[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi everybody. My name is Brendan Malone and you're listening to the Dispatchers podcast every single Friday from the end of December until the start of February. We're giving you the chance to sample just some of the awesome subscriber only podcast content that our five dollar monthly patrons have been exclusively enjoying over the past twelve months. If you like what you hear in this episode and you want more of it, then all you need to do is become a patron of the dispatchers with $5 or more per
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Welcome to Conservations, the podcast, which got its name by literally combining the words conservative and conversations, which is exactly what happens on this show every month. Each episode we host a conversation with at least one other guest where we go in depth on a topic or hear about their experiences on this journey we all share together called life. The aim of this show is to foster and promote dialogue which cultivates goodness, truth, and beauty, and in doing so, unpacks the richness of the authentic conservative tradition. My hope is that you'll find these conservative conversations intellectually engaging and enriching, and that they will draw you ever more deeply into an authentic, truly flourishing and more meaningfully lived human experience. In this episode, we're going to be talking to Dr. Robert Loretz about the profound importance of virtue for societies and individuals who want to flourish. New Zealand born Dr. Robert Loretz has a doctorate of philosophy and ethics on the thesis, deep friendship, virtue and fulfillment, and a master of Music with first class honours, both from the University of Auckland. He also studied advanced theology and philosophy in both New Zealand and France. Robert is an international speaker in philosophy, theology and sacred music, giving talks and seminars to laity, religious and clergy in New Zealand, Australia and the United States. He has a passion for restoring deep and reverent music to the church and has composed over 70 hymns. He is currently also working on a rap opera comedy called Singarella. Robert is an engaging teacher who communicates depth with simplicity, reverence and a touch of humor. He loves to make profound truths accessible to people of all ages and backgrounds. So without any further ado, let's have this profoundly important conversation with Dr. Robert Loretz about why virtue matters so very much for individuals and societies that wish to truly flourish.
Robert, thank you so much. You're back again.
[00:04:24] Speaker B: Hello. Thank you. Brennan nice to be here.
[00:04:26] Speaker A: Couldn't stay away.
[00:04:27] Speaker B: Yeah, well, who could?
[00:04:30] Speaker A: We had so much. Well, I was going to say popular feedback about that last episode where we talked about sacred music.
[00:04:36] Speaker B: Discerning audience.
[00:04:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
And I'm not going to talk publicly right now about it, but after we've finished here today, I've got an idea or two I want to talk to you about for next year. So I think the people have willed it, the people are calling for it. We must give them what they want.
[00:04:55] Speaker B: The good people of God and the people who don't even know they're people of God. It's wonderful.
[00:05:01] Speaker A: Brilliant. Right. Let's start our conversation today by talking about virtue. And it is a word that probably, ironically, we kind of hear not enough of and too much of. In a sense, people throw that word around, but I don't think they really know how to use it accurately.
That's what I mean. We don't hear enough about the truth of what virtue is and what it's not. And it seems to me, and I was thinking about our conversation today, that if you want to understand virtue and the virtues properly, you actually need to understand two things. First, you need to understand the greek thought on virtue, particularly Aristotle. He's hugely important, but that's not enough. You also need to understand the christian elevation of that thought that comes later into the fullness of truth because otherwise something's not complete.
[00:05:49] Speaker B: Grace virtues. Yeah.
[00:05:50] Speaker A: Is that a fair assessment?
[00:05:51] Speaker B: Exactly. Now, because we've always understood as Catholics that grace builds on nature.
God doesn't come to replace everything and start again. He heals, elevates and lifts it up into a higher life. And that includes our, I mean, that even includes our lower instincts, if you want to say, or our love for pleasure or our wanting to avoid pain. All the normal emotions that we have because we're animals as well.
Virtue, for a start, takes them up higher and puts them in the service of something higher so that they don't dominate and destroy us. And then grace goes on top of that and puts it into an even higher finality. It's actually about what your end is. So if you're living for yourself and you haven't worked out that another person's worth loving deeply or worth knowing deeply or worth caring about or whatever. So in other words, the way little children usually start their life.
[00:06:55] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
[00:06:58] Speaker B: And some people never get past that.
[00:07:01] Speaker A: Well, that's what Paul says, right. When I was a child, I thought.
[00:07:04] Speaker B: And as a child. Yeah. Something's got to pull us out of that to the other.
I think virtue and friendship need to be looked at together in Aristotle's thought, because his whole quest is about happiness and what makes a human being truly happy.
And basically, in chapter one of his ethics, he explores a whole series of how do we work out what our main end is?
And he comes to happiness, but he also brings forth the idea that, well, not everyone wants to be happy. That's why they do everything ultimately. And yet there's so many different thoughts on what will bring happiness. Is it status? Is it wealth? Is it glory? Is it fame? Is it comfort? Is it pleasure? What will bring happiness?
And then he looks for that, and he goes through several arguments in chapter one. And in the end, he comes to the active, virtuous life is actually the happy life, but he gets there by some interesting roots. We could look at that, if you like.
And then near the end of his book, he suddenly, after going through a whole lot of virtues and what they are, he approaches the topic of friendship and he says, now we come to frIendship, which is a virtue or is like a virtue.
And he brings up the point, without friends, no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods. So suddenly you realize the happy life isn't just the virtuous act of life, it's the life of real friendship for which the virtues operate.
You have the virtues for relationships?
[00:08:50] Speaker A: Yeah. It's outward directed towards and to other, not just a thing.
[00:08:54] Speaker B: Yeah. So it's not a quest of self perfection.
We can all start that way because actually, immaturity is the road to maturity.
No one starts perfect, and we don't start in these deep friendships in life. We start off making a lot of little pleasure friendships around pleasant people we like, and also useful friendships around projects that we're doing. And then somehow the person within those sort of friendships becomes a lot more important to us and we start caring about them. We start missing them when they're not there. We start wanting to be with them more. We want to share our life, and we start to love somebody's life and being not just their usefulness or how much we get on with them and have a nice time when we're together, that kind of thing. So we go beyond what we're getting out of it to the other person who we care about. And at that point, we really want to be better. Because at the end of the day, if we're not honest, if we're not courageous, if we're not generous, we're going to let our friend down and the people we love down, because the minute it gets tough, we'll run away, run for cover. Sell, bro. You're on your own and not a real friend.
