quote unquote conservative side, right, they didn't create their own political jargon to express ideas. Rather it created counterfeits of ancient terms that lacked the same potent engagement with reality. The distinction in contraceptive speech between left and right liberalism is one of degree and not kind. So maybe I'll open up there for Sean and Shannon for any kind of like, comment or question.
- [98:50]
Shannon
That'S so agree with everything you said. One of the terms that has been so perverted in our culture is the word love, right? St. Thomas Aquinas definition, to love is to will the good of another. That's not the definition of the modern culture. You know, the modern culture, love is romantic feelings or physical pleasures and that sort of thing. Being able to pursue your pleasure without any kind of moral boundaries. I was also sort of reminded of that the old phrase, he who controls language, controls the narrative or controls reality. And we see that with, With. With, you know, with media like propaganda comes from the word propagate to propagate their ideas, to propagate these false definitions of words. Sean.
- [99:48]
Sean
So it's funny that when you presuppose instead that the state is founded on a social construct, this presupposes that you. You seem to be hinting at Deacon Garlic that it's a. Your teleology becomes a lack of restraint, you know, you want freedom is redefined as my ability to do what I want whenever I want. Therefore, autonomy is that which we are chasing, this notion of progress to be autonomous beings. What's interesting then is this freedom is defined as a lack of restraint, and therefore restraint is bad. And therefore anything that impedes on our ability to do what we want whenever we want is bad. This is effectively what CS Lewis tends to hint at in his book the Abolition of Man, that if you destroy the logos, the dao, as he defines it in that book, then effectively you are instead going to move in this, this nature of progress, of total freedom and autonomy, to do whatever you want. And what this presupposes then is as science and medicine, you know, as man continues to master nature so that they can have more autonomy to do what they want. The final conquest, the mastery over nature, will be the mastery over human nature. And I don't know if this is too far, but too far off the ranch, but I'll just go there and you can reel me back in if it is. But this tends to point towards what we see with transhumanism, right? Using technology not just to, you know, help human nature, but to make a man something that is not man. Right. To effectively erase human nature, you know, moving towards a prolonged sense of life, you know, trying to move towards this notion of immortality. So it seems funny to me then that what this all seems to tie back to is the Garden of Eden, that no matter how far away you try to free yourself from the morality of the past, you know, the. The old ways of being, the old rules, the old beliefs, you still never, you know, it's. It's always you moving forward. Is that like that serpents whisper this? You can be like the gods. What did you say earlier, Deacon Garlic? You can hope for heaven and your promised hell if you live in this sort of anti contraceptive, anti logos framework.
- [102:10]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, very well said. Yeah. I simply want to echo and really stress that if people listening right now have not read the Abolition of Man, is it by CS Lewis? It is a short book. It's probably an afternoon in a coffee shop. It's originally, I think, a speech or a collection of speeches. And it is probably one of the best mappings of modernity and our problems that you could possibly read. But the reason it's probably one of the best is because of C.S. lewis's cleverness. I mean, he is absolutely, you know, shrewd as a serpent, but innocent as a dove in that book. Because what he does is he doesn't start off saying, I'm going to critique modernity. He starts off critiquing a child's grammar book to show how relativism has already sunk into that culture and think about what time that is, right? Like 1940s or so. He's already showing how this kind of contraceptive speech, to use our term, is already being built into children's education at that time. And he starts with a child's book and then he goes to the same thing we've talked about tonight, right? An intelligible reality. But he knows that if he says Jesus Christ, the Logos to his audience, their brain turns off because they know what Christianity is and they do not want it. So what he does is he pivots and he uses the dao, Tao, the dao, this Eastern concept that the cosmos is intelligible. And even though he uses that as a synonym for the Logos as we see in Christ, it allows him to kind of sidestep their prejudices against Christianity, to show then what happens to a society and what happens to a mind that cannot actually satiate on an intelligible reality and find truth. It is a beautiful book. I've given it to a lot of people, particularly those who probably like, you know, they would not read papal encyclical. They probably might not even