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Ascend - The Great Books Podcast
Platonic Thought in St. Thomas Aquinas with Dr. Donald Prudlo
01:35:50
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Today on a Stand the Great Books podcast, we are taking up one of my favorite subjects, Plato and St. Thomas Aquinas. What is the influence, if any, of Plato on St. Thomas Aquinas? The angelic doctor? To guide us through this conversation, we are joined by Dr. Donald Prudlow, fantastic thinker, great Thomist, but also rooted in history, a historian, which is very helpful for this conversation. We're going to take up a lot of, you know, what would you call them, the caricatures of St. Thomas Aquinas. Is he a pure Aristotelian? Did he save the Church from Platonism? Does Aquinas owe anything to the Platonic thought? We've studied all of these different dialogues. We've talked about Plato and St. Augustine, Plato and St. Boethius. Now we're looking at Plato and St. Thomas Aquinas. Can you talk about a Platonic thought in the Angelic Doctor? It's a wonderful conversation. So I appreciate you joining us this week. Next week we're going to have a Q and A on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with Dr. Justin Jackson. Always appreciate his thoughts. He clearly loves the text and he's a whirlwind. I always appreciate him. It's a phenomenal conversation. And then a week after that, we will start preparing to read Dante's Purgatorio for Lent. We'll kick off with an introduction with Dr. Jason Baxter, who will come on not only to discuss the Purgatorio, but also his new translation and talk to us about what is it like to actually translate Dante and what are the philosophies that go into his particular translation. It's a phenomenal conversation. And then we will read a little bit about Dante's Purgatorio each week throughout Lent until we finally come to the top of Mount Purgatory right before Easter. So if you're looking for a phenomenal Lenten read, please join us. But for today, join us for a wonderful conversation on Plato and St. Thomas Aquinas with Dr. Prudlo.
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Foreign.
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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 morning here at the Chancery. If you're new to Ascend, we can help you read the Great Books. We have over 50 episodes on the Iliad and the Odyssey, 20 episodes on the Greek plays, and about another 20 covering the Platonic dialogues like first Alcibiades, the Apology and the Gorgias. So no excuses. You can read the great books with Ascend. Check us out on X, YouTube, Facebook, and Patreon. We appreciate all of our supporters who have access to written guides and other valuable resources to read the Great Books. Visit thegreatbookspodcast.com for our reading schedule and more information today. I'm really looking forward to the day. Today's good. I am excited about it. We are discussing Plato and St. Thomas Aquinas as part of our ongoing series on Platonic thought. To guide us in this discussion, we are joined by Dr. Donald Prudlow, who serves as the chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Tulsa. He holds the Warren Chair in Catholic studies. Dr. Prudlow has joined us previously for an episode on Dante's Inferno and for an episode on St. Thomas Aquinas and the Euthyphro Dilemma. So welcome back.
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B
Thank you very much. Always a pleasure to be here.
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A
Yeah. So before we kind of dive into Plato and Aquinas, which is something I'm actually really looking forward to discussing, you were in Rome for the election of Pope Leo xiv. You were doing commentary for Vatican English. I was listening to you on the live YouTube as we kind of went through that. Tell us about that experience.
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I broadcasted for Vatican media for a long time now, over well over a decade, usually for canonizations. But whenever there's extraordinary events, I also provide commentary when they need theological or historical advising. I was there in the 2013 conclave as well, and I was fortunate enough that it occurred after or close enough to after finals that I was able to fly over and help them out again. When I was broadcasting, I broadcasted the first two black smokes that first night, where we had to wait so long because the papal preacher went quite overtime in his opening homily to the cardinals. And then we finally got that at 9pm black smoke. And then I broadcasted the next day the black smoke in the morning. And I was actually off that afternoon. I was gonna. If the Conclave had gone on to Friday, I would have been back in the booth. So my son and I were in the square when the smoke, the white smoke came rather unexpectedly at a time that nobody was looking for. And we were privileged to see the first American pope, Robert Prevost, become Pope Leo xiv. Really, once in a lifetime moment to be in the square when the white smoke comes out. The new pope, very hopeful, very joyful time. And it was a privilege.
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I'm sure it was. It was probably just an absolute beautiful experience. Yeah, we had. We had gathered Here at the Chancery to watch it live in the conference room. The whole place just blew up. When we realized it was an American, of course they announced the name and like most of the people in the room didn't know who it was. And someone's like, I think it's an American. And people are like, no, it can't be an American. They'd never, you know, elect an American. And then it just kind of went through, like shockwaves.
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It did. I did know Prevost. He was actually about fifth on my list. I knew he had been rising the previous week, so there was a possibility. And so I was listening very closely to the name and Robert, for one brief moment I thought it might be Cardinal Seurat. But I was really ready for someone named Peter because there were three contenders who had the first name Peter. And so to hear Robert was surprised. But when they said Prevost, I rather embarrassed myself in the square because it was dead silent. And I shouted out, oh, my gosh, he's an American. And then so everybody around me knew that he was an American. But yes, to hear him come out with his beautifully clear Italian, I've got to compliment him. After many native born Italians with their accents, trying to translate and speak with them, to have this very clear, very perfect Italian is a pleasure.
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A
Oh, it's been beautiful. I've loved the aesthetics of his papacy thus far, and him singing, like him leading the square and Regina Chile and things like this has been beautiful. Saying the prayers in Latin. It's, it's. Yeah, it's been, it's been beautiful. And I thought that was probably a really rare experience for you to be over there.
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B
Yes, absolutely. I mean, I, I'm over there quite often, but to be there. I missed the last conclave by one day since they moved it forward. So this was my first time actually at present while a conclave was going on.
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A
Yeah, no, very good. I appreciate you sharing that with us. Okay, so Plato and St. Thomas Aquinas, this might be a very short episode because maybe just like they have nothing to do with each other. Right. It's just like Aquinas doesn't rely on Platonic thought for anything. He's a pure Aristotelian. And so maybe that's where I would launch off because I've been reading a book recently here, I'll hold it up for everyone if they want to look at it. The World as God's Icon by Sebastian Morello. Here, I'll hold it up for those who joined by video and I'm still working through it. And so I'm hesitant to express any of his thoughts here. But one of the things at the very beginning that I found really persuasive is that he just kind of goes through the natural Thomistic commentators, names that you would recognize, even like Chesterton, Gary Lee, Lagrange, etcetera, Who have phrases like Thomas is simply Christian Aristotelianism or Thomas simply just baptized and Aristotle. Is that, is that a fair way to characterize Thomistic thought?
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I really, I don't think so at all. Now we need to make clear that Thomas was living and working and thinking in an Aristotelian environment in an age that was rapidly recovering Aristotle from the Arab east, from the Christian East. And so Aristotle was in the air. It was everywhere. And of course, Thomas became the greatest interpreter of Aristotle to the Western world. But I think we're long past the time of Gilson and Garry Lagrange. And even Chesterton's idea that he was just a pure Aristotelian or sometimes in the non Catholic world, he was just an ape of Aristotle. He just sort of put a veneer of Christianity over Aristotle and that. And I think that's reflected a little bit in some of the Reformation polemics too, right, that Aristotle, Thomas made Aristotle, as Luther said, into the godless bulwark of the Papists. And so it's a problem that we need to confront. But scholars over the last 50 or so years have been very patiently making the story much more complex, much more rich, to show the great variety of sources that Thomas used and gladly used, even while making some very significant metaphysical breakthroughs using Aristotle, which. That's for sure.
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Yeah, it seems like to me, like one of the, one of the phrases that stood out to me in that text I just mentioned is that if that's really the case, is that, you know, if we, if we want to contextualize this, that Aquinas really just is Christian Aristotelianism. And I think even Chesterton goes as far as to say, like this was like the antidote to the Platonic thought that was almost plaguing the Church. It makes Thomism almost like a, a rupture, an intellectual rupture worth the first. What are we talking about? Right. Twelve hundred years of the Church. And one. I don't, I don't think that's a fair. I agree with you. I don't think that's a fair representation of what Thomas actually does. Actually, the more I look into St. Thomas Aquinas, the more I'm coming to believe that a lot of people who talk about Thomas don't actually know Thomas. Thomas is very often cited, but I think actually rarely understood, if that makes sense. Sometimes I think the summa is too easy to be the treat like an encyclopedia. So it's too easy just to look something up and then regurgitate Thomas. But one of the things that really concerns me, particularly as a modern is like if this really is what Thomas did, is he just, he took a new thinker, right, Aristotle, and basically recontextualized Christianity according to that philosophy. And that constitutes some type of intellectual rupture with the beginning of the Church, the first thousand years, but also the thought of the Church as she was coming into existence, you know, from the incarnate God, then like, does that not set like a terrible precedent? Like why, why can't we just wait for Aquinas 2.0 who's going to do the same thing to Christianity, but with the metaphysics of Kant or the metaphysics of, of say Locke or Nietzsche, right, we can just, it seems like we make a faith where you can just gut the, the metaphysics of the faith and it's just like a veneer that can just get laid over a new philosophy at any given time.
