Chapter 1: Who is Thomas Aquinas and why is he significant?
each human being can have the confidence that his life her life is not an accident there might be bad things that happen you may have experienced some measure of pain a heaping helping of suffering seeming incoherences but it's part of a story and that story redounds to god's glory and potentially your salvation and so you can have the confidence that if you gaze into it it won't be the void that gazes back
I don't know if this is more preachy than your show ordinarily is, but I kind of can't help myself.
I appreciate it. I mean, you are a member of the order of preachers. It would be contrary to your nature if you were otherwise. If you're a longtime viewer of my show, you will know that the sentences in every episode contain three things, a noun, a verb, and a quote from St. Thomas Aquinas. But a lot of people don't know who this guy is.
And they ask me, they say, Michael, tell me about Thomas Aquinas. And I say, look, I love St. Thomas Aquinas. I have a devotion to St. Thomas Aquinas. My confirmation name is Thomas. But what do I know, man? I'm just a cigar salesman. So I'm so pleased to bring in someone who is truly expert.
That would be Father Gregory Pine of the Order of Preachers, who is a professor of philosophy at the Dominican House of Studies. as well as the assistant director of the Thomistic Institute, named after the aforementioned saint, Thomas Aquinas, and the author of Training the Tongue and Growing Beyond Sins of Speech. Father, thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. I'm delighted.
I want to get to the subject of the book, because that really pertains to podcasting. In my line of work, there are really three constituent parts. A detraction, calumny, and gossip. That is basically the whole industry. So I'd love to get to that. I'm very concerned about matters of speech. I wrote my own book on it, probably from a less theological lens. First, I want to know.
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Chapter 2: What are the Five Ways to God's existence according to Aquinas?
I personally want to know, because even though I have a great devotion to Thomas Aquinas, he wrote 10 billion words and he expounded on every single topic under the entire sun. Who is he and why do Catholics and more traditionally minded Protestants and especially political conservatives quote him all the time?
Good question. Let me think about that. I'm done thinking. So St. Thomas Aquinas is a touchstone of the Catholic intellectual tradition.
in short he inherited like the main insights of those who went before him and he communicates them in a way that's readily available to those who have come since so sometimes in the 21st century people about like they'll talk about saint thomas aquinas as if he were complicated or overly complex but the reason for which we still talk about him is that he managed to communicate
in as coherent a way as one can for complex things. So St. Thomas, in effect, the work that he undertakes is to kind of translate the divine wisdom to human concepts. And yeah, I don't know exactly if that's the best way to kind of qualify it, but he's referred to as the common doctor of the church because he inherited the main findings of those who went before him.
You know, he's a deep reader of sacred scripture. He's engaging with the fathers of the church in really, really subtle and beautiful ways. And then he's communicating the faith in its integrity. So he's not just like, I like this, that, and the other thing, and I'm going to talk about them until the cows come home.
He tries to communicate the faith as it flows from God and as it conducts us back to God. So yeah, if I were to summarize it in three adjectives, he's wise, he's holy, and he's comprehensive.
So that'll do it. Nice. I heard a story that, you know, he writes everything. Probably the most famous work is the Summa Theologiae. And then he has this mystical vision at the end of his life, and he comes back and he says, oh, everything I've written is straw. One, is that true as far as legends about saints go? And two, what does that mean?
So I think it's true. So St. Thomas Aquinas is one of these saints who had his life and works kind of subjected to thorough scrutiny as part of like a modern canonization process. The modern canonization process is kind of coming online in the centuries before him, but it's really, it's cruising, it's really doing what it ought to do by the time that He is up for canonization.
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Chapter 3: How does Aquinas define natural law and its importance?
And so you'll hear that story recounted, I think in the biography written in association with that process by William of Tocco. So it was like St. Thomas was in the priory in Naples at the end of his life. He was assigned there from like 1272 to 1274 for his last stint. And he used to celebrate mass and then he would serve mass for his like main scribe, Reginald Piperno.
And he would also spend a lot of time in Thanksgiving and he would weep copiously. And it was the sacristan of that priory church whose name is like Domenico, I've forgotten his last name. And he was passing by and he heard in clear tones an exchange between St. Thomas Aquinas and the crucified Lord. And like, that's the main story.
Like he heard, well, you have written of me, Thomas, what would you have in return? And St. Thomas is said to have responded, nothing but thyself, O Lord, nothing but thyself. So I think it's good to keep that in mind that our Lord thought that he wrote well, because shortly thereafter, kind of in association with that mystical experience and also the exhaustion of his life's work, St.
Thomas pronounced upon his works that they were so much straw by comparison to what he had seen. So it's not to say that they're straw, because if they were straw, he would burn them. They're straw by comparison to what he saw, and he saw the Lord. And so shortly thereafter, that event happened on the feast of St. Nicholas in 1273, and then he died on the 7th of March in 1274.
So it precipitated the end of his life. He actually died on the way to the Second Council of Lyon. I might be muddling a couple of details of the story and just mish-mashing, so my apologies to those in the comm box who have- Could have been the Third Council of Lyon.