read a Christian text, particularly, right, because they're so jaded against it. But they, I will say, well, what about the dao? It's like, oh, an Eastern concept. That sounds fascinating. Like, hey, let's read this book together. So if you haven't read that, it is phenomenal. I really, I just, I cannot say enough about it. Also, to Sean's point, as a side note, but to kind of really bake something into this conversation that we've already kind of given the context for. Is Sean mentioned, like, technology? And, you know, are we using technology correctly? The answer to that is, of course, no. But see, you already have the skill set and the tools based off this conversation to start to understand what has gone wrong with technology. Because the question that you would have to ask, and let's say medical technology particularly, the first question you should ask is, what is the purpose of that technology? Obviously, the first question, right, If. As long as we know what it is, right? So maybe what is technology? What is medical technology? And secondly, what is its purpose? And what you'll find out very quickly is that until quite recently, right, the purpose of medical technology was to help restore the natural function of the body, right? So if I was a heart doctor, all the technology that I brought in to help help with the healing of the heart, with the medicine of the heart was tailored then to restoring its natural function. I want the heart to beat and to beat well. I want it to play its role within the corpus, within the body. And so the doctor is there to restore natural purpose, and the technology is there as an assistant to the doctor to restore that purpose. And so we should immediately be highly skeptical to any type of medical technology that comes in and says that it can change you, it can change you into something else, it can change you that something that is not natural to the body or that is contrary to the purpose of any particular part of the body. That just, you know, as a preliminary, to start that conversation in your imaginations, right. That should lead us to a deep skepticism of, no, wait, has the purpose not shifted? And if it has shifted, then what is the purpose of this new medical technology? Is it to restore the natural function of the body? Or is now the body this kind of plastic, malleable thing for the human will? And now the technology is serving the wills and position of a new reality upon the body, and we get Confused, can we say, well, isn't it all medical technology? That's not the right question. The question is, what is the purpose of the technology itself? And I think that as you, whether it's this conversation or that conversation, you're going to see it falls along the same lines of there are those who are trying to conform their minds to an objective reality, something outside themselves, and then there are those who want reality to conform to their minds. And I think maybe to state that again as a, as a thesis, I really do think this is the distinction between the modern age using that as a pejorative and our own Christian life is that we are trying to conform our minds to reality. But the modern age invites us to conform reality to our minds. That what I believe is true should dictate the reality. And not only should it dictate the reality for me, but you have to adhere to my particular reality and fiction. And this is where, going back to Sean's point, politics almost starts to become impossible in this type of scenario because we get atomized. Sean pointed out very well earlier that if the intellect can't seek truth, then that means our speech can't convey truth to one another, which means our discourse isn't rational. Our discourse becomes emotional, which means it's rooted in the will. And when it's rooted in the will, it just becomes a power struggle. And that's what we're seeing a lot in society. And that's why a lot of our conversations with our neighbor whom we love and want to help aren't really efficacious, because we're trying to convey to them something that's a reason we're appealing to logos and they're very much appealing right to pathos, to emotion. And they're coming as a power dynamic where we're coming as like a logical argument. And you have two very different anthropologies that are trying to discuss things with one another, but they really don't have a shared language. And it's not. That's the reality that we have to really face. I think it's really difficult kind of jumping back though into our. And kind of in the final stretch here of our conversation that we're having, I think another thing to look here is that in this kind of liberal culture, notice that the achievement of consent is praised higher than that of truth. It's not about finding what's true, it's simply about did we reach a consensus. Right? You think about consent based ethics, you think about the fact that we vote on things and therefore they're true or not true. We have to make a distinction here between, like, what are we actually trying to find? And a lot of our society currently is structured around just simply trying to find a consensus on things. And