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B
That's absolutely right. So it's better to think of it not as a rupture, but as a deepening of that which had come before. In Aristotle, Thomas found a useful new philosophical way to undergird the doctrines of Christianity, which for him were always paramount. The theology and revelation of God. All of these philosophical movements are supposed to be at the service of. And so what he found in Aristotle was a way to deepen certain concepts and to solve certain problems that had looked rather intractable when seen from a solely a Platonic angle. But at the same time, Thomas is astonishing in that he finds truth in nearly every previous thinker that there's some aspect that he can use, that he can incorporate. And so to say that this is a wholesale destruction of what came before is just factually inadequate. We do need to go beyond the summa. Some of Thomas greatest Platonic work is actually in his very complicated disputed questions in some of the parts that come later in his life, actually. And we can talk about that a little bit, how his own thought evolves. But Aristotle does remain his primary tool, right? He's not a slavish follower of Aristotle. He reconceptualizes Aristotle. He pushes Aristotle in ways that the philosopher himself would never have conceived of because he's Confronted with revelation. I mean, just to give one example, Aristotle doesn't really talk about creation because he thinks that nature is a given, that it's eternal, that it's perpetual. And so he doesn't ask the question that Thomas is going to ask about existence. He's interested in the natures of things, why things are the way they are and how they are the way they are. And Thomas is interested in their origin. And in order to do that, he's going to have to go. He may use Aristotelian tools, but he's going to have to peer well back into revelation in order to have an answer to that question that simply wasn't live for Aristotle.
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Yeah, there's. I mean, there's so much there I want to unpack. I'm really interested in Aquinas own intellectual history and like if there's kind of a maturation arc, there's very interested in understanding like what kind of Platonic maturation in history Aquinas is actually receiving. Like, what did he actually have? When we say that, what does that mean? But going to your most recent point is it seems like. And again, I'm just kind of trying to observe because if you said to people who's familiar with St. Thomas Aquinas, it just seems like everyone has recourse to St Thomas now, particularly online, lots of people are constantly citing him, etc. And it seems like you mentioned that he uses an Aristotelian jargon at times to express something that actually isn't really Aristotelian, that Aristotle himself would not be familiar with or maybe even would reject. And I've been kind of thinking on this that it seems like one error when we approach St. Thomas is simply that a lot of people have not read Aristotle. And so when you read something of St. Thomas that sounds Aristotelian, Right. It has that sound. I actually think there's a great amount of people who then just attribute that philosophical principle to Aristotle, when in reality he might actually be presenting something from Boethius or Dionysius or St. Augustine, but he's presenting it in a Rustician jargon. It creates this weird dichotomy, or not dichotomy. It creates kind of a weird shadow or like this, this kind of veneer in which you turn Aristotle into a Thomas, in which then like the, the daylight between these two, between Aristotle and Aquinas is not. There's nothing there. Right. They just, There's. It's a complete agreement between the two. And. Yeah, so I think, I think that might Be one reason that people struggle with this is like, we're not reading a lot of the great books, we're not reading Aristotle. You're also not reading Plato. So like, if you read Plato, then you start to understand distinction between Plato and Aristotle. If you don't read Plato, when you just read Aristotle, you think Aristotle came up with a lot of ideas that you don't understand are antecedents. They find their antecedents in Plato. And so we're just kind of coming to Aquinas raw. And I'm a little concerned that it's giving us a misperception on how Aquinas draws from these sources.
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A lot of people just want catechism style, answers to problems that are extremely difficult and have taken the entire arc of philosophical and theological history to understand. And we still haven't understood them. Right. I mean, think, think of the great debate between freedom and predestination between the Dominicans and the Jesuits. The Pope told them to stop calling each other heretics 400 years ago. And we still haven't had a definitive answer on that topic. We're still free to think about it and debate it, but we have to be deep in the tradition in order to do these things. We can't pick and choose. We can't cherry pick the doctrines that we want and remove it from the deeper context and the deeper tradition. This I see is, and I don't want to go down a rabbit hole, but as, as people use AI, it's going to be like Wikipedia on steroids. They're going to look up an answer that they want and it will be plucked out of thin air and they won't have any foundation, won't have any basis. And when they're challenged by truly smart arguments, they're not going to have anything to fall back on. And it's as you say, we need to read Aristotle, we need to read Plato. But there's also this, as I constantly in my work emphasize this cloud of witnesses that bring them to us. So how does Thomas learn from Plato through Aristotle? How does he learn from Plato through Augustine? How does he learn from Plato through Dionysius? And it's only in encountering these texts that we can come to a robust understanding. It's the work of a lifetime, and not just of a lifetime, but lifetimes of people living in and through the traditional. And that's what we try to approach. It's not easy. It's really difficult to do. There's many areas which I simply confess I don't understand it's beyond me. But I do know because I have been exposed to the tradition. I do know where to look and to find those deeper answers. And that's what we need to teach people, especially in this modern age. That lacks so much patience and that lacks the ability to deep, long form. Reading that, that it is going to take effort, it is going to take formation to do these things.
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Yeah, we were addicted to incident gratification. Even if we're looking up metaphysical principles from St. Thomas Aquinas, even that has to be kind of distilled and microwaved for us. So this is good. This is a good kind of like framework of, like, maybe common perceptions are actually not correct. So then maybe we can start to say, okay, well, how do we recorrect them? Or where do we find the balance in this? We could certainly. Aquinas is also not a pure Platonist either. So he's not. So where is he drawing from? So do you mind, because your background is history. I always appreciate it when you kind of give these historical kind of summaries. Sometimes I love just see if I can just wind you up and let you go, because I just learned so much when you kind of go on these little lessons. But like, what is it that St. Thomas is actually receiving? So we talk about Platonic thought and what Aquinas has. Like, what is, like historically, what is the Platonic thought that's actually coming down to Thomas. We focus a lot on what he got from Aristotle and that Aristotle was new in these texts, etc. But I think this is one thing. I think that we struggle with the great books, and I struggle with it too. We read them chronologically now, which is good. I think it's great because you have the great conversation, you see them, etc. But it gets really tricky sometimes when you have to realize, like, oh, wait, this author didn't actually have this text that came before it, so he's not actually reacting to this, this. And so I think a lot of times we think, oh, Aquinas rediscovered Aristotle and he also had all the Platonic texts, and he decides Aristotle is much better. When in reality, my understanding is that a lot of the Platonic texts don't come back to the Council of Florence through the Greek influence. And that's one of the things that sparks the Renaissance. So when we say that Aquinas maybe is in dialogue or we want to focus on Platonic thought, what is it that he actually has access to? What's he receiving?
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He has exactly one Platonic dialogue available to him, and that's the Timaeus, which itself is one of the most difficult Platonic dialogues to understand because it talks about being, becoming, creation. And even then we're not sure if Thomas actually cited it directly. He appears to know it, but this would have been in the middle of the 13th century, the only text available in Latin of the actual Platonic dialogue. So he is not working with like we can go over on our shelf and take up the dialogues of Plato that the patient work of scholars from the Renaissance forward have made available to us. And the great, the great miracle is that we can see how well he is able to understand Plato even with Plato's eye behind his back, kind of, as it were. It's the same thing we have to remember, like Augustine doesn't have access to a lot of the work of Aristotle and so he is using Plato fundamentally to form his philosophy and his philosophical theology. So where does Thomas come into contact with this? Well, it's once again, it's through the tradition. It's the way these things have been passed on for years. His main source, of course is Christian Platonism. That's mediated to him through the Fathers of the Church, most particularly Augustine, but to a lesser extent Origen as well. And so he's starting to engage with Origen quite a bit, particularly near the end of his life. And the Greek Fathers, so the Cappadocians were very Platonic. And he encounters these in Orvieto in the 1260s. And we see a progressive incorporation of the insights of Greek theology, which itself is really fundamentally Platonic. I mean, the vast majority of the early Christian Fathers are Platonic. There's not really, until we get, there's a little bit of. And we can't even really call him a father. Tertullian has some engagement with Aristotle. And then you have John Damascene at the end of the patristic age who begins to evince a new found idea of Aristotelianism. So he's inheriting a century of meditation and really it's a meditation that began in the Scriptures itself. Right. We can see Platonic engagement, I believe especially in the Johannine literature, but also all the way back in the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, the later books of wisdom. And so he's part of that tradition, he's part of that discussion, he's part of that. He understands the way that Christians have used Plato in order to bolster the claims of Christianity. Augustine loves Plato. Right. He says, I followed Thomas says this of Augustine. He followed Plato as far as he could and remain a Christian, which is a remarkable, remarkable. And Thomas says this with approval. This is in one of his later texts on spiritual creatures, which is a very Platonic text, as a matter of fact, that people don't really engage with much. So that's one stream. The other stream is Neoplatonism. And so the revival of Platonism by Plotinus and Porphyry, which of course the early Christian fathers also participated in. But this is a specifically pagan tradition that continues to be taught throughout the, particularly the Christian east during the middle of the first millennium. The Neoplatonists gave. Plotinus is a genius. He's really an underappreciated genius. But once again, Thomas doesn't have direct access to his texts at all. So he gets them through things like Proclus Liber Decausis, which is an important Neoplatonic text long attributed to Aristotle. But in fact, Thomas realizes it's not Aristotelian, it's Platonic. And so he does. He's able to distinguish that and most particularly through the work of Pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite, who was probably a Platonist, a Christian platonist in the 6th century who acquired an astonishing amount of authority in the Middle Ages because of his association with, with the convert of St Paul in Athens who later went on to become a bishop in France. And because of that, because of that tie to the apostles, Pseudo Dionysus, we know it's not the first century, Dionysus acquired a massive influence, but it was a good influence because most of, I would say most of Thomas's Platonism that he follows is going to come from Dionysius on the celestial hierarchies and the divine names and things like that, he also acquires it from Boethius, he acquires it from the, from the early Scholastics. All right, so people like Anselm, Peter Lombard, who were imbued with Augustinian Platonic principles, and he also acquires it from non Christian sources, particularly the Muslims. So the early Muslim philosophers who are also being translated as commentators of Aristotle, particularly people like Al Farabi and Avicenna, were Platonists, but they were also Platonists who were beginning to engage with Plato from the standpoint of a religious revelation too. So bringing Plato into discussion with sort of an Abrahamic monotheism. And so Thomas was going to be responding to them as well. So like I said, Thomas, surrounded by this cloud of witnesses that he uses, that he's able to fruitfully engage with someone whose work he was unable to.
