Pints With Aquinas - 01: Who are you, St. Thomas?

Episode Date: March 29, 2016

Because the doctor of Catholic truth ought not only to teach the proficient, but also to instruct beginners (according to the Apostle: As unto little ones in Christ, I gave you milk to drink, not meat -- 1 Corinthians 3:1-2), we purpose in this book to treat of whatever belongs to the Christian religion, in such a way as may tend to the instruction of beginners. We have considered that students in this doctrine have not seldom been hampered by what they have found written by other authors, partly on account of the multiplication of useless questions, articles, and arguments, partly also because those things that are needful for them to know are not taught according to the order of the subject matter, but according as the plan of the book might require, or the occasion of the argument offer, partly, too, because frequent repetition brought weariness and confusion to the minds of readers. Endeavouring to avoid these and other like faults, we shall try, by God's help, to set forth whatever is included in thissacred doctrine as briefly and clearly as the matter itself may allow. Introduction to Summa Theologica  SPONSORS EL Investments: https://www.elinvestments.net/pints Exodus 90: https://exodus90.com/mattfradd/  Hallow: http://hallow.app/mattfradd  STRIVE: https://www.strive21.com/  GIVING Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mattfradd This show (and all the plans we have in store) wouldn't be possible without you. I can't thank those of you who support me enough. Seriously! Thanks for essentially being a co-producer coproducer of the show. LINKS Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/matt-fradd FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ SOCIAL Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattfradd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd MY BOOKS  Does God Exist: https://www.amazon.com/Does-God-Exist-Socratic-Dialogue-ebook/dp/B081ZGYJW3/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586377974&sr=8-9 Marian Consecration With Aquinas: https://www.amazon.com/Marian-Consecration-Aquinas-Growing-Closer-ebook/dp/B083XRQMTF/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586379026&sr=8-4 The Porn Myth: https://www.ignatius.com/The-Porn-Myth-P1985.aspx CONTACT Book me to speak: https://www.mattfradd.com/speakerrequestform

Welcome to Pints with Aquinas, Episode 1. I'm Matt Fradd. If you could sit down with St. Thomas Aquinas over a pint of beer and ask him any one question, what would it be? In today's episode, since it is the very first episode, we're going to ask a couple of introductory questions, namely, who are you, St. Thomas, and tell us a little bit about this Summa Theologica business. Welcome to Pints with Aquinas. Thanks for joining us. This is the show where you and I pull up a bar stool

next to the angelic doctor and discuss theology and philosophy. I'm pretty excited about the podcast today and the podcast you'll be hearing from here on in. Every podcast will revolve around a particular question and we will hear directly from the man himself, St. Thomas Aquinas, from his most famous work, the Summa Theologica. In today's episode, though, we want to get to know St. Thomas a little better. Perhaps you've heard of St. Thomas, perhaps you know a little bit about him. Maybe you've read some of his stuff at university. Maybe you've heard of his hymns or read some of his prayers. But we want to get to know him a little bit better and then understand a little bit more about what the Summa Theologica is. So, who is St. Thomas Aquinas?

Well, he was born around 1226 and died in the year 1274. He became a saint and his feast day was actually originally in March, but because it kept falling during Lent, they decided to move it to January the 28th. And so that's his feast day now. He is the patron saint of students and universities. St. Thomas came from a rather well-off family, not the most influential, but a family that did have some influence. He went to school around the age of five. Apparently, he kept asking his teacher this question, what is God? Not what is God like, not, you know, tell me about God, but what is God?

Interesting question. And for those of you who have read much of Aquinas, you know that his answer is, we don't know and we can't know the divine essence in and of itself. We can't comprehend that. Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. But St. Thomas went to school. His parents had hoped that he would become a monk. What they did not hope was that he would decide to become a Dominican friar. This was a relatively

new order. They traveled from town to town. They preached. They actually begged for their food. He first came across them in Naples when he was studying there at the university. So they were unlike any other religious community that he had met. And so he became rather enthralled by them. This is around the age of 15 and decided he wanted to join them. This brought embarrassment to his family. And at one point, his mother actually sent two of his brothers off, we think it was two, to kidnap St. Thomas as he was being moved to Rome by the Dominicans. They were moving him because they knew that his mother was kicking up quite a stink. Well, the brothers got him and they actually took him back to the home castle where St. Thomas was imprisoned for

around a year. So if you were ever grounded unfairly as a child in your eyes, it's pretty safe to say it was nothing compared to this. During that year, St. Thomas tutored his sisters. He prayed and he never lost his resolve to become a Dominican friar. And that wasn't because his family didn't try to make him lose that resolve. There's actually quite an infamous true story that his brothers hired a prostitute to sleep with St. Thomas and they actually let her into the room and shut the door, hoping that she would tempt him to kind of give up on this whole vow of chastity thing. Not the best brothers, I'd say. But anyway, apparently St. Thomas didn't waste a moment. He went right to the fireplace where he grabbed a hot iron that was lying in there and he chased her out of the room. So, you know, there's one way to do it, I guess. And it's said that angels came to visit St. Thomas and strengthened him. And he said that from that point on, he never was tempted again to the sin of unchastity.