But if it is someone we really care about, we suddenly are naturally stronger for them anyway. We want to be there. We want to sacrifice. We don't usually want to sacrifice for our workmates or just our casual friends at the pub. No, but we want to sacrifice when we really realize that someone's really important to us, so they go hand in hand. The growth of virtue and the growth of friendship go together.
[00:10:38] Speaker A: Yeah, well, and it's essential, right, because you see that with Aristotle and the three types of friendship he identifies. And it's a journey always upwards from utility, where it's like, I guess like a business contract, only exists because we've got something in it, then pleasure, which is we both enjoy it. But then the highest one is that friendship of virtue, where I seek the good of the other, and all of a sudden everything's transformed. And for me, it was quite a profound revelation in his work, that natural law truth that he stumbles on, really, and unveils about, that the virtuous friendship isn't just good for the person who receives virtuous friendship. It's essential for the person to give virtuous friendship to.
[00:11:19] Speaker B: Exactly. And when it's developing, the interesting thing about it, it happens almost without us noticing, in that we have lots of good.
We quite enjoy friendships and we don't analyze them too much, but we notice, especially when we really mark the absence of somebody.
If you say I miss you in English, sort of sounds like a target that you're missing. I'm aiming for you but missing.
[00:11:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:53] Speaker B: In French, they say, tumim. Monk, you are lacking to me when you're not there.
[00:11:59] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:12:00] Speaker B: And in Italian, they say, santito la mancansa dite. I sense the lack of you.
[00:12:06] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:12:07] Speaker B: Yeah. So in other words, the world's not the same when you're not there.
[00:12:10] Speaker A: So the framing is not the eye, it's on the other.
[00:12:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
They're all getting at the same thing, but it's like your absence actually carries a weight now because your presence carries a weight that is not the normal weight of presence.
If we look at the difference between knowledge and love, when you know something, it's like in your toolbox. So you know Pythagoras theorem. So you know how to find the side of a right angle triangle if you needed to. Not that you ever do need to, but once in a while to be. Really got to use that thing. But you don't carry it around in your heart like something like a treasure that's so precious, but you do carry it as a thing, you know, or whatever. You know, when you learn a new thing and get a new fact or whatever it's stored away, it'll come up in a conversation. It might come in handy. A bit of know how to do something again.
[00:13:07] Speaker A: It's still toolbox. It's a piece of trivia, though, that's still self referential to the individual. Right?
[00:13:11] Speaker B: Yes. It's part of our kit set for life to go well. But when we carry a person in our hearts, completely different.
We're not carrying a thing we're possessing, we're not carrying a thing we're in control of.
We can think we're in control of people, but that's never going to be a right relationship.
It's an abuse, like a narcissist thing.
[00:13:34] Speaker A: And that's just what I was thinking when you're saying that, as if the moment you treat a person as a piece of utility or know, oh, look, I know Robert Lorette's and it's about me knowing.
[00:13:46] Speaker B: That's a good point. Because what's so strange about love is that it goes much further than knowledge.
I know something about you, I might even know a lot about you, but I love you more than I know you, because love is not the love of my knowledge of you, it's the love of you and your goodness. And your goodness I can't really properly define, I can't really articulate. If somebody said, why do you love?
Like probably people ask Katie that all the. Well, yeah, like Katie's mum or something. Why do you love?
[00:14:29] Speaker A: Tell me.
[00:14:30] Speaker B: She's probably a fine lady. I don't know.
[00:14:34] Speaker A: Was. I was at a school once, speaking, and I always introduce myself and I show a photo of my wife. So her and I standing together, and this young girl in this north island school just pipes up totally uninvited, and she goes, wow, you're punching up, aren't you? I was like, yes, but I was like, thank you. Don't be so rude. I'm lovable as well.
[00:14:53] Speaker B: There you go. And it's not all looks, Brian.
Know, we tend to love a person because basically, love is a response to goodness. And goodness has many levels, so that's why love has many levels. So it's legitimate to say, I love water when you're really thirsty. Yeah, I'd love a drink of water.
You love what you really need instinctively when you're in danger of not surviving.
That's an instinctive love. Then there's the love of pleasurable tastes and smells and colors and sounds.
[00:15:35] Speaker A: Going back to that point, though, sexual love, instinctive love. It does seem to me, though, that your love is really for the good of your own survival rather than the thing that will get it.
[00:15:46] Speaker B: It's built into us.
[00:15:47] Speaker A: It's a transitional love, transactional love.
[00:15:49] Speaker B: Yeah, well, it's basically an animal love because the animals have it, too.
And the thing with Aristotle, which is really nice about Aristotle, he notices what we have in common with all living things, so that he call that maybe the vegetative level, because even the grass has this in common with us, which is that we eat and we grow and we reproduce and we breathe. Those are the kinds of things we do that are in common with every living thing. And then animals have this weird thing where they get sense knowledge, so they suddenly are aware of something around them and responding to it. And then with sense knowledge, always is an affectionate knowledge. So an affectionate response, like, I love that sound, or I hate it, I love that smell, or I hate it. I'm drawn to that, or that's an aversion. And so we got a passional response, and that's all in the animals. And we find ourselves having that as well. But ours is always a bit different because it's penetrated more by intelligence, but it's still there, like an animal passion. And then we have higher things as the difference between the human and the other animals is the spiritual element. And that's where we have, first of all, our creativity, which is wonderful. We make all kinds of things we transform the whole earth.
Animals, we don't see other animals doing that.
And we communicate, we talk. We have these shows because we're able to put our concepts into symbolic sounds and share them so we can share our heart. All of that animals aren't doing, even if they're barking and meowing. No, well, it's a desire, too, for.
[00:17:29] Speaker A: Transcendence in a sense, because I create a thing to try and live on in some way in that thing.
[00:17:33] Speaker B: Right, yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah. The human aspirations come through all the arts and also our communication.
It's just part of our spiritual nature. And then we've got, obviously, our intellect and its highest thing is to know the truth and the heart is to love the good. And you've always got to know there's a thing to love, because if I didn't know you at all, if you didn't know somebody, you couldn't love them, at least know they're there. And secondly, know that they're good, there's some goodness in them.