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Read yeah, I'm glad you mentioned Boethius there. Last week we had on Dr. Thomas Ward down in Baylor to talk about Boethius and I actually, because we met at the Boethius conference at the University of Tulsa, and that's where we met. And so now we've connected and he helped us on an episode for Plato and Boethius. And I don't think I really had a great appreciation until you all hosted that conference at the University of Tulsa about how much of medieval thought is really predicated on Boethius and how influential he was. And when you read the constellation of philosophy, you can see a huge imprint. But then, you know, obviously Boethius's great task that he wanted to do, which was translating all of Aristotle and Plato, you know, into Latin, was unrealized. And you kind of wonder, like, how things would have been different if he would have been able to create that library for us.
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The project of the medievals was harmonization. And this goes back to the early church. It goes back. It crosses religious barriers. It crosses to the Muslims, to the Greeks and to the Jews. And Boethius great project was not just a translation of these texts, but a harmonization. He thought at the bottom that Plato and Aristotle essentially agreed. And his life's work was to prove that. We see that among the Muslims as well. Avicenna and Averroes like to find commonalities between Aristotle and Plato, reconcilia between them. And that's, I think, how Thomas is operating too. Thomas is a part of that great age of medieval harmonization. He knows that they disagree on some fundamental points. And so he's not sort of, you know, trying to make a square peg fit around hole, but he sees the two as complementary, essentially, as approaching things from different angles and reaching, as we know, so many of the same conclusions. So the same conclusions about. About politics, about ethics, about. About the nature of knowledge, the nature of the good. There's so many agreements, even in the ancient world among Plato. I worry sometimes we tend to try to overplay their. Their distinctive. Their. Their genuine differences, their distinctive differences. But we should remember also that Plato and Aristotle were friends. Aristotle was Plato's most brilliant student. He said he couldn't start class until Aristotle arrived. He gave him a nickname. He called him the Brain. And so even. And even when Aristotle disagrees with Plato, he has the famous line, right, you know, we value friends, but we must. And Plato was my friend, but we must value truth above friendship. And so these two were very close as well. We shouldn't make too much of their distinction.
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A
Yeah. Peter Kreeft, I think in his, he has a wonderful kind of introduction to Platonic thought. And the analogy he gives is that, you know, Plato and Aristotle are like neighbors, right? They're distinct, but they're very close to one another. But then you jump to someone like the moderns, like, you know, Locke or Rousseau or Kant. These are people that are in different countries. And so sometimes, you know, we forget how close both Plato and Aristotle are. And yeah, we only focus on their differences. A lot of times when I hear people talk about Aristotle, they'll talk about like, oh, well, you know, he's very different than Plato because, you know, he doesn't believe in the forms and stuff like this. But then if you look at the whole Platonic idea of philosophy that Aristotle inherits, we're just talking about teleology and virtue and all of these things. I mean, it changes. I will say one thing I've really appreciated on here on the podcast of doing a deep dive of Plato is that then I had to take. Well, I don't get to take a break, but I had to pick up another project which was teaching the Nicomachean ethics again to the men in our diaconate program. And the more I read Plato, the more you see his imprint on Aristotelian thought. And I think that is a much better way to approach it than I think originally when I was introduced to Aristotle, it was through Aquinas. And I think I've kind of come to understand how dangerous that is because then I'm reading Aristotle through that Thomistic lens. It's difficult at times then to kind of parse that out. So what would be like a good example? Like, so if we're going to say, like, actually probably a better way to view this is St. Thomas Aquinas. If I can kind of just summarize here in kind of a, a simple way, St. Thomas Aquinas is, is trying to find a synthesis, right? He's trying. He. Because mainly he's interested in truth. He's not interested in. In proposing one thinker over another for the sake of the thinker. Right? He's not trying to promote Aristotle because he thinks Aristotle's better than, you know, Plato etc just by virtue of who they are. He's trying to find, okay, what did they say that's true. And how can I incorporate this all together in this kind of, you know, cosmic whole? Right, like wisdom.
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Right.
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Wisdom is knowledge of the whole. So what would be a good example maybe of a Platonic thought or Platonic teaching, and I'll just use that broadly, and that includes neoplatonic, etc. Just this platonic tradition that Aquinas picks up.
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I think one of the most famous that everyone should be pretty familiar with is the exitus reditus pattern, I.e. the going forth of all things from God and the return of all things to God. It should be familiar because it's the way that Thomas organizes the Summa theologiae. We start with God as he is in himself, and then creation and then moral life begins, the return to God, and then that return to God is perfected in the God man, Jesus Christ, which brings us the return. So from the one to the many. This is an exceptionally Neoplatonic concept that he gets from. And that really is absent in Aristotle that he gets because for Aristotle, everything is kind of this cyclical, perpetual existence instead of the going out and the returning. And so I would say this is the emanation of all things from God. For Thomas, he's going to enrich that concept of necessary emanation from God by making God a person and willing creation into existence through love. And this cycle of emanation and return from the one to the many, back to the one. He is going to enhance with the particular Christian story of both corporate and individual salvation, of grace, of penance, of purification, and then ultimately salvation. And so he takes this Platonic concept, this Neoplatonic concept, and he deeply enriches it with Christian revelation. And this is a particularly platonic moment in St. Thomas.
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A
That's a fantastic example. No, I appreciate that. I'm not sure that's one that people would be able to originally identify as a Platonic teaching. But now that you say that, yeah, that seems very clear. It's also just a beautiful way I talk about that in Ocia, where you're trying to just give a big map of how things work. That Exodus ready to, you know, from love to love. Right. God creates that love in us and then we come back to Him. It's very beautiful. Also, what about, you know, recently I ran across the thesis that Thomas's understanding of evil and really the Church's understanding of evil is really first articulated well by the Neoplatonics like Plotinus, that evil is actually a privation of the good. It's not. I think St. Augustine talks about this to a certain degree, but that's really not pulling from Aristotle. It's pulling from the Platonic side where they had to deal with what is evil. It's like, well, evil. It's a privation. It's like a hole in the ground. It's like cold to heat or shadow to light. It's not a real thing. But that's now very clearly an idea that we associate with St. Thomas, correct?
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Absolutely. I think he wholesale incorporates the Augustinian Neoplatonic framework for his analysis of evil as the privation of a do good, which is not. Not really the way that Aristotle would have put it. But once again, it's the revelation that demands an accounting. It's revelation that really makes. And so the Neoplatonic analysis of. While it did come from them, the concept of evil as a privation, its real moral and soteriological content comes from Augustine. And so Thomas is going to have no problem adopting this pattern into his analysis of virtues and vices, particularly from when seen in the light of revelation.
- [32:45]
A
Yeah, no. Very good. Okay, so what about the ideas? So most people, if you say, what is Platonic teaching? And they don't really know much about Plato, they're going to point to the ideas or the forms, right? These eternal forms that have this metaphysical reality that are just kind of like floating out there. There's like the perfect horse. And this is the universal of hoarseness. And all the particulars participate in this, you know, this idea of the horse. So there's, you know, if you look at St. Thomas, it's interesting in the Summa is that he has. He has one article, I think, on this, in which he talks about the ideas and he simply states he follows Augustine. Who? Augustine. You know, St. Augustine solved a certain problem for us, which was the idea of these. These metaphysical forms kind of just floating out there seems incongruent with Christianity. And so it seems that St. Augustine then has this brilliant understanding of like. Well, actually these ideas rest with. Inside the divine mind. And the divine mind is the Logos. And this is what became incarnate in Jesus Christ. And so the second Person, the Blessed Trinity, is the divine mind. And all these ideas that serve as kind of the pattern of creation are in the divine mind. And that creates actually some very beautiful and poetic pictures about what creation is and et cetera that I personally very much love. But I lose track how that idea comes into Aquinas because we talked about in the Summa. It's just, it's. He says it, it's there. But then if you read any other section, he never seemed. It doesn't seem to play a key part. It's not a cornerstone, it's not there. So how do we, how do we come to understand how he looked at the Platonic ideas?