whatever that consensus reaches is the truth. And these are these kind of subtle things that we have to watch because this is how that contraceptive speech, I think, becomes very normative, right? And kind of giving a high kind of a kind of an architecture here. What ends up happening, though, is that classical liberalism, this conservative liberalism, always naturally leads to left liberalism. It has no breaks. So it starts to reduce the human person, and it has no inner structures to stop that degradation. And so we've seen this over the last 500 years that this kind of like classical liberalism ends up falling into left liberalism, to use a mundane example. But that's maybe a little bit more apparent to us. You know, it's often joked that the Republicans today are defending whatever the left liberals were like 10 years ago, that the right seems to. The left seems to be driving to the narrative right. Everything's shifting left. And then the Republicans are just kind of like pumping the brakes on it, but moving left with them. That's not like a last decade problem, that's like a last 500 years problem. And that's really because the conservative side, the classical side of liberalism, say in Locked, really doesn't have any internal structure to stop itself from moving leftward. But the problem is that left liberalism then habituates us to relativism, because in left liberalism, there is. There's nothing outside the social contract. It's not. It's not that there's a common good, but we can't agree on it. Therefore, everyone has to have the freedom to seek their own private goods. It's that there is no common good. And so the only goods that people have are the goods that they desire for themselves. So if you ever wondered, like, where did relativism come from? Why did this all of a sudden make sense to us? It's because we're in a culture that just habituates us to this type of thinking, that everyone has their own particular good. Because we live in a society that praises freedom above any kind of good in and of itself. But the problem is, is that relativism isn't actually satisfactory to your intellect. And so what ends up happening under relativism is, is that eventually it gives rise to nihilism and we become a very nihilistic culture, right? There is no truth, nothing has meaning, etc. And this leads us to despair. And you can kind of map out even how the soul suffers this degradation. The politics is nothing more than a collection of souls. And so you can kind of track out, you know, why are we heading the direction that we are? Why do we have the depression that we have, or the despair and all of these things, this kind of like very flat, empty life that doesn't seem to be actually satiating anyone. Well, it's because we've actually believed several presuppositions that actually make it very difficult for us to kind of find this very fulfilling life. The problem, though, is that, you know, in the west, liberalism is not something which we can really stand apart from and critique, right? We're immersed in it. It really is our cave wall. Its contraceptive speech forms and shapes our morals, our political imaginations. It is in many ways our anthropological and cosmological default. If you're going to push against it, it has to be something that you very intentionally try to observe and push against. It's not something that you can just casually discard, if that makes sense, because it's baked in to basically every piece of media presupposition, every meeting you go to. The principles of liberalism are always there and they're always leading to this kind of contraceptive speech. So, you know, liberalism in a lot of ways can attribute a lot of its success to its habit of securing for man societal approval for his disordered appetite through contraceptive speech. And what does that mean? It means that what we've seen in the last 500 years is that as these things kind of degrade, one of the reasons that it's become popular is because it keeps telling us that we have the freedom to do more and more things to satiate in pleasure, right? So it keeps telling us these ancient boundaries that society has had in place, we can topple those over. And things shouldn't stand in the way of your pleasure, right? It actually takes the appetitive part of man, the lowest part of the soul, and really exemplifies it and really controls the demos, the people, by offering them what they might find pleasurable and just keeps telling them, listen, the more you knock over these ancient boundaries, the more we're able to kind of break these things down, the more free you are, the happier you will be, the more pleasure that you'll have in life. And we just kind of keep believing this lie. Again, think of that contraceptive speech that divorces us from reality. We keep just kind of deconstructing things, thinking that if we just do this enough, right, we're going to be happy. It's actually a type of perverted emancipation, right? Man actually is a, is emancipated from everything that is supposed to govern him in this reality, whether it's God, true religion, nature, history, reason, the body, etc, all of