[00:18:08] Speaker A: Well, that again, can I stop you there? Because that's another distortion, again, where we can recognize, like a stalker of a celebrity, they don't know the person at all, but they develop a total fantasy of love that's not real love.
[00:18:21] Speaker B: An obsession. Yeah.
[00:18:22] Speaker A: An obsession is not a love.
[00:18:23] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. And that's an interesting one because that's an example of a warped, imaginative love. We haven't got to that one yet, but the next one was going to be that, because a romantic love, which can be a good thing, is also coming from an imagination in the sense that, first of all, our passional loves are basically our responses to nice things, and we tend to want to stay in the niceness of it. A beautiful sunny day, a lovely view of the beach, whatever it is, from the mountain, nice music, whatever it is, even pleasant company, someone's nice smile, all those things you want to kind of bask in, that it's all lovely. But in a certain way, those pleasures, it's a possessive love. They're for us, as Aristotle says, we don't wish wine well for its sake.
We hope the wine goes well for our sake. Yeah, that's so that. That's a love that's good, it's right for the things that are like that. But we mustn't treat another human only like that. That'd be like treating a human like an ice cream or something like that for me to consume, not for anything, for the.
[00:19:40] Speaker A: This is why whenever I talk about pornography. I always start with Aristotle's three friendships, and then I say, now, what's wrong with porn in light of this? And it's that very fact that a human person, first of all, there's no community or relationship between two persons. It's the objectification of a person. They've been reduced to an object, so they're not even communing in any way. It's not even utility. They're not even meeting. And then on top of that, I really stress the point because we hear a lot today, even in our secular culture, about how bad objectification is. But what we normally do is frame it, as in, it's bad to objectify another person. That's true, but it's also probably arguable that even more damage is done to the objectifier, because I might not know I'm being objectified, but the person doing the objectifying.
Know, if we take Aristotle seriously, they are not just not experiencing the fullness of flourishing that comes from the French of virtue. They're moving in the exact opposite.
[00:20:37] Speaker B: And he talks about the disintegration of. Well, he uses the word the wicked.
The wicked. It sounds like a very judgmental word, but it's really just saying for him, it's about, what are you aiming at? So basically, we can aim at the good and miss all the time, either because we're doing it badly or because we're weak or whatever. And so we can wish we were good, and we can try. Like a person struggling in an addiction, they wish they weren't. They wish they were better. They wish they were chased. They wish they were whatever, and that's falling back all the time.
That sort of person he calls incontinent, because they're not in control of themselves. Then there's another sort of person who's wanting to be good in a certain way. He also wants to be bad, but he fights that want strongly, and he wins, and he ends up fighting himself to be good. And he calls that person continent because they're holding it together, but they're not yet virtuous. They're virtuous when they want to be good, and even their feelings are wanting to be good. And their whole person is wanting to be good, and they're rejoicing in the good. They're not wishing, half wishing they weren't having to be good because they're fully virtuous. But then at the other end of the spectrum is the wicked who want to be bad, and they delight in being bad, and they're not trying to be bad. To be bad. Bad as in we have to seek a good. Even when we're doing something evil, we're seeking a hidden good in it, false good in it.
[00:22:15] Speaker A: That's one of the great insights, too. Isn't of the Greeks that I think. Was it Socrates who talks about, without virtue, there is no world, because even a band of robbers has to have the virtue of loyalty to be a band of.
[00:22:28] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And that's using a very loose word, the word virtue, but, yeah, that's right. There's basically remnants because every evil is parasitical.
[00:22:37] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:22:37] Speaker B: It's pulling away at a good.
[00:22:38] Speaker A: Privation. Of privation.
[00:22:40] Speaker B: Yeah. So you're never going to have complete privation or you wouldn't have anything.
[00:22:44] Speaker A: No.
[00:22:45] Speaker B: As long as there's something, there's some semblance of the good, in a way. So even though a band of. Let's say there's a band of bullies in a gang that just think it's funny to find someone where you can beat them up, and they kind of laugh at how much that person wasn't crying out or whatever. They're maliciously sadistic and they have their bit of pleasure together about that, but underneath they're not actually, because there's no peace in it. They're not at peace with themselves because their nature is initially made for that. They're actually already unraveling even though they think they're having a good time.
He argues that the real pleasure is only really had in the virtuous. It's the fullest pleasure a human can have is actually in goodness, because all other pleasure that is in false things is this sort of caricature of it. And it's hollow. And you can see it in what the Christians call the vice of sloth, where people don't want a spiritual destiny. They don't want to have to be good in a virtuous way, and they just wish they could be left alone to indulge. And in the indulgence, they become very busy. So sloth isn't. You're laying on your bed all day because you can't be bothered getting up. No, sloth could be. You're frantically busy all the time. You never stop talking, you're always restless, you never stop moving. But what you hate is silence. You hate can't being calm. You hate actually the moment where you might start to reflect. You hate sitting in front of the Lord in the Eucharist or something, because it's all too much better to fill the gaps, watch some entertainment, whatever. But not to think that I might have a spiritual calling. I might have a spiritual destiny.
[00:24:39] Speaker A: In many ways, too. I'd say. I'd extend that to the apotheism of our age. It's not even so much that people disbelieve. It's this they don't even want to believe. It's this nihilistic apotheism.
[00:24:52] Speaker B: It's very dangerous. Because the real opposite to love is actually indifference. It's not hate. Yeah, hate is when you hate something because it's threatening something you love. If you don't care about anything, you don't hate anything. So hate is like a secondary response when your loved thing is threatened. Whereas indifference is like there's no thirst in your heart for anything.
It's what we see in the 7th letter in the book of revelation.
You guys think you're comfortable, you think you're rich, but you're poor. You're despicable, you're wretched, you're lukewarm. I spit you out of layer to see her.
[00:25:27] Speaker A: Isn't it church?