- [34:22]
B
Well, it's, it's because this, this is one of the areas where, where his Aristotelianism is rubbing against classical Platonism. Now, Plato had had to do two things that the early philosophers, they had to do two things to make philosophy a workable, a necessary thing. And they had to answer these two errors. One of them is the error of materialism, the idea that nothing exists that's not a material body of some sort. And the second problem they had to address was how do we gain certitude? Can we be certain of anything? And so Aristotle and Cicero give us these great histories of the pre Socratics of people struggling with this and sort of that parmenidean discovery of being which became the foundational concept of all subsequent Western philosophy. And then how Socrates pulls this philosophy down from the heavens and makes it applicable, and how we can know things about who we are. And so Plato's answer, his absolute realism, which is sometimes, that's strange to people to hear that word realism, what it means philosophically is he believes absolutely in the existence of separate ideas, right? Like you said, like goodness, justice, beauty, hoarseness, humanity. And rather famously, Aristotle is unimpressed with this. He denies the existence of a third place, you know, a place that. Where there's a world of forms or a world of ideas. But Augustine finds it very useful because he says, well, of course, the archetypes exist in the exemplar, right, that because God has created all things and because God knows all things through his essence, through who he is, that we can safely say we can salvage a Platonic world of forms by saying it's the mind of God. And I think Thomas is content enough with this as it goes. But for him, following Aristotle, he's a moderate realist. And both he and Aristotle and Plato stand against what is about to come in the 14th century. And following the conceptualists, and particularly the nominalists, people that will deny any reality to universal things, which is a very serious philosophical error. And he says, no, the universals exist, they're really in common, but they only exist in things themselves. And so he's happy to accept the Platonic idea in the mind of God, but at the same time, these archetypes in the mind of God, they exist only in discrete real things and things like. So we have a genuine common humanity, but there's not Deacon and Rudlow and a third thing called humanity. Humanity is imminent to who we are, and we share it in common? Absolutely. It's a real universal, and it's something that we can apprehend. And the way that we apprehend it is different From Plato and St Thomas and Aristotle as well.
- [37:21]
A
So just kind of like pushing into that. So when Aquinas, what is universal for Aquinas or maybe. Maybe for Aristotle and then for Aquinas, because for, you know, Plato.
- [37:31]
B
So for instance.
- [37:31]
A
Or even for St. Augustine. So St. Augustine does. My understanding of St. Augustine does two things. One is that he roots the Platonic ideas in the divine mind inside the Logos. He gives them kind of a new metaphysical address, which I think solves a lot of problems. It also creates, I think, some very beautiful understandings between creation, also our relationship with God. Why God plus creation doesn't equal anything more than God. Right. Because we're all kind of in this divine mind. But two, St. Augustine kind of famously also states that there are also ideas about the particulars. So it's not simply that, you know, God knows, you know, humanity or man, and then I participate in man as a man, but also that God actually also knows the idea of Deacon Harrison, of what eternally what I was as he had always known of me, and what I actually would be if I was perfect as he knew me. And then there's even people who have kind of tried to capture this with Cardinal Ratzinger's understanding of, you know, in Revelation, when God gives you this, like, white stone that seems to have, like, your name on it, your true name as he knew you. Right. Is kind of connected to this idea. So it seems clear to me, like, how Augustine structures the relationship between universals and particulars. I don't think it's. My understanding is that if you really want to get into metaphysics of how does this happen step by step, it's not terribly clear. And Plato's also not clear about this either. And so there's gaps. And this is probably one reason Aristotle wasn't entirely convinced or even impressed with this. But when you get to Aquinas, or maybe if you maybe start with Aristotle, what's a universal for Aristotle? And then does Aquinas hold both of these together? Or, like, what does he do?
- [39:09]
B
Well, I mean, so the form of a thing would be, for Aristotle is the what? It answers the what question. It answers the nature of a thing. And so. And those forms are never found apart from matter for Aristotle. And so when you have form and matter, then you have the substantial thing. And to say that you could have a form without matter is. Was. Didn't really make any sense to him. But both Plato and Aristotle were comfortable with the idea that the one God didn't know particulars, that it was too removed, that these dirty, messy particulars were too removed from the one. And so both. And here's where Augustine and followed by Aquinas brings in revelation that no, God knows individuals through his essence, through his creative essence, he knows these particulars. He knows us as individuals, as persons. And as we know, we've talked about in the past, person itself is a Christian term. It's not a term that is found in classical philosophy at all. It has to be used because of the problems that revelation uncovers or that brings to the surface. And so Thomas is going to agree with Aristotle partially, but also disagree with him because he knows that God knows particulars and God has in his mind these archetypes. But for him, these are exist only in human. We'll just take humanity. They exist only in individually existing humans. And he gets into a further discussion about how. Well then what happens. Well, when we talk about mind body issues. So this is another issue that Plato and Aristotle. So I don't know if you want to move into mind body issues. Dualism, Platonic dualism.
- [40:56]
A
Yeah, that's probably. Yeah, that'd be a good one. Just as a side note. Yeah, I think that's. I just want to reiterate what you said because it's an important principle that God actually knows all things by knowing himself. And so I think that's helpful because you have. You have kind of contrasting pictures, so you have this like emanation from the Timaeus, but you also have, you know, creation. You have exitus ready to. But at the same time, as I, I mentioned, you know, briefly, God plus creation doesn't equal anything new. And so he knows all these things through himself because he is being itself. And maybe that's something we have to get into because my understanding is that Aquinas is. I think you already referenced this quickly. But Augustine's. Excuse me, Aquinas's understanding of essay in existence is also kind of a unique contribution that he's been pulling in both Platonic and Aristotelian thought to. But as another contrast. Yeah, I mean, if you want to talk about the anthropology, that would be another good area.
- [41:49]
B
Yes, as long as we don't forget about the essay question, because that's very important. I think Plato deserves a lot more credit on that than he's usually given. But in terms of one of the things that people will point to when they Say, well, how did St. Thomas correct Platonism? And it will be this mind, body dualism. Because it's pretty clear for Plato and for the Neoplatonists that the person, I mean, now I'm using Christian word already, that who we are is the soul and that the body weighs the soul down and which in later heresies and Gnosticism, the body will become actively a principle of evil because the activity of the body drags the soul away from the good and the one. So Plato doesn't go that far, right? He's not going to call the body evil, the Neoplatonists, but it is a burden. And there's some truth to this, right? Any one of us who inhabits a body knows that the body can be a burden sometimes to our spiritual realization. But we have a relatively significant issue in Christianity when we bring in the concept of the incarnation, right? If God came down not just as a docetistic soul, a ghost, in order to save us, but came down in his humanity, in his full humanity, that must mean in some way that the body is necessary for humanity. And if necessary for humanity, then a good, a positive good. So Christianity is, I think, one of the things that distinguishes Christianity from every other movement, religious movement on earth. Every religion emphasizes the spiritual. Every, every decent religion is, Is a religion about. About how to perfect the soul. In some ways, Christianity is unique in that it is defender of the goodness of the material world and the significance and importance of the material world. So much so that the means for our own sanctification are bodily things, are material things. And when the early Christians encountered Plato, they found so many good things. They found a wonderful system of ethics that matched Christianity in nearly every point. They found a system that had argued its way towards the one God and an immortal soul. And so they adopted it as much as they possibly could. And there's a temptation throughout Christianity that, you know, we want to emphasize the spiritual side and sometimes that leads to a denigration of the body, and that's bad. And that manifests itself in different ways in dualism and puritanism and all sorts of things like that. And so when they adopted the anthropology of Plato, they sort of unconsciously adopted this, the body problem, the mind body problem. Well, okay, well, we like Plato's idea. It's a really good one. He believes in the immortality of the soul. We've got a rational proof of the immortality of the soul, but he doesn't seem to see the body as significant. And you see a lot of early Christian spiritual writers, a lot of the early monastics, the early ascetics, that if read wrongly, they seem to be anti corporeal, they seem to be anti body, when in reality they're not. I think a deep authentic reading of the early Christian fathers will show that they're not. But still Platonism sits a bit uneasily with that, the Platonic idea. And so when Thomas, when the medievals discover Aristotle and that they realized that form and matter is critical, that you can't have the human form without the matter, that this is revolutionary. And so Thomas finds this anthropology of Aristotle more conducive to defending the goodness of the body from a Christian perspective. And so with that, I mean he, he departs a little bit, but in that sense he retains, and this is what people forget, he retains the Platonic emphasis on the separability and the immortality of the soul. I know that this is particularly debated among Christian Aristotelians, but it's pretty clear to me that at the very least Aristotle is an agnostic on the survivability of the soul after death. And it's. In the Middle Ages it was even more serious because his Muslim commentators had effectively affirmed there is no individual immortality after death, that everything reverted to the active intellect. And so Thomas very strongly had to use those Platonic arguments to say so Aristotle is right. A human is a body and soul together, a body, soul, composite. So much so that after we die, we're not really complete in our personhood until the general resurrection, which then Thomas uses as a very clever philosophical proof of the resurrection. Well, we need to be resurrected because that's how we'll be complete again. And at the same time maintaining those Augustinian Platonic defenses of the immortality of the soul, the unique individuality of the soul. And how does he do it? He says, well, our individuality comes from our once having been embodied. That note of bodily ness is on the soul. And so, I mean, do you see how he uses both an Aristotelian metaphysic and Aristotelian anthropology while maintaining everything that is good about Plato? It's absolutely brilliant, Thomas's anthropology.