that is actually now not only governing man, but handed back to man as something malleable to his own will. It's really going back to like the father of lies concept, right? There's, there's a deep embedded non servium there, right? I am an individual. I am an atomized individual. I'm a. I am, I exemplify this type of freedom that looks at plurality of choice and therefore I can make whatever decision I want in seeking my particular good. And we're so saturated in lying, in contraceptive speech, in these kind of artificialities that it's hard to even see anymore. We really have to be intentional about kind of pushing out against this. So there is hope, though. I don't want to end, you know, on a terribly negative note. I think there is hope, right? And we kind of turn to the Inferno, I think, for this hope, which is an odd place, right, since you were supposed to abandon all hope, ye who enter, but there is hope. We see this in the Inferno towards the end, right? They leave Master Adamo in the eighth circle behind, and Dante the pilgrim and Virgil discover that the final pit of hell is ringed with giants who rebelled against the divine. They meet the giant Nimrod, who famously attempted to build the Tower of Babel in Scripture. Fittingly, Nimrod can only babble. Nimrod can neither be understood nor can he actually understand anyone. And one thing that's really important to understand in Dante, he's using the giants there as natural analogues to the angels, to the demons, right? So the demons rebelled against God, and that is in the Christian revelation, right? The true myth. But then in Greek mythology, the analog to the demons are the giants because they rebel against Zeus. So right before he goes down into the pit, he sees all of these giants and it's supposed to be that kind of more natural mythic understanding of those that fought against the divine. Even though Nimrod is actually from scripture, the other giants there are the Titans that fought against Zeus. That's fitting though. The reason I mentioned Nimrod is that he can't really talk well, right? He can neither be understood nor can he, you know, speak to others. And so Dante the poet's catechesis here on the correlation between speech and sin is made complete When Dante the pilgrim and Virgil stand before the giant demon of Satan at the center of hell. And what I mean by this is it's very subtle, but one of the reasons that Satan is a giant. He's a giant demon is because he is the exemplary example of rebellion. So he's both that pagan example of the Titans, the giants, and a demon from Christian revelation. So therefore, because he's the perfection of both of those rebellions, he is then a giant demon in the pit of hell. But why is this important for our conversation? It's important because Satan is quiet. Satan cannot speak. And this is incredibly important for Dante, and it's often overlooked because a lot of times when we get to the end of hell, we're expecting a very clever, savvy, rhetorical Satan. We think of Milton's Paradise Lost. We think of the accuser in Job. We've had all of these dialogues throughout the entire Inferno, and we finally get down into the pit of hell. And the first time I read it, I was thinking, man, this dialog between Dante the pilgrim and Satan is going to be really impressive. And we don't get that. What do we get? We get silence. They're fro. The souls are frozen completely in ice. Down at the last, the fourth section there, the souls are completely frozen. They're like straw that Dante can see. Frozen in ice, right? There's no movement, there's no speech. And Satan himself, right, his win, his wings are flapping, he has movement, and he's gnawing down on these three sinners and his three mouths, but he can't speak. And this is actually a very subtle sign of hope from Dante the poet. What I mean by that is like, you know, we think that Satan's going to give this great speech, but he's silent. And so the speech that spun the unrealities that separated man from God is now soundless. It's a subtle statement of hope that no matter how sordid the untruth of our age, no matter how much our contraceptive speech impedes the flourishing of man, no matter how much that happens, truth shines forth. In the end, all lies will follow the father of lies into silence. Dante the poet does not even give Satan the capacity to lie anymore. His lying has brought him into an eternal torment in hell. And I think it's. It's a catechesis that's often overlooked, but the silence of Satan in the pit of hell really is a catechesis on this contraceptive speaker speech that even though it can be incredibly pernicious, to man and ruin his mind. And obviously Satan's surrounded by a giant pit of souls suffering in hell that believed his lie in some capacity. Despite all of that, it will all come to naught and good and true and beautiful win in the end. And so I think this is. I think that Dante the poet has a very subtle sign of hope at the end of the Inferno. And I think it's a sign of hope that we should certainly incorporate even to our own pilgrimage, you know, currently here on Earth. So, Sean, Shannon, any thoughts?