[00:25:28] Speaker B: If you are only hot or cold, but if you only were full of love or hate, I could do something with you. But indifference is like you're dead. You're dead. There's no thirst. And then he turns around and he says, but I'm knocking at the door of your heart. I'm the beggar. I'm the one who's like needy and begging. I'm teaching you to be needy again. And begging. I'm teaching you to be thirsty again. It's like he did with the woman at the well. He says, give me a drink. And he teaches her to thirst for the living water.
[00:25:55] Speaker A: Yeah, great point.
[00:25:56] Speaker B: He makes himself the one. He goes humbler when we're too proud to accept him kind of thing.
But yeah, when it comes to the mystery of virtue developing, I mean, there's different levels of it because. Because there's nothing wrong with wanting to be a good man and trying to be a good man, but it's kind of an immaturity in virtue. If it only stayed at that level.
And it'd be great if every young kid wanted to be a good man or woman one day and they wanted to work on their virtues, whatever that means. But in actual fact, you're really working on your virtues when you start to care and love for somebody else more than you start to think of yourself.
[00:26:40] Speaker A: And that's that key point, right, of the greek insight, too, is that it's almost like an artisan, right? This is the skill that you have to practice to actually become better at life.
[00:26:51] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. There's an analogy to arts and it's quite interesting to see that thing because Aristotle even asked that question, what makes a good human? And first he says, well, we could talk about what makes a good, know a good flute.
Is it that some people play the flute and other people add wellness to the way they play the flute? No, playing the flute well is what playing the flute is. And others are approximating playing the flute because they're not doing it well. But playing the flute well is full flute playing, yeah, but playing the flute well doesn't mean you can play the cello. No.
When we are really good chef doesn't mean we're a good mechanic.
We can get really refined at a thing admirable to others. It's amazing what you can do. But then what is it that makes us say that person's a good man, not just a good mechanic or a good chef or a good flautist. I think it's really revealing the way what everybody says at a funeral in the eulogies, if somebody gets up and says, well, they were very punctual, they were always on time for work. There was never any complaint from the timekeepers. They were always there. They filled in their work card and they always left. They never left early. They left exactly on time. They sat down and that's it.
Okay, is that it?
[00:28:23] Speaker A: Great guy, great man.
[00:28:28] Speaker B: Or you get the work CV, read out all the work achievements and the work CV, but it's okay to do it if that's the warm up. It might be that the guy's done amazing achievements. He invented the easy yogurt maker or something.
You're going to mention it, but if that's all you mention, you wonder what happened, then you go on to, we're satisfied when we start to hear he was a loving husband, he was a great father, he was a wonderful grandfather. He was so generous, he was courageous, he was this. We start hearing the virtues and the relationships of love, which are what the virtues are for, and then we know there's a life, well know. And he loved his God and he loved his wife and all of that.
And you. Yeah, fine, fine guy.
What makes a good man? And Aristotle looking at that question, and then he says, well, he calls it the function argument, the ergon argument.
What's the function? If things have a function, especially things we make have a function. Egg. Beta has a function. It's a good egg beater. If it beats eggs, it's a bad egg beater. If it won't beat the egg, unless it's a really bad egg, don't be a bad egg. Yeah, but anyway, has man as a whole got a function? And he starts looking for that, and he says, well, it can't be what we share with the. With the vegetables. It's got to be in our highest nature, our function. It's not what we share with the animals. So it's higher than our feelings, it's higher than our emotions. It's higher than our love for pleasure. So what is it?
And he keeps looking, and he takes it to our intellect, and it can sound like he's all in the head, except we have to remember that love is a blind force without any mind in it, without any intellect in it. So basically, love needs.
There needs to be a truth, content that love is involved in loving.
[00:30:31] Speaker A: Yeah. It's not a reductionist approach into the mind at all.
[00:30:34] Speaker B: Yeah. It's not both the head, not the heart, but there is no real heart without the.
[00:30:40] Speaker A: Because, well, that's just infatuation if you just got heart.
[00:30:43] Speaker B: And, no, it's like. It's a little bit like what Aquinas says about prayer. Prayer is not just desire. You can have a desire. I can have a desire to be well when I'm sick. That's not a prayer. It's a prayer. When my mind enters that desire and lifts it up to God and tells him about it, then it's a prayer, lord, heal me, because I'm sick and I want to be well. The intelligence has given content to the desire, and it's become a prayer. It's the same with Love, in a way.
If we want to love well, it's loving intelligently. And that brings us to the great cardinal virtue of prudence, or what Aristotle calls practical wisdom.
Basically, there's no virtue as a virtue unless it's got practical wisdom, shaping it, forming it, making it right. And he gives us five things that are always needed.
Things have to be done in the right way. They have to be done for the right reason. They have to be done with the right person, the right object, and the right time. And those are five things that are basically your five little test cases. And then you can add another one, the right amount. If it's something like generosity, one of the big things people misunderstand about Aristotle, and I'm amazed how much this is misunderstood. I've tried to find a good little video somewhere online to quickly explain virtue as the mean, and they constantly get it wrong and these explanations you find online, they think that it's like a mathematical mean, so they think it's like a continuum. So the golden mean and it's moderation in the middle that he wants. And don't be too much of it. And don't be too little of it, but find the right amount. That's not what he's saying at all. When he talks about a mean, he calls each virtue like a summit of a mountain, as well as a mean. So in its own right, it's an excellence.
So, like, courage is an excellence.
He doesn't say, don't be too courageous.
If you're not courageous enough, you're coward. But if you're too courageous, that's a problem as well. You need to find moderate courageousness. He doesn't say that. No, but courage is still a mean.
[00:32:55] Speaker A: Yeah. The thing, I guess, is the moment you step away from authentic courage, you're in excess, but you're no longer in courage. That's the point.
[00:33:04] Speaker B: Right.
[00:33:04] Speaker A: So there is no mean there at all. There's no courage.
[00:33:07] Speaker B: Not a continuum. Yeah.
[00:33:08] Speaker A: No.
[00:33:08] Speaker B: So it's not like a quantity thing where, like, how much money is the right amount of money and the whole spectrum is money. It's not that.
It's like you say, you're stepping outside authentic courage, but what are you stepping into? Either you're stepping into lack of courage, which is one side of the mean, or you're stepping into false courage, which is the other side of the mean. So the caricature is the excess. So the excess doesn't mean too much of the virtue. It means a false thing that looks like the virtue but isn't for some reason, that's lacking in what the virtue needs to have. So, for example, courage. You need to know that there's a danger.