- [47:36]
A
Yeah, I appreciate that. And it also shows very clearly that this like kind of a flat narrative of Aquinas rejected Plato and adopted Aristotle, I think is wrong. And I appreciate you addressing too whether Aristotle held to the immortality of the soul because I think that gets skipped over too much and that, you know, a lot of times we look at how Aquinas had to correct Platonism, but at the same time we. I've noticed this, it's not as common to talk about how he corrected Aristotelianism. And again, that kind of goes back into like he just clearly baptized it. How do you. I mean, I apologize, I don't have a particular example. But, you know, we can talk about the medievals and the reception of Aristotle into the medievals and some of the problems that raised and things like this. But what's curious to me is that if you, particularly if you go into the early church, the very early church, they seem to have access to Aristotle. And there's a lot of negative comments that when they look at Plato and they look at Aristotle, you find these early church fathers quotes in which Aristotle is too materialistic. He denies the immortality of the soul. He doesn't understand Plato. That's the one I find fascinating, right? There'll be comments that he doesn't actually understand Plato. And so it seems like sometimes in the early church, there's actually a cognizant rejection of the Aristotelianism on behalf of Plato. And then it kind of stays very Platonic for a long time, and then we have this resurrection of Aristotelianism. How do we handle that kind of initial look at Aristotelianism in the early church? That seems to be somewhat suspicious of him as a materialist.
- [49:02]
B
Everything the early church liked about Aristotle they already found in Plato. And so what they saw was Aristotle, sort of a lesser version of Plato, one that was. That was too dangerously close to a materialism. And so they embraced Plato. I often wonder. I read the Justin Martyr and the Apology, and he talks about going to different philosophers, and he goes to the Stoics and he goes to the Epicureans. And then he went to Aristotelian, he went to a peripatetic. And all the peripatetic philosopher wanted to do was talk about his fees. And so it wasn't really a philosophical problem he had with the peripatetics. It was this venal, peripatetic philosopher. I often wonder if that peripatetic had been less venal. It may have changed the course of Christian philosophical history. But in any case, Justin then goes to the Platonist and he finds in the Platonist this sort of perfect preparatio, evangelic, right? This perfect preparation for the gospel, which is how Augustine sees it, and it's how Thomas sees it. Thomas sees Plato and Aristotle as providential preparations for the gospel, right? Just as we see the Hebrew world preparing us spiritually, we see the Roman world preparing us politically, socially, anthropologically, we see The Greek world preparing us intellectually for the coming of the gospel. The three legged chair of Western civilization that's so critical, but the early church they do tend to. And Augustine, by the time we get to Augustine, we don't have a lot of the Aristotelian texts. Neoplatonism is in full swing and has the wind behind it with people like Plotinus and Porphyry and the stuff that Augustine does. He gives short shrift to. Aristotle's categories. Right? He says, well, I read them, I understood them, but I didn't think that they were that useful, that deep. But then later you're going to have people like Boethius that sees how truly great Aristotle is and that how much Aristotle has to offer. But by that time, by the time that Aristotle starts to get some good pr, well, that's when social order collapses and that's when the areas of learning, Platonic Academy is closed and all these other things that become problematic. And so it's going to have to wait for. Well, Aristotle had to wait for the coming of Islamic philosophy first. Islamic philosophy was light years ahead of Christian philosophy for several hundred years until the Islamic world decided it just didn't want to think anymore. It didn't want philosophy and it didn't even want theology for that matter. It simply wanted literalism by around the year 1200. And so the great inheritor of the Islamic golden age is ironically medieval Scholasticism. It's the west, the great thinkers of the Islamic world, they're not studied in the Islamic world today. Nobody's sitting in a madrasa reading Avicenna and Averroes. We are, the Western universities are, and Thomas was using them and profiting from them. But the Islamic world had also shown how dangerous a misapplication of Aristotle could be for a monotheistic faith. And they showed it very clearly with the case of the immortality of the soul. It ended up with the Islamic philosophers essentially denying personal immortality. And one of the reasons why people were so alarmed in the 13th century about Aristotle was could that happen to us? Could Aristotle wreck philosophy? And that's why Thomas spends his whole career not only doing theology, after all, he was a theology professor, but he had an entire second career where he patiently worked through every line of the Aristotelian commentaries in order to ensure that Aristotle was understood properly, to disentangle him from Islamic accretions, to dissociate him from doctrines that weren't his. All right, like the unity of the ancient intellect is something that was really developed by the Islamic philosophers and isn't original to Aristotle. And so wherever Aristotle could be defended. And Thomas was so good at this in trying to understand his interlocutors in as good a light as possible, even when they were. Even when they were heretical. Right. So the famous work, the Opus Imperfectum was attributed to John Chrysostom, but it's an Arian text. And so what Thomas did was take out all of the good things from that commentary and bracket off the Arian sentiments. And so Thomas was such an ironic, such a great interpreter, a patient interpreter of these things.
- [53:39]
A
Yeah, no, incredibly well said. I appreciate you kind of parsing out how the early church received him and then kind of going into the Islamic thought as well. That's very good. I also liked your three legged stool because obviously on a sand. We talk a lot about Hebrew faith and Greek reason and Roman order, kind of tilling the soil for the reception of Jesus Christ and how this all kind of came together in a very unique culture which really is, you know, finds its zenith in Catholicism. Can we go back though to this distinction of essay being or existence and essence? Can we kind of go to this distinction? And I'm, I'm very much a neophyte here, but this distinction in my understanding is that this is something that is unique to Thomas. That as he kind of took up this kind of intellectual tradition that came to him. Part of the problem was, as we kind of mentioned earlier, was the problem of the one and the many. How do you actually, how do you go from one thing, God, and go to the many things and also then what does that do to the relationship between the one and the many? I've already said multiple times that God plus creation doesn't equal anything more than God. Well then what, what is the many and what does that actually mean? And so my understanding is, is that when we look at then at this kind of hierarchy of participation, right? How, how is all of creation, this hierarchy of creation, how is it all participating in being and how is it actually ordered that Aquinas does something really fascinating and really brilliant here that really pulls, I think from both the Neoplatonic tradition of participation and hierarchy of being, but also a lot of the language and kind of the logical grammar, I guess of Aristotle and did something really unique here. Do you mind kind of leading us through this?
- [55:18]
B
Yeah. This is one of Thomas's key metaphysical points that he makes in De De. And it's astonishing because he wrote that when he was 26 years old. This one of the greatest metaphysical breakthroughs in, in World history. But once again, it's something that he builds on from what he had received. He receives a tradition of Platonic participation, right? We participate in the forms. We have a share of existence from the forms. And then Augustine elevates this with our participation in God. Because this, as you say, the one in the many is such a classic philosophical problem, right? Everything is a deterioration from the one, right? It's a falling away. Things become more and more imperfect, the more multiple, the more manifold it is. And so Thomas is going to retain that. He is also going to develop Aristotle's distinction between act and potency. That all of being, for Aristotle, is divided between act and potency. There's no other thing. Which is why Thomas, Thomas can follow Aristotle's concept of God as pure act and everything else as a combination of act and potency. But then he particularly gets to the question of existence, which is something that Aristotle, as we talked about earlier, just didn't really think about, because for him, the world was eternal. There was no need to appeal to some sort of creation. It was just a stable cyclical world. That. And what you had to explain essentially, is how things change. And so Aristotle did that with, with acting, potency. But what about their coming into being at all, as all of the monotheistic religions insist? Plato has a kind of a model for this in his. In the Timaeus, sort of the necessary emanations that the one was going to give off many. And these many things would be inferior, inferior things until they got to material reality, which was the most inferior thing. So before Thomas, the monotheistic philosophers had considered this, particularly Avicenna. And Avicenna is the one who first makes this distinction between essence which answers the question what is it? And existence, which answers the question, you know, answers that it is that it exists. And to. To conceptualize that distinction. For him, that essence was primary existence was seen as sort of an Aristotelian accident of essence. So a person, for Avicenna, would have. It would be a human who had the accident of existing, right? He had an attribute that could be taken away. Thomas takes this distinction just in its beginning form and elevates it to his prime metaphysical principle. And so Simon Tugwell says that for Thomas, unlike every philosopher before him, every other philosopher before him had been interested in the question, what is it? And so for him, what it is was not the primary interesting thing. The really interesting thing was that it is that it exists at all. And so existence becomes the fundamental metaphysical category. If you want a Copernican Turn in philosophy, this is it, the foregrounding of existence over essence. And so this provides an answer to the one and the many, to the existence of many things. Because you have the one. And people have been asking, you know, what is the one? So Plato said the one is the good. Aristotle said he was the unmoved mover. Augustine said he is the one who creates. Right, the one who is eternal. But Thomas said all of those were sort of, yes, they belong to him. They're part of the definition. But the real, the genuine definition of God is existence. God's essence, his nature, is existence. It is unlimited, absolute, pure, actual being. God is being. His essence and his existence are identical, which is why he is the one God chooses because he's a person, because he's a trinity of persons to create, to share what he has with creatures. And so he takes an essence and adds to it existence. So in everything that is not God, essence and existence are distinct. In everything that is not God, it is not simple. Only God is pure simplicity in the robust philosophical sense. Everything else complexity is less perfect because you have two parts at least, that are put together. An essence plus an existence to which is added existence, a participated being. So even though he's using this new Aristotelian model, it goes way beyond Aristotle. He returns back to a Platonic idea. God is being, necessary being. We are participated beings, all right. Our participation in being is the result of existence being added to a certain type of thing.