- [119:38]
Sean
I find it really fascinating how you invoked the. The giants and how it's tied together both in Greek mythology and scripture. I had given a space on this Tuesday and I was still working this out for myself. So I was taking everything you said in every word. But we were discussing how in Greek mythology the. The progenitors of the monstrous are also two giants, two serpentine giants, Typhon and Echidna in Greek mythology. So again, it was intriguing how these giant beings are that which give forth to the monstrous, that are effectively acts of chaos and anti creation because Typhon was specifically created to go to war against Zeus, you know, the. The order of Olympus chaos reigning free. I think this ties back in again to the idea that the monstrous is the anti Logos, that it moves towards destruction. Evil is a deprivation of good that moves to non being. That perhaps ties on to the silence that you see in the Inferno as well. If logos is the word, then the complete culmination of the anti Logos of evil is complete silence, complete non being itself that you know, evil will destroy itself. It's interesting when you see this in scripture too. We were attempting to see any connections with Genesis 6. There's also something about these giants who are implied to be monstrous beings, the Nephilim. And one of the common interpretations is these giant beings that are obscuring their origins were considered probably evil and wicked because they are mentioned right before the flood. So again, when evil giants reign the world, the natural. The natural conclusion of their evils is cataclysm is flood is non being itself. The last point that we were trying to work out. I'm very curious, Shannon, nor Deacon Garlic, your thoughts of this is. It seems then that there's also a implied moral or way of being for the the heroic. There's giant slayers in scripture as me and Michael were working on. There's Joshua who takes the promised land away from the Canaanites. And the Canaanites were described as being giants who were inhabit. Inhabiting the land. And then of Course, David famously slays Goliath and then David's kin, I believe, slays the last few of the the giants in Scripture. So it seemed then what led to the giant Slayers, what made them successful wasn't necessarily their might, but the fact that they were pious, that they were obeying the will of God, that they had a good standing and good relationship with God, which prefigures again the Logos in Christ. If you love God, if you act in accordance and harmony with God, with the Logos, then you conquer the giants, the principalities of evil. And I also wonder if there's something about the giants being these prideful, puffed up beings who have a lack of humility, who refuse to bow and surrender. Again, the Miltonian line in Paradise Loss is that Satan says it's better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. I would rather be free in suffering away from God than to bow down and serve the Logos. So I don't. I just saw a bunch of fascinating parallels there. I'm really curious to either of your guys thoughts on that if decohers or. But I, I digress here.
- [123:21]
Shannon
I always love Sean's digressions when we do our spaces. He always apologizes for, for going on tangents. I was like. Your tangents are like, are like so good. No, I love how you pulled those parallels from, from scripture of the giants and slaying. I'm reminding of something that imperator, he was in here a little bit earlier often post that the greatest battle is within. Right. Our greatest struggle in life is, you know, the giant that could grow inside of us. A pride of refusing to be humble and recognize our dependence on God. I also wanted to share this definition because contraceptive speech as Deakin alluded to, is only possible because our culture is swimming in liberalism. There was a book written by a Catholic priest in the 1800s and the name of the book, it's a fascinating book. It's. Liberalism is a sin. And this definition comes from. I wanted to share this definition so you get both of your thoughts on it. Liberalism is the dogmatic affirmation of the absolute independence of the individual and of social reason.
- [124:38]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I am, I'm familiar with that book. It is a fascinating book. It also reminds us, I mean on the Catholic side we should be reminded that we actually have a long tradition of fighting against liberalism. It's a fight that we kind of have forsaken in the last 60 years or so. And it's one that I think we need to pick back up but particularly if you look at that book. But then think of something that's more magisterial. Pope Leo XIII wrote heavily against liberalism. And so you have to understand that we live in an age in which an error that our popes were railing against and warning us against and what it would do to us, you know, only 200 years ago, has now become the absolute political and anthropological norm of all of our discourse. I mean, in certain ways, we are the dystopia. We are the way we are the age that has fallen. And so it is because you can. You can fight a lot and argue about certain traits about liberalism. The fact that it's kind of a floating modifier and somewhat nebulous is what makes it really difficult to have conversations about. But I think at the end of the day, kind of the follow the quote that you gave Shannon is that at the end of the day, I think it's not