Pints With Aquinas - Be Wise at a Nutty Time! | Fr. Gregory Pine

Episode Date: October 7, 2023

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Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine and I'm a Dominican friar of the province of St. Joseph and this is Pines of the Aquinas. In this episode I'd like to talk about wisdom. Because in the 21st century it seems to me that we are at a loss for wisdom. So a lot of people out there who have knowledge, a lot of people out there who have understanding, but not as many who have wisdom. And perhaps this has always been the case, but it feels more acute now. And I think it's because, you know, as our families break down, and our polities break down, and our churches break down, the incoherence of our present state is

brought before our eyes, and we look for ways by which to live well. And in the ordinary course, we would have followed what wise persons do. And we're at a loss now to lay hold of those persons. And we feel like we have to invent our own existence or we have to invent our own life projects, which is a tough place to be. So I think that it's worthwhile to turn back to wisdom, to seek to cultivate wisdom, to perfect wisdom in our own lives. So that way we can re-infuse the culture with a wise sensibility.

So let's go ahead and talk a little bit about wisdom. lives so that way we can re-infuse the culture with a wise sensibility. So let's go ahead and talk a little bit about wisdom. Alright, so I want to talk about three kinds of wisdom. What we'll call philosophical wisdom, theological wisdom, and then mystical wisdom. And these wisdoms are going to draw on our kind of pagan and Jewish and Christian roots and achieve a kind of synthesis. So it's not like the steps through which you progress, so much as it is different expressions of the one search for wisdom, all of which are in accord or all of which are in concert to be held together and not in conflict,

but which operate in different registers or make different pursuits. So let's think first about philosophical wisdom. So we've heard it said that it pertains to the wise to order. So wisdom in this philosophical sense, we're talking about the type of discourse which doesn't rely upon faith, right? It doesn't rely upon charity, but it does rely upon an effort to reason well. And in reasoning well you seek to bring about a certain order. So it's not just a matter of knowing trivia, because anyone can know trivia provided that they have a sufficiently retentive memory. But that again is not the point. Whether we're talking about speculative wisdom or practical wisdom, we want to breathe some order

into our lives. So that way we can see how things hinge. We can see how things hold together, so that in coming to address the reality as in fact is, we can live well in accord with it. So like when the ancients talk about wisdom, they'll describe it as an intellectual virtue. Prudence is sometimes described as practical wisdom and that'd be a practical virtue. So you have different versions here. And, but when they describe the intellectual virtue, they'll say that wisdom is like when you see the principles and the conclusions and the

conclusions and the principles. Like you don't need to work your way through the argument. You don't need to work your way through the proof because you have a notion or a concept of how it all holds together. You can see reality in its kind of distinction or in its articulation and you don't know it so as to pick it apart, but you know it so as to embrace it. You know it so as to treasure it and so as to enshrine it in your life in a way that's appropriate.

Another way that the ancients will describe this type of wisdom is the knowledge in light of highest causes. And that's a peculiar part of our human dignity that we can arrive at the knowledge of causes. That's what it means really to have science or to have knowledge is to arrive at the knowledge of causes. But we don't just want to stop with the closest causes at hand, the proximate causes. We want to know where this all leads to. We want to know how to trace it back to its source. And so this kind of philosophical wisdom is also what we mean by the word like metaphysics. In the sense that we want to have a theory of everything. We want to have a theory of being and all of its different facets, I suppose, or all the different ways in which it's pertinent

for us to inquire. So when we're cultivating this kind of philosophical wisdom, we're seeking to approach reality in orderly fashion, to know the principles and the conclusions, and the conclusions and the principles, to know all things in light of their highest causes, because as human beings that's part of our dignity to rise to the knowledge of high, high causes, so that in knowing those highest causes and knowing those highest things we might be afforded a certain delight, a certain contemplative insight, we might look at the thing, call it by its right name, we might look at our lives and know the reason for which.

So this would be the first sense of wisdom. Second sense of wisdom would be like theological wisdom. And here we're talking about putting on the mind of wisdom. Second sense of wisdom would be like theological wisdom. And here we're talking about putting on the mind of Christ. We're talking about being transformed by the renewal of our minds. Because when we receive the gift of faith, we rely upon God's testimony. So we gain access to God and the things of God by virtue of the fact that God speaks to us of His interior life. So the beginning, the seeds of faith, is just the knowledge of God and of the blessed. So God gives us as principles for our reasoning His own knowledge

and the knowledge of those who look on Him day and night in the vision of heaven. And so what we have here is a kind of choice, right? A kind of a sense which causes in our mind, uh, what, what some have called a cogitation, a mental inquiry, an ongoing unrest whereby we seek to search ever further into the knowledge of God, into the very depths of God. And so we'll talk about in the Christian tradition faith seeking understanding. By faith we gain access to these principles which I've called the knowledge of God and of the Blessed.