No, probably not.
There isn't one, but nevertheless.
So that story that you just recounted is one of the other very famous stories about him, which is that God says, you've written well of me. And he says, what will you have? And instead of saying, I want a Ferrari or I want a box of Mayflower cigars, which would be worthy answers. So I can mention. You're crushing it. Thank you very much.
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Chapter 4: What insights does Aquinas provide on virtue ethics?
I know we're three minutes in. But rather than that, he says, nothing but you, oh Lord, which makes so much sense. And so this reminds me of something. that I see going around Twitter. I see St. Thomas going around Twitter a lot, which does my heart good because Twitter is a cesspool and it's full of scum and villainy. But sometimes you see these bright moments.
And one thing that was going around was St. Thomas pointing out that lust is one of the causes of despair. And I think, actually, he says sloth is maybe more primary a cause of despair, but lust is a big cause of it, because lust turns your mind away from spiritual goods toward earthly goods. And so, because your mind isn't on spiritual goods, you know, you're lost.
Ultimately, that's where your hope has to lie. It made me realize that his answer is the obvious answer, because no nearly terrestrial thing will ever satisfy any of us. And so, you know, it's not just that he's being holier than thou. That's the only reasonable answer to give, nothing but you, O Lord. When one reads Thomas Aquinas, it's so eminently reasonable
And yet the thinkers of the Enlightenment, so-called, mocked the scholastic thinkers of the Middle Ages and said, oh, they're all debating how many angels dance on the head of a pin or whatever. How did the thinkers like Thomas Aquinas fall out of favor? Are they coming back into favor again? And if so, why?
Yeah, I think, so this is my take. This idea might be shared by other individuals. I haven't checked in with them, so I'll just send it across the bow. I think that, so in the history of theology, at a certain point, like especially in the late 15th, early 16th century, people get really concerned about nitty gritty details.
And we understand why, because if you found yourself in an ambiguous moral situation or in a potentially compromising situation, you want to be able to act with certainty and confidence, especially when you fear for your ever loving immortal soul. And so,
During that time, especially with kind of contemporary changes in philosophy or the practice of philosophy, there was doubt that we could actually know the things themselves. And so there became this great reliance on authorities. So philosophers and theologians began adjudicating claims on the basis of who said
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Chapter 5: How does grace relate to happiness in Aquinas' theology?
or how vehemently this or that person said. And so it became this kind of calculus of if you can marshal X number of authorities or Y number of authorities, then you can be certain, then you can be confident. And it was as part of that conversation that people began to reject scholastic thought.
because it had become kind of decadent and it had become inordinately concerned with pacifying doubts rather than getting to the heart of the matter. And so St. Thomas has always been someone to whom we can return because he's passionate about getting to the heart of the matter. St.
Thomas doesn't necessarily address a lot of these nitty-gritty details in his works, but he furnishes you with principles so that you can rehearse arguments, so that you can be in fruitful dialogue with your environment, your contemporaries, with whomever. And I think that like, yeah, part of the reason for which St. Thomas has so much purchase now is because you read St.
Thomas and you find that you can engage with life in a way that's more free, in a way that's more kind of abandoned as it were, maybe that's the wrong word to choose. But the basic idea is that, you attend to what is most important and you find that that kind of unriddles the complexities.
And while life still might be hard, you know, it's like hard to persevere in the practice of the faith, it needn't be overly complex, you know? And so like St. Thomas, you know, even though people talk about him as overly complex, it ends up that he, yeah, he facilitates an encounter with life which proves more simple.
It reminds me of the Reagan line in his most famous speech, Time for Choosing. He says, you know, some people say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Maybe they are simple, not easy, but simple. And in a way, I guess I get the same feeling from St. Thomas Aquinas. Which is, I'm not saying that what he is teaching is easy to live out, but it is simple enough.
In fact, divine simplicity, I suppose, would be one of the things he teaches. So then for people who are listening to this, and they're saying, okay, this is Thomas, he sounds like an interesting guy, and he had a lot of answers. I mean, truly, I consult him on just about any question I have. What should I have for breakfast on Tuesday? It's in the Secunda Secunda, I think.
They're going to say, okay, I get it, but what... What is it that he is teaching me practically for my life today that I am not getting from the modern world?
I think often this line from Chesterton, he says, the most practical of persons is the mystic.
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Chapter 6: What challenges does Aquinas' thought address in modern culture?
In the sense that the mystic has clearly between his navigational beacons, the port of call, the mystic is headed for heaven. And in light of heaven, he's able to make judgments as to things here on the surface of the earth and do so with clarity and conviction. And I think that's the power of St.
Thomas Aquinas in that he's not a slave to our practical considerations, but he furnishes us with, again, speculative principles or maybe to make it more approachable for folks. He furnishes us with genuine wisdom.