[00:33:53] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:33:54] Speaker B: And you need to know that your strength is big enough to conquer it if you're going to attack.
So you need enough hope to attack it. You need to know realistically to have assessed the danger properly. If you've underestimated the danger, so you launch in thinking you're going to easily win, but you've completely misunderstood the danger. That's not courage. No, just you got it wrong and.
[00:34:18] Speaker A: There'S no courage needed. Right in that situation. If I think this is unlosable, I don't need courage because I didn't need bravery.
[00:34:26] Speaker B: Yeah. And so he even uses examples about soldiers.
If they got way superior weapons to the other side, they might look like they're brave, but actually they just know their weapons. Are way better.
I've got a nuclear bomb.
[00:34:42] Speaker A: Aren't I brave?
[00:34:43] Speaker B: Yeah. I'll send my drone in and wipe you that.
[00:34:47] Speaker A: And that's funny enough. That is a long standing character. I know Brendan Beehan, the irish poet who was know when he wasn't drunk, he was complaining about the English. And he wrote that great poem, come out, you black and tans. Come out and fight me like a man. And there's a line in that poem which got turned into a song where he says, tell us again about how you faced off against bravely faced the Arabs with your 16 pounder guns, and they had bows and arrows and weren't you brave? And it was like, no, you're not. It's the very caricature.
[00:35:17] Speaker B: So that could be one.
Or like the guy that speeds around the corners of cliffs. It's Bervura. It's not courage. It's a guy who loves speed more than he loves his life. So it's foolishness.
Real courage has to have a noble good that you're holding on to. If it's no noble good, there's no courage. So even if you think something's right and it's wrong and you die for it, that's not even a courageous death. Yeah, it's a courageous death. If you happen to be right that it was a noble good and you did die for it consciously, then it's courageous because you took the wrap for the noble good that was worth holding onto. Otherwise, you're just a fool. Because a person with his loves out of order is a fool. And if you price one of the low loves as worth dying for, and you give away your life, which is a higher good than that thing, for that thing, it's a moment of stupidity. It's not a moment of, you know.
[00:36:13] Speaker A: What I think of when I think of that? I often think about thrill seekers who are like, I'm going to climb this 40 story building with no ropes, no harnesses, and their addiction is to the thrill. It's not bravery. You know what I mean? It's a disorder.
[00:36:28] Speaker B: That's right. And they might have some chip missing that makes them worry about real danger.
So they seem totally courageous.
That's a kind of excess. Another one is like, if you think of generosity, obviously, it's easy to think of the opposite. You think, stinchy mean guy will never pay for anything.
Hordes'money, miser, Scrooge, whatever you can think of that guy. But the false generous is the flamboyant person who might pay for more rounds at the pub, and they all think he's a wonderful dude. He's not looking after his family properly. He's wasting all his money trying to please people. And that's not real generosity, it's not intelligent generosity.
Sometimes a child can't understand why you walk past a beggar and you didn't give him $20, and you might explain, oh, well, he looks a bit like an addict. And I think if I gave him 20, he's just going to get another drink. So we'll get him something to eat, or we'll sit down with him and we'll talk to him and we'll do something else, but we won't necessarily hand him money.
[00:37:37] Speaker A: Yeah, well, because you would then be fueling a vice and you would be directly cooperating and sustaining that man's vice.
[00:37:44] Speaker B: That's right. And a young kid who's jot a generous heart might think, oh, that's strange, because we don't start with the prudence that you need to get the virtue right, but we can start with a good disposition. Aristotle calls it natural virtue. Like, you'll see, if you've got a number of kids, one might seem naturally generous, one might seem naturally caring, one might seem naturally even courageous, stands up for things, all of that.
That's good, because they're showing a disposition toward good virtues, but they're not really virtues until they're intelligently discerning.
We call it prudence. I actually would rather we called it practical wisdom, which is Aristotle's word, because prudence has got a bad rap in the modern world. People think prudence means, oh, we've got to be careful. We mustn't do anything that would risk anything, which isn't what prudence is at all.
[00:38:44] Speaker A: I like practical wisdom because, again, it speaks to the fullness of human flourishing.
And I love that point you made about kids, because a child could be doing a virtuous thing because they're afraid of their parents, or they just think, oh, that's what I'm supposed to do.
[00:38:57] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right.
That brings up piety, actually, which is.
[00:39:04] Speaker A: Actually, before we go too far down this rabbit hole, because I'm going to try and tie honestly. Yeah, it really is. No, it's good. But let's wrap up Aristotle and then we'll move up. Well, I don't know if we can wrap up Aristotle, but I'll try and put a bow on it in the sense that I look at Aristotle and I think, man, he comes so tantalizingly close to what Christianity, the fullness of truth completes on the question of virtue. That's very true, but it's still natural law and it's still valid. And I also recognize, I think the very person, the person of Christ was not present in history at that moment to really, because the ultimate friendship of virtue was the cross, right? That total self giving love for the good of people who don't even love you. But then Christianity, and it's really Aquinas, I think, isn't.
[00:39:53] Speaker B: Aquinas brilliantly integrates, but.
[00:39:56] Speaker A: Really elevates into the fullness of christian truth, faith.
[00:39:59] Speaker B: But what the big difference I've made with Christ is that we now have a divine human friendship.
[00:40:09] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:40:09] Speaker B: So Aristotle's, look, he does believe in God. He does actually end up realizing there's only one God. And he even goes so far as to realize God is pure act and we are all in potential and he's drawing everything to himself. He gets as far as that.
[00:40:27] Speaker A: He also all natural law truths.
[00:40:29] Speaker B: He realizes that God is the contemplation of contemplation. So what he must do all day, he's not making houses, he's not working on his virtues, he's not doing the sort of things we do all day, but he is contemplating himself, which is the fullness of truth. So he's getting very close to, in the beginning was the word God is contemplating. The word is contemplating the word is his contemplation sort of thing. He got close to that, but he can't get there without revelation. But the thing about it is he thought God was so distant, so transcendent, so perfectly enact, that he doesn't really have much to do with us except attract us. So in other words, we can't ever have a friendship that's unequal. For Aristotle. You couldn't have a friendship between a master and a slave. If you did, you'd have to stop him being your slave, so you'd have to become equals. And it's sort of like that.