- [60:43]
A
Yeah, no, brilliant. I really appreciate that. Yeah. Because my understanding there then is that this is why you take this distinction between existence and essence. And then it creates out of that distinction this hierarchy of participation. And so I really appreciate what you said there, that it's actually only God in which his existence and his essence are the same. You can't actually separate them because the answering the question what he is always says that he. He is that I am. He always has been. He can't actually, those two can't be separated. So, you know, maybe in simple terms, then what that means is that everything else that comes into being at some point, you know, was not in being and does not have to be in being. And so therefore, this kind of, in my simple terms, starts to introduce in the concept that we have to participate in the thing that is basically being itself. And so we receive this. And, you know, people have, you know, essay has many different forms, I guess, but then essence seems to then narrow them. And so my understanding there is that he creates this, but then he artic, which is kind of a very Platonic model, but then he maps onto it or articulates it in an Aristotelian act and potency language, which is not my understanding, is not how Aristotle would have. Because you said earlier, it's not a question that Aristotle really takes up because the world's eternal. So he's not as focused on the essay, the being, the existence, but he takes this Aristotelian language of act and potency and uses it to map out a lot of these distinctions between essay and essence.
- [62:20]
B
Correct? Yeah, that's exactly. And I'm glad you brought up the biblical point from Exodus, that this answers the Exodus question, that it defines God in the way that he calls himself by name. And so Thomas finds this Aristotelian way, but in the midst of that Aristotelian way, he returns the Neoplatonic model of participation by saying that. And we can see this in Augustine as we see in Plotinus, that as we enact our kind of essence, the kind of thing we are, we either participate in being more or tend towards dissolution more. And so this is going to end up affecting his moral theory, right? As we are more perfectly humanized, particularly after the prototypical human Christ, then we, our being is increased, we become who we are meant to be, which is an exceptionally Platonic idea. And that when we do that, we dissipate our. When we fail to do that, we dissipate ourselves and we tend towards, tend towards non being. And Augustine refers to this particularly. And Thomas would be in absolute agreement with this as well. And it also relates to hierarchy, the hierarchical universe which Thomas particularly draws from. I really can't stress how much Thomas loves Dionysius. If you want to understand Thomas Aquinas as a more than an Aristotelian, you need to look at his work, his commentaries, the way that he integrates the divine names and the celestial hierarchies. For him, it's like the Platonic ladder of being. It's that we can, we can see this well ordered cosmos that's not the result of a necessary emanation like Plato called it, but the result of a will, the result of a person, the result of love. And it's not a Platonic ladder. So Thomas is going to deepen that concept that it's not simply eros, though eros is involved, right? That desiring love, it's completed in caritas, the absolute agape, the self giving love, that is going to either draw us up the ladder of being or send us back down towards non being. And because for St. Thomas, just like for Augustine, just like for the Neoplatonists, the dichotomy is not between God and Satan, it's between God and nothing. Right. And so the further away we are from God, the closer we approach the cessation of our own existence as the kind of thing that we're supposed to be.
- [64:53]
A
Yeah. Earlier you mentioned, you know, things that are unique about Christianity, and one of them, I think too, is that as a monotheistic religion, that the more we draw close to God, we actually become more ourselves and not less. And so many other religions you're becoming less yourself, but in Christianity you're actually becoming more of yourself. And I really, I really appreciate there how you took what maybe to many people could sound like, you know, a very kind of theoretical, academic subject, etc. And show immediately how this then pivots into the moral life. So if that, you know, if I agree that the world reality is ordered, I live in this cosmos, the next question is then how. How do I navigate it? How do I live in this cosmos? And how am I supposed to then in that exitus, ready to return to God? And what does it look like then to kind of climb and perfect yourself and pursue Jesus Christ and have that virtue that, I guess to use this phrase, right, that God, a more Platonic phrase, God is beauty itself. And I pursue him and my soul becomes more beautiful by engaging in that arete. In that. In that virtue. So maybe that's a good segue into where it's, what's the role of beauty in St. Thomas Aquinas? Because I think that maybe I play some of my own cards here is that I love reading Plato. It's just beautiful. I just love it. I love the Symposium. It's one of my favorite texts. And I can come to it time and time again. He's a wonderful read. I do not feel the same about Aristotle. Actually. I find Aristotle to be a terribly unerotic read. And I have to sit there and read it like an instruction manual. Like, I know this is good for me, but like, please, I got. It's very hard to focus. I like the narratives. I just. Plato's beautiful, etc. So again, I think that. And well, before I get to that, not only is the text beautiful, but then Plato talks a lot about beauty. And I think that sometimes. Now, if you get different translations, I recently wrote or wrote. I recently read one of the translations of the Nicomachean Ethics by Sax, I believe, and there, instead of translating it as noble, he translates the word as Beautiful or beauty, which actually did make Aristotle at times sound much more Platonic than he kind of normally does. But I think for those who love Plato, we're used to hearing about beauty and how it draws us in and how we want our souls to become beautiful. I think about like the end of the Gorgias too, about like, you know, the tyrant, as a tyrant beats his slave, so does the unjust man beat his soul. And so, you know, vice is this thing that when you present your soul at the end of your life to the judges, your soul's ugly, it's bruised, it's beaten, it's scarred. But for those who live, you know, for Plato, the philosophic life, you have a beautiful soul. When you get into Thomas, he doesn't talk about. He doesn't seem to talk about beauty that much. And so I think again, that lends into him being much more Aristotelian in his jargon. But where's like, the role of beauty for St. Thomas?
- [67:45]
B
That's a really rich question. A lot of thoughts there. I mean, Kalon can either be nobility or beauty. I mean, it just depends on how you're translating and what the context is there. So that's an absolutely acceptable translation. And so just to start off with Plato and Aristotle and their differences, just a couple things to note. Aristotle did write dialogues. They're just all lost. And so I wonder what those would have looked at the remaining Aristotelian texts that we have. Most of them are either lecture notes or they're even notes taken down by a student. Right. And so I don't know how I'd feel after 2000 years of being known only through my students notes class. I suspect I wouldn't come off as well as Aristotle does, but. And so we do have to remember, remember that a little bit. We have to remember Aristotle has a more scientific mindset. Aristotle is deeply interested in the material world. His father was a physician. He loves biology. And so that's why people have maybe a different temperament, maybe more stem temperament like Aristotle, a little bit more to get to St. Thomas and Beauty. It's true, Thomas is not a beautiful writer. He's not a prose stylist. The fineries of Latin style never quite rubbed off on him. For him, Latin is a technical toolbox in order to access the truth in as efficient manner as possible. And there's a certain beauty to that. And one of the advantages to that is if you learn a technical vocabulary of about 50 to 100 words, you're going to be reading Thomas in Latin very quickly, because it is very simple, right? Deus simplex est God is simple. I mean, he said that's kind of how he. How he writes. And so now, does this mean that Thomas doesn't care about beauty? No, that's just not what he's doing at that moment. Because anyone that's been to. To Benediction and heard the beautiful poetry that Thomas pulls out of seemingly nowhere and has remained with us as the way that, I would say most Catholics today interact with St. Thomas would be the hymns of Benediction and of Corpus Christi. We know that how much he loved beauty in that sense, and he does talk about beauty. There is another sort of academic debate on whether Thomas thinks beauty is one of the transcendentals. So, I mean, one true good. We always say the true, the good and the beautiful. I think the jury's out on the beautiful, because I think beauty is the connection between the one. Sorry, between the good and the true. It's particularly that apprehension of the good as true and doing the good because it's true. That's the nexus of beauty instead of being a separate transcendental power. But God is beautiful because he's the cause all beauty. For Thomas, beauty is integrity, proportion, clarity. It is that which pleases when seen. That's Thomas's simple definition of beauty. That which pleases when seen, which is deceptively simple. The first thing we have to do is not reduce it merely to material or sensory seeing. Certainly that's involved. And that gets us to a theory of optimistic aesthetics, right? That we can. We can actually. Some things are actually in the material world more beautiful than other things. That's something that's very difficult to get across to modern people, to students who have sort of this innate suspicion today of beauty. So certainly it applies to the material world. But think of how important seeing is for Thomas. And perhaps the best way to show this is through Thomas's grand student, Dante, and see the importance of vision and seeing and eyes and sight, because it's the analogy, it is the noble sense, because it is the correlative of intellect, of intellectual grasp and intellectual vision. Thomas says that we'll be fulfilled by the beatific vision, which will be the most beautiful thing of all, because it's perfectly integral, it's perfectly ordered, perfectly proportional, perfectly clear to us at that point. And so I think there is a way of digging into a Thomistic aesthetics that's kind of neglected, but people have to be, you know, prepared in different ways, different. I love reading Plato as well. They're just a delight to read. And so if we can see sort of Dante as the, as the opposite side of the coin of Thomas, we see sort of a sung summa, a summa unveiled in poetry. Now Dante's not a perfect Thomas, we know, but he's communicating those truths. And so that's where Thomas, I think would accord with the Platonic ladder of beauty.