Yeah.
that we find we can apply to practically every situation. So there's some real input energy. I think about those like charts in my ninth grade biology textbook, like you have to have like a catalyst, maybe it's whatever, shut up, no one cares. But the basic idea is like, you're gonna have to invest a little bit at the outset.
to engage with the Catholic intellectual tradition or the Christian intellectual tradition more broadly, but you find that it furnishes you with a grammar so as to speak coherently, and then your own experience of life becomes more, I guess, transparent to these cool conceptual resources. I'm speaking overly complexly, but the idea is this. It's like a lot of us are eclectic in our thinking.
We're like, this cool person said that, and this holy person said this, and this other guy, whatever, who cares? But the idea is that it all hangs together.
Like it all comes forth from God and returns back to God, and that we can kind of tap into God's providential plans in their unfolding, not in that we become ubermention as a result, but in the sense that we can actually know, and we can actually love. So like when you and I enter a church, for instance, we're not like, hey, here's the thing.
People said that our Lord is present in the Eucharist, but like can't really rule out the other alternatives because we haven't seen him appear in a Eucharistic meeting. Who knows about anything? So I'll genuflect to the front of the church, to the left of the church, to the right of the church. I'll genuflect to the entrance itself. You know, it's like to cover my bases.
It's like, no, no, we just genuflect because we believe that we can have certainty, confidence that the Lord is who he says he is. And on the basis of that conviction, St. Thomas is able to say like, okay, Here are steps, here are principles, here are arguments. This is the way that you engage.
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Chapter 7: How can Aquinas' teachings be applied to contemporary moral dilemmas?
You don't actually like nourish yourself on what is. You're just whatever. St. Thomas says like, you can know and you can love.
Because, right, there's the impulse to say, and I fall into this all the time, well, this old dead smart guy said something, and good enough for him, good enough for me. So there's that kind of appeal to authority. But then there's another one I fall into. There is this reflexive observation from the modern world, which is we say, well, look, that guy is wrong about everything.
He's wrong about literally everything. And so if he says something that I don't know very much about, I'll just assume that that's not true and perhaps take the opposite approach. And, you know, practically, it kind of works. It does work out, but it's not rooted. You're right. That doesn't lend itself towards systematic thought. So I think you've hit on this crucial point, which is in our world,
Our culture is very skeptical of certainty. Even on the right, even among Christians, they just say, well, you can't ever really know. The medievals, the scholastics, Thomas Aquinas, they really knew, like they really knew. When did we stop really knowing things?
Good question. Short answer, I have no idea. Long answer is I suspect it had something to do with the traumas that Europe passed through in the 16th and 17th centuries. And you see that reflected in philosophical thought. I'd like to introduce my friend Father Bonaventure into the conversation who teaches specifically 18th century pietist precursors to Kantian thought.
Well, I mean, look, that is a fan favorite out here. Millions of the audience members
morning, noon, and night. Yeah, when you said at the beginning, like a lot of people are asking, who is this Thomas Aquinas? I thought to myself, how many people, you know, at least maybe four. Yeah, I can't rule it out.
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Chapter 8: What practical steps can individuals take to embody Aquinas' teachings?
That's okay. I'm in a cottage industry. Well, when it comes to the things that I'm interested in, it's like St. Thomas Aquinas and like Philadelphia sports. I have a lot more, nevermind, keep going, Gregory. But the basic idea is this, you know, so like Descartes, for instance, the beginning of the discourse on method is revolutionary.
just call everything into doubt and then see what you can do on the basis of your subjective experience.
And then the idea that things which people claim to be certain of can be a source of, you know, violence, oppression, et cetera, whether those claims are adjudicated in good faith or whether that's just used as ammunition as a way by which to rule out difficult claims that have purchase on my life, which caused me to convert, you know, we can talk about that all day.
and all night with all three people who care about who Thomas Aquinas is. But yeah, I think that in the 16th and 17th century, you see the breakup of a kind of consensus. And, you know, people blame that on science. I don't think it's to be blamed on science. Obviously, like the medievals had an appreciation for how science was to be conducted.
Their approach, their kind of methodology relied heavily on demonstration so that you could advance with certainty. You make the empirical judgments and then you say, okay, let's ground this on the basis of what we know. But yeah, I think that we're still in the, whatever, aftermath, in the ruins of a kind of post-apocalyptic wreck that was visited upon us by 17th century folks.
I mean, this very company has gotten lots of views because of a movie called, What is a Woman?, which became this dominant question in our culture to show you the extremes of the skepticism. So then what do you say, what does St. Thomas say to the person who is watching? I've gotten a lot of emails on this. They say, look, the culture is awful. It's decadent. It's terrible.
It's making me unhappy. The behaviors that it imbues in me are making me unhappy. I want to believe. I want certainty. But I just can't do it. So what do you do?
So I'd say there are also... salvation historical reasons for which we find it difficult to be certain and confident. Like we're all laboring under the burden of sin. So we come into this world despoiled of grace and wounded in our nature. And so we're just thinking through things under the cloud of ignorance. We're choosing through things with this kind of
I don't know what you would call like a knot of malice. And then we're feeling through things with a healthy dose of like concupiscence and weakness mixed in. So it's just hard to navigate life in that respect. Insofar as the very tools with which we're trying to process our experience are themselves bent, not broken, but bent.
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