Christ actually fixes that because he becomes man, and so God becomes man. He's come down to our level.
[00:41:32] Speaker A: He lays aside his kingly glory, right?
[00:41:35] Speaker B: Yeah. And he says, I no longer call you servants, but friends. Right at the last supper. And why are we friends? Because our servant doesn't know his master's business. So we are knowing our master's business. We are in on the heart of Christ and we are in on it by the Holy Spirit.
He's sharing the secret heart that he has with the Father through the Holy Spirit. With us by the gift of the Holy Spirit from the cross.
[00:42:05] Speaker A: On that point, something I realized even this week, it just struck me, a particular translation. I was reading about this coming Sunday's gospel, which is about the talents, the parable of the talents, and something I'd never noticed before. The three servants, one of them buries his talent, the ground, and that's the wicked servant. The other two invest and get a return. But what I didn't notice before until reading it this week again was that with each of the two good and faithful servants, at the end, he doesn't just say, oh, thank you, I will take the investment return for me. He says, come share in my reward. So the whole thing is it's actually still orientated towards the disciple receiving the fullness of what he's sharing with them.
[00:42:45] Speaker B: It's true. And the amazing thing with redemption is that Christ achieves it on the cross and then he shares it.
So he shares it because we all become a kingdom of priests. He's the high priest, the one high priest, and suddenly he's making a kingdom of priests. He's the king of kings, and we're the little kings on the other white horses. And so he's sharing even his desire to save the world. He's sharing it with the church. So the church becomes an instrument of salvation.
Everything we do to pray for people, the saints, all that is him sharing his work. And so he shares, if you like, the spoils of the work. He has the victory over Satan on the cross, and then he has the victory in every soul, one by one in a particular way through grace that everybody needs, particularly rather than just in general.
And so he's living that same thing by the Holy Spirit. Yeah.
What that's done is it's changed who our deepest friend is from being a spouse or from being a really good mate or a brother or whoever. It was. Some woman saying, my mum's my best friend. And that can be very valid once they're grown up. Can't be really valid when they're little.
[00:44:03] Speaker A: No, because again, to know is missing.
[00:44:06] Speaker B: You need the prudence and also you need something of the equality. And while you're growing up, your mum is your prudence or your dad is your prudence, but their job is to develop your prudence so that you can be your own person and they don't have to give you advice on how to cross the road anymore. You know how to do it.
[00:44:26] Speaker A: An appropriate use of the gift of freedom.
[00:44:28] Speaker B: Yeah. So then you get the Lord as our friend and suddenly all the virtues for start, they're transformed by grace, but even just looking at them, transformed by their end. So before, courage was about the noble good, and the noble good would be the friend worth dying for, the family worth dying for, the country worth dying for, that sort of thing. Now you've got Christ worth dying for and the truth in Christ, so you'll be a witness to him no matter what. And even if you lose your family, you're going to hold on to him. And even if you lose your country, you're going to hold on to him.
[00:45:13] Speaker A: He's not worth living for, he's worth dying for.
[00:45:15] Speaker B: Yeah, he becomes the ultimate good that all other goods are measured by. And if it came down to an opposition between your family and God, you'd choose God. That's what he says. Anyone who loves mum, dad, whatever, more than me isn't worthy of me.
So that transforms courage all the way to martyrdom. Chastity gets transformed all the way to virginity for the kingdom of God, you've got justice gets changed from just being good to the man next to you by giving him his due. What's due to him? I've got to be fair.
Suddenly I've got to think, but what's due to God?
Even before Christianity, there's a virtue called the virtue of religion. That's natural virtue where we realize we're being created and we realize, flip, I didn't deserve that. I came from nothing. I've come into being this source of being. I have to give myself back, I have to be grateful, I have to thank. I can never pay back, but I want to. I start to worship and adore. That's a natural thing. In all human cultures there's an element of reaching out to the divine as our source.
Then God shows us what that really was by revealing himself. In Christianity we were made in the word by the Father through the spirit, and we're called into a life of communion with them. And suddenly how do we give God as jew?
For a start, we're also sinners. So not only do we not give him as jew, we go absolutely against it.
And how has he redeemed us? He enters the world, has every rejection of God thrown on him while he's affirming the Father in absolute trust. And so he's letting love of the Father conquer all hatred of the Father through all sins of the world until all the way to death. And in that death he gives the Holy Spirit to the Father as worship and he gives the Holy Spirit to us as mercy.
And that means he's given us the way to worship him justly. So that's why we say in the mass, let us make eucharist. Give thanks as make Eucharist. Let us make Eucharist to the Lord our God. It is right. And just because it's the only thing that God deserves is full, infinite love, which only Christ can give him. And we are standing with Christ and offering that, offering ourselves with him. And he's given us the way to have a just present for God. How do we give God back love? We give him back Christ.
And that's what the mass has been through the ages. And in that, our openness to it, our openness to unite to it. And that means also in our lives, unite our crosses to his. He's going to transform every cross that we have into a part of his victory. He's going to transform all of that. So suddenly we've got this friend. It's not just a friend. This guy's already died for me.
He gave me to me. He knows me more than I know myself.
[00:48:23] Speaker A: Well, I was going to say that it is the perfect.
[00:48:25] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:48:26] Speaker A: Because normally, to be known by another, it is still always limited. You can only know me so much. Yes, but God, and through Christ, knows the totality. It's my very thoughts before I even thought them.
[00:48:39] Speaker B: That's right. So he knows us fully, and that means he knows us more than we know ourselves, which means he knows our good more than we know our good. And so trusting him will lead us to our good, more than trusting our own judgment will lead us to our good. And the same thing with the heart.
And in human love, we get to know someone, we want to know them more. The more we know them, we want to love them, we want to love them, we want to know them, blah, blah. But that takes on this infinite thing with God, too. So he's giving us. We're constantly.
It's all through the seven gifts of the spirit, actually, because we don't have a link otherwise.