Well, how did Thomas end up leaving this imprisonment? Well, I guess his mother, seeing that he wasn't going to change his mind, decided that instead of just letting him go, because again, that would have been a sign of defeat, I suppose, for her, she let him escape. And so that's, I guess, what people thought. St. Thomas, he wasn't a saint then, but old Tommy, had escaped the castle and ran off to join the friars, which I suppose she found less humiliating. Now, while at university, it was said that St. Thomas didn't speak a great deal, and this led many of his fellow students to think that he was rather slow. Albertus Mungus, who would go on to be St. Albert the Great, one of St. Thomas' teachers, prophetically said this about him. He said, All right, you call him the dumb ox,

but in his teaching he will one day produce such a bellowing that it will be heard throughout the world. St. Thomas was clearly a very brilliant individual um we have more than one account of those who said that saint thomas could dictate up to four secretaries on four different subjects all at the same time i can barely write a paper for class, so this is pretty impressive. Pope Paul V declared St. Thomas a doctor of the church, and he said that Thomas was the most brilliant light of the church. Before we go on to talk a little bit about his most famous work, the Summa Theologica. I wanted to just share with you seven of my all-time favorite quotes from St. Thomas Aquinas. The first one, happiness is secured through virtue. It is a good attained by man's own will.

So, happiness doesn't come through riches, it doesn't come through pleasure, it doesn't come through power, it doesn't come through fame. And in fact, St. Thomas addresses all of these in the Summa Theologica, and we will in subsequent podcasts. But he says, happiness is secured through virtue. It is a good attained by man's own will. So, not something you stumble across, something you fall on. It's something you want happiness. Well, it is a good that you can get by your own will and it's secured through virtue. Number two, good can exist without evil, whereas evil cannot exist without good.

So what Thomas is saying here, and we'll talk about this again in in future podcasts is that evil is a deprivation essentially so good is synonymous with being in so far as something is it is good and so when we say someone is an evil man So when we say someone is an evil man, we don't mean he is a man who is in the fullness of his being and in addition to that has certain attributes that are unpleasant. What we mean is there is a deprivation there. So he might lack generosity or he might lack fortitude or chastity or something like that. So good can exist without evil, whereas evil cannot exist without good. Third quote, wonder is the desire for knowledge. Wonder is the desire for knowledge.

Any Montessori fans out there, this is a great quotation. Wonder is a desire for knowledge. there, this is a great quotation. Wonder is a desire for knowledge. Number four, the theologian considers sin mainly as an offense against God, the moral philosopher, as contrary to reasonableness. And so, this idea that sin can be seen through these two different lights. So, through theology, what is sin? It's an offense against God. But thinking about it merely philosophically, who would say that a sin is contrary to reason, contrary to reasonableness? Number five, whatever is received is received according to the nature of the recipient. So, we abstract reality from the individual substances we come into contact with, and it is received according to our ability to receive it. You know, the way that you receive, say, a beautiful piece of music is going to be different to the way in which your seven-year-old receives it because, you know, he's not mature enough.

He hasn't experienced life enough. Perhaps his palate for the beautiful hasn't been refined as much as yours. And so, yeah, that quote, whatever is received is received according to the nature of the recipient. And by the way, if I'm getting ahead of anybody with posteriori, from some work of his more surely known to us. So let's quickly break that down. I'm not going to get into it a great deal, but a priori and a posteriori. A priori means prior to experience. A posteriori means through experience or after experience. So, if some

of you are familiar with Anselm's ontological argument, that is an a priori belief because it's not one based on or through experience. And incidentally, this is perhaps the most famous argument for the existence of God and Aquinas rejects it. So, to hear that quotation again, he says, it's possible to demonstrate God's existence, although not a priori, yet a posteriori from some work of his more surely known to us. In other words, we can look around at the world and we can deduce from it. It can lead us back to its original source. And we'll talk about that as well. And number seven, the things that we love tell us what we are.

So you and I might have all sorts of ideas about who we are, how we would like other people to view us. But what do you love, really? Not what do you want people to think you love, but what do you love? Really? Not what do you want people to think you love, but what do I love? These, St. Thomas says, will tell us who we are. So that's a little bit about St. Thomas. I hope you learned something new in that. Now let's move on to the Summa. What is the Summa Theologica? Sometimes pronounced Summa Theologiae. It's Latin for the summary of theology. Okay. What is it? Well, it's Thomas's most famous work. I've got it on my desk here, all five volumes. I'm just

reaching out to one of them here. The edition that I use and will be quoting from is the one that was translated from the Fathers of the English Dominican Province, published by Christian Classics. There is over 4,000 pages in these books, okay? So, it's quite a big tome, and it's essentially broken into three major parts, each of which deals with a major subsection of Christian theology. So you've got the first part, the second part, and the third part. All right. The first part in Latin, the pars prima, this has 119 questions that Thomas wrestles with. And we should say these questions are put in the form, after the question is made, there's then certain arguments given contrary to what Thomas would like to have said.