- [72:50]
A
Yeah, there's such, his poetry is such. Kind of like a flag, right? Because if you just read the summa, you read a lot of his works, it's very simple, it's very straightforward, it's very technical. And then all of a sudden like, oh, by the way, here is this amazingly beautiful, rich. And I think the only thing you get this too, I have like a little book of Aquinas's prayers. And if you read his prayers, you see this kind of like deeply poetic side that comes out, but it just doesn't seem to be the way that he thought best to express. And probably some of that is, I mean, not to argue against my own Platonic inclinations, but some of that beauty, some of that poetry doesn't lend itself to technical clarity. It tends to express a more existential side that can resonate with a lot of people. But again, as you mentioned, maybe people have more stem minded that technical clarity at times can be very welcomed. You mentioned kind of, you've mentioned, you know, the ladder a few times. But I'm just kind of curious because I mentioned earlier that I love the Symposium and people talk about Plato. Those who have read a lot of the dialogues typically navigate back to the ladder of love. That the soul and the cosmos kind of correspond in their hierarchies in that this eros, this natural love may be a more. More in Latin going back to the exitus ready to it is this fire. Dante gives a wonderful talk about this kind of contra asadia in the Purgatory.
- [74:09]
B
Right.
- [74:09]
A
There's this natural fire in man that has a nature to ascend. It wants to actually go back to God. And so you have in the ladder of love how the soul can move from lesser goods to higher goods, from lesser beauties to higher beauties, moving all the way up, you know, eventually for Plato, he kind of has this kind of vague divine beauty itself. It's not clear exactly. It's not entirely clear like that. It seems like the form is that God, you know, the relationship between the forms and God is not always clear in Plato. But for Christianity, for like Dionysius, like okay, yes, that is God. It's God is Beauty itself. And there's a wonderful mapping there, because sometimes they even talk about this in Ocia, simply because what that teaches you on a simple level is that your erotic desire, your appetite, is infinite. And that brings it into an immediate problem, because all the goods in this life, all the beauties of this life are finite, even like the really good ones. Oh, I have a beautiful spouse, I have beautiful dinners with friends, I have wonderful children. They're all finite. And they also. Not only are they limited, they only make you happy in certain ways. They don't make you happy in all ways.
- [75:14]
B
Right.
- [75:14]
A
It'd be odd if I had a glass of scotch and that just was a euphoric experience that made me happy in all ways.
- [75:19]
B
Right.
- [75:20]
A
For all things. This is the beatific vision. So it makes sense then, even from a natural standpoint, even without looking at Scripture, that your erotic appetite, this desire, is actually looking for an infinite beauty. That's the only way it can actually be satiated. And then obviously you satiate in God. That doesn't preclude the lesser beauties. It kind of cascades down and perfects everything in it. Do we. I mean, I know Aquinas says the exitus reditus bright broadly, but if someone said, like, where's the ladder of love in Thomistic thought? Is there ever a way that he comments on it or alludes to it or where would we look?
- [75:53]
B
Yeah, I mean, he didn't know the Symposium directly, but he knows the celestial hierarchy of Dionysius. He calls it a eucharistic hierarchy sometime, which I really like. He calls, I just gave a paper on the Creed, and Thomas calls the Creed a eucharistic hierarchy, in that it is the latter, whereby that God has given us through revelation, coming, the teaching coming from the one that will draw us back, just as the Eucharist draws us back to God and participation in the body and life of Christ. And so in there, he definitely does. I mean, if the particular passage of the Symposium, if the Symposium itself is not there, certainly it is absolutely there. And that leads to me, to what I think is one of the. And by the way, I have had some scotch that has provided nearly that experience. So. But you're right, not quite. It can't ever. Even the best scotch I've had has not quite gotten me there. But this hierarchy that Thomas wants is rooted in his ethics, right? In his virtue, which. And the virtues, once again, Plato and Aristotle get to the same direction they approach it from. Get to the same destination, they approach it from rather different Directions, but they get to this virtue. And for Thomas, one of the key, I think today one of the absolutely critical Thomistic teachings that we need to reinforce is that nature, grace builds upon nature and that grace does not destroy nature. In fact, the grace that God gives us enables us to become who we are supposed to be. It perfectly. It heals us as the Good Samaritan heals us. He heals the wounds of sin and he restores us not to as good as we were, but better than we could have ever possibly hoped to be through grace. And this is effected through cooperation, through our, through our willing cooperation with grace in developing the habitual virtues that are necessary in order to live a beautiful life. And this, this, you know, it affects the way that we do things, right? I mean, it affects how we interact with other people, how, what kind of friendships we generate, the kind of food that we begin to eat and the way that we, the way, the manner in which we eat, the way that we begin to consume things during our leisure hours. Whether, you know, you start with video games and then you begin to progress and okay, now I'm going to read Dante and now I'm going to listen to Mozart. And that's. Those things have to be cultivated as well to live a whole life with nature, building up grace so that we can realize when we see it, the true and the good and the beautiful, which for Thomas, these are all steps, the virtues, grace, graced virtues, and these practices are all steps on that ladder.
- [78:48]
A
Yeah, very well said. No, I appreciate you kind of showing how that imprint is in maybe Thomistic thought. Overall, I do think that Dionysius gets overlooked a lot. I've, I've read a few of his works. You know, I'm actually, you know, the podcast goes on for another 20 years. We'll finally get to him and. But I, I'm, I'm interested to kind of read him like in a deeper way, if that makes sense.
- [79:07]
B
Right.
- [79:07]
A
If I can go back and just ask one question because I want to make sure that I'm kind of tracking. When we talked about, you know, existence in essence, we talked about, I think we kind of emphasized how since God is being itself, then we're pulling our being from God. And so there's this like participatory nature in it. What about, though on the essence side. So that's the existence side. So on the essence side. So obviously I pull my being, but many things have being, but it's my essence that is that kind of limiting factor. If I understand correctly, it Limits me of like, okay, well, you have being, but you're a horse or you're a man or you're a truck, whatever it is. And where does that come from? Is that seems to ultimately also be coming from God. That seems an easy answer. It's like an ocia. The answer is always Jesus. So you get it. You get partial credit there. But how do we articulate that? Because we kind of mapped out the essay side. But what about the essence side? How does the essence go from God to the dandelion?
- [80:06]
B
God creates a universe in which there is inequality. And that inequality is a feature, not a bug, a lot of the things. It's that hierarchy of being again, that God creates a universe with manifold different things in it as an example of his wisdom and his power. That if he had just created one thing, or if he'd created a race of human automatons, human robots, it would show a lesser degree of perfection in the world that he's actually created. And so Saint Therese of Lisieux explains this so well, right? That God plants this beautiful garden. And the fact that there are daisies there does not detract, but actually enhances the beauty of the roses. And so this. The. So Thomas actually takes the problem, right, of the many and turns it into this great feature of divine wisdom, which is. It's absolutely brilliant that this inequality that we find in nature, that we find even among humans, is there for a reason. Now, I'm not talking about unjust inequality. I'm talking about the differences in levels of being, the differences in human personality and human talent and those things that are innate, that these are good. And God creates those things so that the person with the talent, who cooperates with the talent to play the piano, can please those of us who have developed our skills so that we are delighted when we hear that person play Mozart. And so that that diversity actually increases the perfection of the universe that God created.
- [81:42]
A
Okay, good. No, thank you. I appreciate that. How do we. Where would we look? Maybe if everyone talks about the summa. But maybe like a twofold question. One, like, if I wanted to really see, like, okay, here's a good place where there's a good Platonic imprint on Aquinas. What work would I turn towards? And two, is Aquinas consistent in his pulling from the Neoplatonics throughout his life? Or is there a gradation there, a maturation? How does that work?
- [82:08]
B
I do see. This is a little controversial, but I definitely see, and everyone does see maturation and different emphases like for instance, everyone knows that Thomas becomes much more deeply involved with the Greek fathers after he encounters them in the papal library in Orvieto. And so we see references to the Greek fathers multiply. I mean, he loves the Greek fathers. It's very clear after 1261. But I think that he had a very clear focus on aristotle in the 1250s, that he was. That he was really interested in getting to the bottom of the philosophers, as he called him, the philosopher, which tells us a little bit something about Aristotle, right? For Thomas, he is the philosopher. You know, Plato was Plato, but Aristotle is the philosopher. So, I mean, we do have to credit that a bit. And as he goes into the 1260s, he actually becomes more Augustinian. He actually begins to involve more Neoplatonic ideas. And I think this is largely an effect of his great devotion to Dionysius, because he knows Dionysus very early. He helps St. Albert comment on Dionysius. I think he gets a little bit of Platonic influence from Alberta himself. And part of his differentiating himself from Albert and from the other professors, sort of making a name for himself was this work on note. Let me show you how Aristotle is supposed to be understood. Then once he's an established scholar, that's when he begins very much deepening. I mean, it's certainly. I mean, most of his metaphysical points are very clear from the beginning of his career, but he deepens this through an exposure to the Greek fathers, through more Augustine, through studies of Plato, and by the end of his career, especially in the disputed questions on separated substances and on spiritual creatures. If you want to find out Thomas really engaging with Plato, those later disputed questions, they're very difficult, right? These are not meant for beginners. These are the ones that were meant as, like, academic monographs in his time. They're the ones that are going to reveal. We also see it in his commentaries on the Psalms that he makes at the end of his life, much more engagement with Platonism. And while he still maintains those sort of several key Aristotelian metaphysical positions, he sees how useful and how good the Platonists have been. Platonici, he calls them. Right, The Platonists. Sometimes you refer to Plato by name, sometimes the Platonici in plural. So you want to look at the end of his career, and you will really begin to see that maturation just. I mean, what would have happened if he had not died at 49 years old? What. What. What could have come, but what he gave us was already enough for 10 lifetimes of work.