We can have a great desire to be a child of God and to know him. But without the gifts of the Holy Spirit operating, our soul doesn't really connect. So what happens in our soul is we start receiving his lights, and that's understanding. And we start receiving even his nudging and his counsel. He tells us, do this now, do that now in an emergency or whatever, and we start to receive his actual voice for what to do in counsel, we receive his knowledge of his discernment and judgment in the way we see the world. So we start to smell a rat. We start to see when there's propaganda waving over the world and everybody's being fooled, but we smell a rat. Why do we smell a rat? It's not just because we're conspiracy theorists, it's because we've got the gift of knowledge.
[00:50:06] Speaker A: It's also, yeah, the Holy Spirit is.
[00:50:08] Speaker B: The ultimate conspiracy theorist.
He warned Jesus of the conspiracy against him.
[00:50:15] Speaker A: Builds on nature.
[00:50:19] Speaker B: So all of that, we're in a new Life.
And the interesting thing, friendship, the exact thing of friendship is why Christianity goes to the new level of love your enemy.
[00:50:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:50:32] Speaker B: Why do we have to love our enemy? It's because Christ doesn't have that person as an enemy. He has that person as a potential friend, if not an actual friend. That person he's died for. He's trying to save them. He wants them to come into our number. He doesn't want them to be lost. So we can't love our best friend, Christ, and hate what he loves, which is the Other Guy, and we've got to want what he wants.
And this even happens in natural friendship. Thomas Aquinas goes into this, you'll go out of your way for your friend, but you'll also go out of your way for your friend's friend if he says, oh, bro, I've got a mate coming over.
I have a mate in France, a very close friend, and he might tell me, one of my very dear friends is visiting your city. Would you be able to show him around or know. And because he's a friend of my friend, I'm going to try and give this guy a really good time. I'll take him to Rotorua. I'll show him things. We'll go out of my way. And I think, oh, what amazing. And I remember how I was treated over in France because I was the friend of somebody else's, and. And Aquinas uses that kind of thing. We start caring what our friend cares about. So when they're worried about someone else, we start to actually take that on board as start even with our own friend. We rejoice in what they rejoice in, and we're sad for them when things are sad.
[00:51:56] Speaker A: Well, this is the very fundamental point. I talk a lot about this, about how people take for granted how important Christianity is to the west. And one of the massive distinctions that Christianity brings into the world is moral equality between persons. And as Paul says, it's only through Christ there's no jew or gentile slave or free or that moral equality. No one can say I'm morally superior to another because all are loved equally by that. In the ancient world, that is unknown, like you were talking about before. That's where Aristotle stumbles, because in the greek culture, no, you have a hierarchy of persons and the example of the slave loving a master.
And he's right about the inequality, but they thought that was normal. But Christianity says no.
[00:52:46] Speaker B: It naturally gets rid of slavery because it's even seeing it in the letters of Paul A. This guy was your slave, but now he's your brother because he's become baptized.
And the more you treat him as a brother, the less you can treat him as a slave.
[00:53:00] Speaker A: How do you have a concept of universal human rights despite the abuses of that in the modern enlightenment, post enlightenment, liberal era? How do you have that concept make any sense? Unless there is an a priori belief that in actual fact we all have a moral equality and it's the fact that we are all brothers and sisters in Christ, we are friends of Christ that make sense of that.
[00:53:19] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. Either potential or actual. So even somebody who doesn't know him yet is still made to know him.
[00:53:26] Speaker A: And even your enemy.
[00:53:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:53:27] Speaker A: So even a prisoner who does evil.
[00:53:29] Speaker B: Things, we may of the Lord at the moment, but we all started like that. And that's the way the cross is preached, isn't it?
While we were enemies, even.
[00:53:38] Speaker A: Exactly. Still loved us while we were. And even like an enemy of society, a violent prisoner, we go, okay, they must be punished, we must protect society. We put them in jail, but we don't torture and abuse them while they're in jail. We don't treat them like an animal because that's a failure to show regard to the face of Christ.
[00:53:55] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:53:56] Speaker A: It's quite profound.
[00:53:57] Speaker B: Yeah, it is. It does actually introduces radical mercy.
[00:54:01] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:54:02] Speaker B: Which virtually no other religion can manage.
And the reason we can manage it if we can, which is only through grace, is because everyone's in the position that they're looking on the one whom they've pierced. When the Lord comes again, it says everyone will see him, all those who pierced him. In other words, we're all guilty. So we don't look at it like we're the good guys and they're the bad guys. We look at it like we are so lucky to be redeemed and so blessed because we didn't deserve it and we were pulled out of the mirey pit of it and we are now made children of God. And now I can't sit on my high horse and judge somebody else. No. And yet it's a sad thing that Christianity has a little bit of a reputation for puritanistic judgment, but it's also.
[00:54:48] Speaker A: The faith that tells us and gave us that great slogan that everyone uses there. But for the grace of God go I.
[00:54:54] Speaker B: Grace of God, go I.
[00:54:55] Speaker A: Because you look at the pagan world, that's not how they viewed the world. They looked on a weaker neighbor and they said, yeah, okay, your neighbor is weaker than you. It's not just a good idea to go and invade them and take all their stuff. They believe you have a moral obligation to do that because they're weak and they don't deserve that stuff. It's quite a profound difference.
There's no looking on them and going well there but for the grace of God. That could be our society. We better look after that.
[00:55:18] Speaker B: That's a very christian thought and it's one we have to bring back because I think a lot of younger people haven't been taught it always, that distinction between the sin and the sinner is massive. It's very hard to get if you don't have any faith.
So somebody's done some terrible thing. Yes, they have. We're not letting them off lightly by loving the sin or hating the sin.
But we know that there's nothing metaphysically bad. God didn't create a bad man.
This man was made for goodness and happiness. He's gone down a number of wrong roads for a number of reasons and who knows? I'm not letting him off. Some of it's his choice, some of it might not be his choice. But the thing is, no one knows the complexity of that. But as well as that, we can't even judge if we are in a better state than that guy. No, because pride is blinding. So we might be in full pride and think we're perfect or it could just be a matter of like the sort of thing St. Therese says. I'm not conscious of ever having a mortal sin. And then she sort of panicked because she read that.