necessarily immediately first a political claim. It's actually an anthropological claim, because all politics are downstream from anthropology. What you believe a man is is going to then dictate what you think politics are, because obviously all politics are, is simply man coming together to live with other man. And so we have to understand then, like, you know, what's a particular good for a person before we understand the common good of persons in the political community. And so I think that a lot of ways, liberalism, even in its classical sense, is a claim on anthropology. It's a reductionist claim on who man is. And it's that reduction of man that implants a certain erosion in our own souls and intellects that then, over the last 500 years, has really eroded every single guidepost that. That our forefathers had to help lead us into what's true, good, and beautiful, right? So, like, God has gone to the side because we're. We're now God. Nature has no moral standard. I mean, outside of a lot of, you know, Catholic circles, there's not a whole lot of people anymore that think nature has any kind of, like, moral standard for man. History becomes very malleable, right? It's not actually like a lesson from divine providence. It doesn't have a purpose, right? We think history has a purpose. Purpose. We think of Israel in the Old Testament. We think of God coming into time in the Incarnation. We think that time will have an end, say, with revelation and the great new heaven and new Earth. All of that's gone. And history just becomes simply us living in the moment. You see this even when we read on the podcast the Iliad and the Odyssey, those who think that the Iliad and Odyssey have nothing to teach us as moderns. Right? Because they atomize our human nature from theirs. They have nothing in common with Achilles or Odysseus or any of these characters. They have nothing to teach me. I have an iPhone. I can Google things, I can use Grok. Right? There's nothing that they can teach me. There's a certain historicism, if you will, or relativism applied to history that cuts us off from the lessons that I think Providence would teach us. And then obviously, like, you know, now today, because it's most apparent, you know, even our own bodies can be considered offensive and contrary to our wills. Right. We're very gnostic in how we approach these things. So, no, I think that liberalism in a lot of ways is a claim on anthropology that then kind of, as it kind of tumbles out, if you will, ends up having a strong new sense of politics. And unfortunately, one that became very normative in the West. I would say, too, because that can kind of lead into a whole new conversation. But I would say, too, if those. If people are interested in that, there's a lot of good people doing good work there. I'd probably point first to Patrick Deneen, Dr. Patrick Danin out of Notre Dame, why liberalism failed. Also regime change. You know, I think in a lot of ways he's one of the ones that really cracked this conversation open, particularly for, like, the general public, the Josiah's website. So actually, the conversation that we had tonight is actually based off an article that I published in 2003 on the Josiah's website called Our Contraceptive Speech. So I know a lot of tonight was. Was probably somewhat thick at times, and so obviously you can listen to the space again. We're going to publish it again as a podcast here in a few weeks on Ascend. So it'll be up on Spotify and Apple and YouTube and things of that nature. But also I've posted on X here under the space, the link to that article itself, if you want to have that in writing and kind of move through it. So I think Austin Josiah does a lot of good stuff on liberalism. New Polity is another group that does a lot of good stuff on. On liberalism. So there are pockets, I think, in Catholic thought that are really starting to take this seriously. Because if you come into a culture that is dominated by an ideology that is pernicious, the problem is that you have to be incredibly intentional at all times to not allow it to affect your thought. And that's very difficult. Right. It's not something that even for myself, it's not something that you stand apart from. It's something that every day you're having to make sure that your grammar, your logic and your rhetoric are aligned with what's true, good and beautiful. And that can be somewhat challenging. So maybe, um, Sean Shannon, like any, any kind of final words, I, I.
- [130:00]
Shannon
Was delaying because I was in the comments trying to copy the link to that post because I look forward to reading it. Did you say that's from 2003?
- [130:09]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yes, I wrote that in 2003. Yeah. So this is something that I like in my own thought process and my own spiritual life. You know, I've been, I've been wrestling with. And so particularly as we've been reading Dante's Inferno for Lent, it's all kind of come back up. And I just think Dante is a wonderful teacher and he has a lot of things to teach us. And so I think, you know, if you're a first time reader of Dante, just trying to understand Dante is very important. But then as you've read him a couple times, I think one of the challenges is how do I take the lessons of Dante and apply them to my own age. And that's a dangerous conversation because Dante is so disruptive to, I think, a lot of the norms of sin that we become very comfortable with.