We can also talk about the articles of the Creed as principles of our reasoning and then we can tease out the implications. Certainly the church does that in her tradition, in her magisterial clarifications, but we can do that as participants by the sense of the faithful in this teaching, this kind of prophetic dimension of the Church's life. So by this theological wisdom, you gain access to the divine testimony which speaks of God's interior life and of the created world in light of that interior life so that our minds eye can not so much behold those things as gain a certain access to those things by virtue of testimony.

And it's a testimony that's certain, right? Because it's based on God who is the most excellent of warranters, or the most excellent of witnesses. So then, there's a recognition here that if we're gonna do faith discourse well, we have to have faith, right? So ultimately, faith discourse isn't about advocacy, it's not even about getting what we want,

it's not about manipulating, you know, or like kind of pulling out the levers of society or of polity so that way we can achieve a just arrangement. No, it's about knowing God, uh, because that's what we're made for as made to the image and likeness of God. We're made for knowing God, uh, because our intellectual nature is a promise that God intends to communicate his interior life for us or to us such that we can experience it in some way, shape or form. So here we're talking about the very mind of Christ, Christ who is himself the wisdom of God.

So then, going on further, we can talk finally about mystical wisdom. And here we're thinking especially in light of the virtue of charity. So with the gift of the life of grace comes the virtue of charity, which is just the substance of Christian perfection, whereby we love God with his own love of himself, and that affords us a deeper sympathy with the divine life. So St. Thomas, following St. Augustine, will associate the different virtues with various gifts of the Holy Spirit. So he'll say like, faith is perfected by knowledge and understanding, and hope is perfected by the fear of the Lord and when he gets the charity he says that it's perfected by wisdom and he intends it in the sense of the gift of the Holy Spirit

which is like a virtue but kind of beyond a virtue. So with a virtue you operate in a human way, with the gift of the Holy Spirit you operate in a divine way because the gift of the Holy Spirit makes us open to the divine movement, open to the divine instinct or inspiration. It makes us perfectly receptive to the working of God. And so wisdom makes us perfectly receptive to God's revelation of himself, right, to God's bestowal of himself. So, Pseudo-Dionysius will say that wisdom makes us to suffer divine things. It kind of gives us a sympathy with God's interior life. It makes our heart to beat in time with His. And so all of us, by virtue of the gift of grace, the gift of charity, the gift of the

Holy Spirit which goes by the name of wisdom, have access to this type of savor or taste of divine things. And so we're all called to the contemplative life, right? We're all called to experience really, to genuinely experience God's gift of himself. So it's not just for these elevated saints and mystics of yesteryear who levitate and bilocate and do all of the things besides, it's for us, right? To experience a kind of infused contemplation such that we can, you know, journey further up and further in to God himself.

So that's what we mean when we begin to describe wisdom. The philosophical wisdom, theological wisdom, and this mystical wisdom, all of which might be operative in a person's life in different ways so we can describe a kind of analogy of wisdom and all of which are ultimately ordered to our ongoing healing and growth they just work in different registers or they just operate according to different modes or paradigms all right so that's wisdom I'm hoping that we can cultivate wisdom so that way we can order our own lives and live with a greater coherence in the midst of a world which is disorderly and seemingly incoherent,

such that by building up a certain wise culture in our families and in our polities and in our churches, those who come after us might find it easier to live. Not that easiness is the point of human life, but why not communicate something of that life when we can, right? Because the principle of merit isn't difficulty, the principle of merit is love. That doesn't seem like it applies in this instance, but I assure you it does. Okay, so this is Pines with Aquinas. If you haven't yet, please do subscribe to the channel, push the bell, and get email

updates when other things come out from the channel. Also, if you haven't yet, check out God's Plaining, which is a podcast to which I contribute with four of the Dominican friars. Last Easter, we did a series on the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, so there's a whole episode on wisdom, which you might find fruitful, which I did there with one of the other friars. And then, last thing here is I'm running out of things to announce, but a podcast that I do with Father Jacob Bertrand on Ascension called Catholic Classics, we just launched

season two which is about the confessions of St. Augustine so we read the book and then comment the book over the course of the next X number of days so if you want to tune in to another sweet sweet podcast perhaps that's for you and if you want to learn about practical wisdom, check out my book, Prudence, Choose Confidently, Live Boldly, if you haven't yet. Copies are still available, which is cool. Alright, that's all I got. Know of my prayers for you, please pray for me and I'll look forward to chatting with

you next time on Pines with Aquinas.