- [84:57]
A
Yeah, very good. No, I appreciate that. So what just as like a clarification, where do you see him in his phases when he's like moving through the Summa? Because that's what most people are familiar with, right? And obviously he doesn't finish it, but I'm actually personally not familiar with how long of his life he was working on it. So if you look at the Summa, how's that fit in with like this kind of early Aristotelian influence and then kind of shifting into maybe Greek father's Dionysian influence?
- [85:22]
B
This is also a little, a little controversial because a lot of people see their exposure to Thomas is essentially the Five Ways and the treatise on law, alright? So if you have a sort of an introductory college class, if you're lucky, you'll get those. And the way that that's presented, oh, this is just kind of a cold Aristotelian logic. This guy isn't really, you know, and look at his style. This does not existent and he's just interested in making distinctions and things like this. And you start to forget that once he, I mean, the first part of the Summa is absolutely fantastic for theological philosophy. It's the greatest work ever. But as he gets into the prima secunde, the Secunda Secunde, when he starts talking about the moral life, all of a sudden his discussion on the passions and the virtues becomes so vivified and he's doing this in the middle to late career, right? So the Summa is a product of this more mature idea. So he develops and you can see the development from his early commentary on the Sentences when he was in his 30s, to working on the Summa when he's in his mid-40s and you start to see. And then specially when we get to the third part in the life of Christ, right? So we have the going out of all things to God, we have the life of virtue, we have the life of morality. And then we get the picture of morality, the picture of the goal, which is the Incarnation, which is Christ himself and the return of all things to God. And so it becomes in a sense much warmer near the end of his life. And the Summa does take. And even within the Summa we see a progression in that, in the way that he uses sources. And if you want to use this is for a loose term, a more a warmer Thomas by the end.
- [87:06]
A
No, I appreciate that, thank you. Is there, and this might be a loaded question, so, you know, feel free to dodge it, but is there like people are wanting to learn more about this and obviously, you can read Thomas. Reading primary sources is great. That's what we mainly do here on the podcast. But if people want to kind of say no, I'd really like to focus on maybe Thomas is a loaded term. Whatever. Students, you know, teachers of St. Thomas, who. Who do you think really kind of understands Thomas as a synthesis? Like what. What thinkers? What Thomas would people turn to maybe to kind of hit this balance correctly?
- [87:38]
B
Right. We're really lucky in that a lot of scholars have turned their attention to this matter, especially in the last 20 or 25 years. The classic study was. Was Robert Henley's St. Thomas and Platonism, which you have, I think you have there on your. And this is in the late 50s. And he does us the service of collecting together all of Thomas's references to Plato and Platonists in his works. Now, he does put these in Latin, and he doesn't always have a very extended sort of analysis, but it has the great merit of collecting all those things together. And so if you want to look just for reference, that's the best first reference. There's a couple texts, there's a couple articles that I think are really important for this. There was a collection called Aquinas the Augustinian by Matt Levering, Michael Dauphine and Barry. That is really. The whole book is about this as Augustine. As Thomas is being analyzed through an Augustinian lens, they're analyzing him through a Platonic lens as well. So that is a very rich collection that I can recommend. David Burrell has a. Was a great philosopher at Notre Dame, has an article called Analogy, Creation and Theological Language in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas. We haven't really talked much about the analogy of being, but that was another critical Thomistic point, another controversial Thomistic point. And he talks about the influence of Plato and the Neoplatonists on Thomas's doctrine of analogy, which is critical for understanding what Thomas is doing. In the Oxford Handbook of Thomas Aquinas, Wayne Hanke, who's done a lot of work on this, has an article called Aquinas, Plato and Neoplatonism. Once again, that's the Oxford Handbook of Aquinas. And finally, if you want just a general introduction, Ed Faser's Scholastic Metaphysics will give you all of sort of the technical background, the jargon, as we've been talking about the terminological framework for all of these things, and talk about what's coming from Aristotle, what's coming from Plato. It's really a great general introduction.
- [89:47]
A
Yeah, that's fantastic. Actually, Dauphine was One of my teachers when I was at Maria University. So that's really exciting to actually hear him kind of in this vein because we're actually still looking to find a time maybe for him to come, you know, on the podcast. Okay, good. Anything maybe from. I realized that we could talk about this all day. I'd like to talk about it all day because one, I'm deeply in debt to St. Thomas Aquinas because actually speaking of Ave Maria, when I went down there, you know, I grew up in a kind of very fidistic Christian household, church, whatever you want to say. It's very nebulous. But so, I mean, running into St. Thomas Aquinas was such a salutary thing. The idea that faith and reason were harmonious together and you could present these kind of beautifully ordered hierarchical faith. I mean, I just ate it up. And I was very blessed at Ave Maria that the summa was basically the cortex in every class. As I've gotten older, I've really come to appreciate Plato. So, you know, my, my prejudice here, right, is that these two loves of mine are actually much more harmonious than sometimes people want to give them credit for. So I would talk about this all day with you, but anything that you think we missed or you'd like to clarify or anything kind of as a.
- [90:55]
B
Final thought, just that. Well, two things really, based on what you said. First of all, that this is a dialogue, a historical dialogue among friends. Thomas loves Aristotle and Thomas loves Plato. He thinks that both of them are bearers of wisdom that can undergird the revelation of the true God. And so he is very happy to bring that sort of historically impractical congress of minds, that great conversation. And just as he's happy to have Avicenna and Averroes and Maimonides in his classroom, so this is a dialogue among friends, which I think we so often forget in sort of more modern philosophy where it becomes such a dog eat dog world. Instead of the sort of the Cartesian posture of doubt that modernity has, the pre modern Christian was a posture of gratitude for what one has received and not seeking to tear things down or replace things to fit, you know, modern man or whatever it is. But it's a respectful. And then, and then to take that and build upon it, right? To be privileged to stand on the shoulders of giants and not be in some way offended by that, instead of tearing down foundations, continuing to build what we've been given. And the second one is I find your experience of St. Thomas exactly what I find in school. My Students, the religious students, even sometimes when they're Catholic, but mostly the Protestant students have come from these fideistic backgrounds at which faith and reason have nothing whatsoever to do with one another. It is bracketed off, it's just how strongly you believe in Jesus and that's all that matters. And from the atheists, from the non religious side, the atheists, they're also convinced, I think because of this, that religion is inherently irrational and that religion and reason have no business being in the same room together. And so just having them in class and presenting this tradition, this great tradition of faith and reason really moves people. It really is. I mean, unlike a comment made by our former Pope, I absolutely believe God can be found in a classroom. In fact, I've dedicated my life to that belief that God can be found in a classroom. Now once you find God in the classroom, you go out of the classroom and change the world. But he's certainly there as well. And as I end my book, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Aquinas was convinced of this fact too, that God could be found in the classroom.
- [93:33]
A
Yeah, wonderful. So Dr. Perla, we really appreciate you being here today and kind of guiding us through this conversation. It's a beautiful conversation. I think you've added a lot of wisdom here, things that I actually want to, to go back and probably listen again and thank you for all the kind of the recommendations. We can continue to kind of dig into this. Where can people find out more about you and your work?
- [93:52]
B
They can look me up on the University of Tulsa website or they can do a search on Amazon. All my books are available on Amazon. Just released a book, the first translation of the lives of Saint Omobono of Cremona, who was the first non royal lay saint. He's the patron of business people. Sadly, he is almost unknown, particularly in the English speaking world. So my co author Paul Voss and I have tried to correct that. Also I have new works that are out on administration, sanctity and administration, how important it is to keep those two concepts together, especially in administering the Church. And also a new sort of a higher level academic study on the history of the royal Roman Curia. So things that are, you know, have been in the news lately. I really liked what Leo said to the Curia. He said, you know, popes come and go, but the curia remains. So it's a very important office that we often confuse as sort of a sort of bureaucracy, but really it's a fundamental, fundamental service to the church. And so I've been working on that in that area, too.
- [95:00]
A
Well, from someone who works at a chancery. You know, I think we've done a lot of work to show that the chancery is a ministry and a really important one because, yes, I agree. Good administration. People kind of forget that good administration is very much an antecedent to actually just a flourishing church. That we're actually prudent. Yeah. That we're being given to us in.
- [95:19]
B
A world that God created. Right. He created us to bring order, and that's, that's what that does.
- [95:26]
A
Well, thank you again so much for being on the podcast today.
- [95:28]
B
Thank you very much. It's always a pleasure. Thank you, Deacon.
- [95:31]
A
All right, everyone, we are going to gearing back up to jump into Dante and his purgatory as we're looking at Lent. So go check out thegreatbookspodcast.com for our reading schedule and we will see you next week. Thank you.