- [130:49]
Shannon
Well, I love the way you explain things. We had that space or you wrote that essay on the biblical symbolism of water. And I just love this phrase contraceptive speech sort of just frames it in a way that's one it's so easy to understand but also sort of in a new, looking at it in a new way, you know, paralleling with physical contraception, you know, the intellectual or emotional or spiritual compos, you know, of lying. And I went to a mass recently where that, where the homily was, was about white lies. Don't you know the truth will set you free? And that's really our purpose. And well, it's our struggle in the current, in our current culture is we have to continuously orient ourselves to the truth because like you said, the entire culture is pointing us in totally the opposite direction.
- [131:48]
Sean
It really touches this notion. I think you had just said it, Deacon Garlic, that the logos, well, it can be destructive. But it reminds me of Christ that I came not to bring peace, but a sword, that to today's modern sensibilities, speaking the truth, there's in some sense a price to pay. But at the same time, I think when you touch back into this message of hope, well, I Mean, yes, live not by lies, even the small white lies. That's just back to Solzhenitsyn, that if you simply live by the Lagos, you are doing your part and your part of the world of setting everything right and back in its proper place, putting things back as they belong. Justice, right? So as overwhelming as it can sometimes be to look at the state of an anti Lagos, you know, liberalist secular society filled with contraceptive speech, just never forget that it's your duty to just simply tell the truth. The truth shall set you free. You know, keep your aim right on your relationship with the Logos. As they say, seek first the kingdom of heaven and all these things shall be given unto you. That as overwhelming as it can be, sometimes it's the simple duties of tending to what is right in front of you is the well, the faith that moves mountains, even if it's as small as a mustard seed.
- [133:06]
Shannon
Touch on that point again about white lies. We all tell white lies. And I think one of the best examples is that question we get every morning, hey, how are you? Even in asking of it? Sometimes the question is a lie because do you really want to know how the other person is? How many times have we said, oh, I'm fine, and that's just totally not true. But you know, the other person, they don't really want to hear why you're upset. It was. It's just more of almost like a greeting. And I think it's interesting to look at that question, hey, how are you? Even the question isn't 100% honest, because do we really, really want to know or is it just a way of being friendly?
- [133:49]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I think. I think it's really challenging to the way that we use speech. And I would, I would make one distinction just simply so people don't fall into scruples over this subject. Is that the speech that Dante has in mind, particularly when he looks at fraud in the eighth and ninth circle and say, like flattery, right? Flattery is again, as we said, it's in a lower section of hell than say, murder or suicide. We have to keep in mind though, that the flattery and all the lying in the 8th and 9th circle all has to be malicious. It's an actual evil willing towards another person. Right? So it can't simply be. Sometimes there's like a lack of courage, right? We don't like conflict and so we kind of shy away from things. Sometimes we do things really without thinking, right? Without a lot of prudence and things like this. There's other reasons that we lie and why our speech becomes contorted. It would still be contraceptive speech because it is impeded from its actual purpose of sharing truth. But, you know, we might. We might make distinctions about whether that's always malicious, right? Whether I always have a malevolent will towards another. Because it seems like, Shannon, to your point, sometimes we've picked up this kind of just perfunctory lying. This, like, lying that's not even, like, even intentional anymore. We've just kind of gotten used to a certain way of speaking. Cultural norms can play into this heavily too. Someone asks us like, oh, how do I look in this? Or how do I How are you doing today? Like, we just have these, like, rote responses that we typically give. So, no, I think that's really challenging to how we use that speech. And also saying, you know, is this malicious or. Or not? If it's not malicious, then where is it coming from? As I kind of examine my own soul. So, Sean and Shannon with Catholic Frequency. I deeply appreciate both of you guys being on tonight and helping us, kind of guide us through this concept of lying as contraceptive speech. I would invite everyone to go follow Sean and Shannon on X. They're doing a lot of really, really good work. I appreciate all the subjects that they bring to X and all the good work that they're doing. I know there's a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes to do threads and spaces and all the different things that they're doing, and so very much appreciate them in their presence. So again, please go follow them. And if you're interested in Ascend, the great books podcast, right, we're helping people read the great books like Dante's Inferno. Go check out thegreatbookspodcast.com for our reading schedule. We have lots of good things, including Dante, the Greek plays, Plato. Coming up, you can read the great books with Ascend, and we'll see you guys next time. Thank you so much.