So, for example, when he deals with the existence of God, the question might be, you know, does God exist? And then there will be a few statements that are to the contrary. They might say, we know God doesn't exist because, you know, look at the evil in the world, right? And then Thomas goes on to respond to these. What's fascinating about Thomas's approach here is that he always puts forth his opponent's best arguments. So, if Thomas wants to say that non-Christians can be saved, if he wants to say that money cannot make us happy ultimately, then what he does is he puts forth these arguments from the opposing view to these particular beliefs.

And when you read them, you think, goodness, I'm not even sure how I'd respond to that. That sounds pretty convincing. So I think that's a sign of a rather good philosopher. He's not attacking straw men. He's attacking very good, solid, reasonable arguments. So the first part of the Summa has 119 questions, and this concerns things like God's existence, God's nature, the creation of the world, angels, the nature of man. Now, the second part, and we should say, just to make things a little more confusing, that the second part is broken into two parts. So, you have the first part of the second part and the second part of the second part. In Latin, you'll hear them sometimes be called prima secunde or secunde secunde. Now, overall, the second part has around 303 questions,

and these concern things like morality in particular, including individual virtues and vices. The third part has, I think it's around, I'm looking here, it's about 90 questions concerning the person and the work of Jesus Christ in particular. It also talks about Christ being the way of man to God. It discusses the sacraments, the end of the world. Now, what's fascinating about this third part of the Surma and what you may have heard of is that St. Thomas leaves it unfinished.

Why? Why does he leave it unfinished? Well, he apparently had some sort of supernatural experience where he encountered God. And he said to a fellow brother of his who kept pressing him, why aren't you writing? You should be writing more. You should be dictating more. Why are you leaving this unfinished? St. Thomas said, and I'm paraphrasing, but he said, what I have seen has led me to look upon all I have written as straw. Straw. Straw is what you put down for animals to, well, do their business on. Straw is what you throw into the stove to get the fire going. Straw. Now, we don't know exactly what it was that St. Thomas saw. There's this beautiful story, we have no reason to not think it's true, I don't think, where St. Thomas was meditating after Holy Mass. Apparently,

he would often go and rest his head on the tabernacle. And a fellow friar testified to this, that he was walking past and he heard Christ say to St. Thomas, to this, that he was walking past and he heard Christ say to St. Thomas, you've written well of me, Thomas, what shall be your reward? And what did Thomas say? It's beautiful. Are you ready? If you're thinking of getting a tattoo, if you were thinking of writing something pretty on your chalkboard, here's something to perhaps consider writing. He said, What a beautiful thing to say. Nothing if not you, Lord. Now, because the third part of the Summa was left unfinished, we have a supplement section. Now, this section isn't written by somebody else.

It actually was gathered together by a fellow friar of his from some of Thomas's earlier writings and placed into the third part to fill it out, to finish it off. And these questions, there's about, I think, 100 of these or so, 99 questions. And they consider things like extreme unction, which is another name for anointing of the sick, holy orders, purgatory, matrimony, and so forth. So that is a little bit about the Summa Theologica. Now, one final thing as we wrap up today's podcast is St. Thomas viewed the Summa Theologica as a work for beginners. So there you go. If you wanted to be humbled, there you go. That's what he has to say. It's a work for beginners. I'm going to give you a quotation directly from him in his very short introduction to the Summa Theologica. Here's what he says.

Because the doctor of Catholic truth ought not only to teach the proficient, but also to instruct beginners, we purpose in this book to treat of whatever belongs to the Christian religion in such a way as may tend to the instruction of beginners. Well, regardless of whether or not Thomas thought this work was straw, it's an attested fact, I think, that this will lead us closer to Jesus Christ and enable us to live more full and beautiful Christian lives. So, I want to close today's podcast by inviting you, asking you to please do a few things. The first thing is this, would you subscribe to the podcast? I plan on doing a podcast every week or so. The second thing is write to me over Twitter, Matt Fradd, at Matt Fradd, that's the handle. Shoot me a message, maybe a direct message, or just tweet at me. Tell me the sorts of questions you would like

addressed in these podcasts. The third thing, go to my website, mattfradd.com. You'll see a banner there for Pints with Aquinas. And every episode where I quote Aquinas, I'm going to put a link up so you can read directly from the Summa from that particular episode. Two more things I want you to do for me. Would you tell people about this podcast, especially your nerd Catholic friends that want to learn more about philosophy and theology through the lens of St. Thomas? And very finally, would you consider rating this podcast? People who know a lot more than me tell me that this is how people stumble across podcasts. They need to be rated in order for them to be ranked

appropriately so that they'll come up when people search things like a theology or Aquinas. So, would you do that? Listen, my name is Matt Fradd. It has been a pleasure. May God bless you. Thank you so much. you you you Thank you. Thank you. you