[00:56:27] Speaker A: If.
[00:56:29] Speaker B: The one forgiven little loves little in return, the one forgiven a lot is going to love more. And she suddenly thinks, oh, flip, I haven't done any mortal sins and I want to love them the most.
[00:56:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:56:41] Speaker B: And then she starts worrying about that and then she says, oh, hang on. He knew that if I ever committed a mortal sin I'd never get up again. And so he saved me from falling down the cliff at the top rather than picking me up from the bottom. He actually gave me even more mercy than he did to the one down the bottom. So therefore I can love him more because I've had more mercy back to loving him more again, which is kind of Mary's.
[00:57:04] Speaker A: Well, it's also in that sense, then, literally at that moment, what I'm hearing is, come to life, God's mercy is inexhaustible. You can never exhaust it. So even if you're at the top of the hill, you can't say, well.
[00:57:17] Speaker B: You'Re still getting mercy. Yeah. Mary hasn't sinned. She's made immaculately conceived, so she's made a new eve so she can give a full yes to the covenant, and so she's got nothing in her that will resist. And yet she says, he looked on me in my nothingness.
I'm nothing. But henceforth, all generations will call me blessed. It's part of humility to know your real state and to also know the greatness of your call. So I am nothing without him, but with him, I can do all things. Yeah.
[00:57:49] Speaker A: And on that point, for some of our. Maybe our protestant listeners who are listening and the catholic belief is she's still saved, but she doesn't have to fall down the hill like we're talking about. She doesn't have to fall into the pit.
[00:57:59] Speaker B: Joyces, in God my savior.
[00:58:01] Speaker A: Yeah. So God can save you, or someone can save you from a miri pit by either pulling you out of it or stopping you at the edge, and they prevent you from falling.
[00:58:11] Speaker B: And the thing about Mary, so that we don't get resentful or think it's all a bit unfair that one person was made better than someone else.
[00:58:19] Speaker A: How dare they?
[00:58:20] Speaker B: It's about the call. God doesn't give you a call and then mock you because you don't have the means to answer it. If he gives you the call, he gives you the means. And her call is so spectacular because she's not just the surrogate mum who's carrying the baby and then dispensed with. There's nothing like that.
[00:58:38] Speaker A: You're just my mere human vessel to.
[00:58:40] Speaker B: Get me into the next incarnated, not just so he can say, oh, cheers for the ride. She's not his Uber driver.
[00:58:48] Speaker A: What would you call it? Your Uberus?
Uber.
[00:58:53] Speaker B: Uber.
She's not a neutero Uber or he's an utero uber.
[00:59:00] Speaker A: And it was the worst uber ride. It didn't get a tip. And then you get a sort of sorry to pierce your heart at the end.
[00:59:05] Speaker B: The only tip was the tip of a sword. Yeah. Pierce your heart, piercing your soul. And he probably wondered why she was following him.
Mean, you get out of your Uber and you walk off? You don't expect the Uber guy to.
[00:59:15] Speaker A: Follow you around nine months, what are you doing?
[00:59:17] Speaker B: Yeah, but anyway, we digress. The main thing is that the whole of the Old Testament is God wooing Israel as a potential bridegroom. Right? He's a lover, he's the boyfriend. He's seeking her out, and she's playing hard to get.
And then with the incarnation of Christ, that's the beginning of the marriage between God and man. And it's quite an interesting thing because in the one person of Christ, the two natures are married. You could say human and divine nature in one person, united now in one flesh, too, you could say, but before that, God can't just be the husband. And no one ever says yes.
The bride's got to say yes, and that's a creature. So there's got to be one creature that is made to say the yes for all the other creatures and start that covenant. If there isn't a creature, there's only a proposal. There's no acceptance. And so she's that creature. Now, the very first parents were created without sin, and they fell for the idea that they'd be freer without God, to be like God without God if they could control good and evil. Mary was made graced without sin, and she never said no to her grace. And so that's why when the angel greets her, she's full of grace and her whole thing. She doesn't understand what's going on. She just says, let it be done to me according to your word. But I don't get it. She doesn't get it. How can this be? I'm a virgin. She doesn't get it, but she affirms it. And that's actually a real interesting mystery of love because that's even in our deepest friendships, we don't understand the other person completely, but we love them well.
[01:00:59] Speaker A: And it's humility. Humility. Total humility, right. Total detrust in the divine providence of God. It doesn't get any more trusting than that.
[01:01:09] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right.
And she has to be like that because if she had said no, God only allowed creation and sin in the world because he could bring a greater good out of it, which is the redemption and the glorious communion of everyone in him. And if there was never going to be anyone that said yes, he would never have created anything in the first.
Coming back to our discussion on virtue and friendship.
[01:01:41] Speaker A: Suddenly the brakes come on.
[01:01:43] Speaker B: The virtue of charity is actually the virtue of divine friendship with Christ. So that's all it is. If Christ is our best friend, where does that leave us, and how does that change us?
And friendship is mutual. So it's not just I love him, he's loved me first.
[01:01:59] Speaker A: Reciprocal.
[01:02:00] Speaker B: Yeah, it's reciprocal. And he's given his life for me. So it's the least I can do is give myself back.
[01:02:05] Speaker A: Can I say, too, this is where I see in Christianity that the trinitarian understanding of who God is. And we are made in the image of God, who is a Trinity, a community of three divine persons engaged in an eternal act of self giving love, eternal act of friendship. Then all of a sudden, Aristotle's conception of the virtue gets elevated to this whole higher level. It's not just human flourishing. It is actually the very imitation of God. When we give ourselves away, human flourishing.
[01:02:29] Speaker B: All the way to supernatural, eternal flourishing. And flourishing is in communion with God. Yeah, exactly. And with each other because of God.
You commune with God first, I suppose, and then through him with everybody else. It's like glory. The mystery of glory is, first of all, God's glory. No one can imagine it. We see beautiful, glorious sun rises and sunsets and mountains, and we hear glorious music, and we meet gloriously virtuous people sometimes. So we get a glimpse of what greatness is.
But no one can imagine God's glory. You see God's glory, you're going to fall down like John does in the book of Revelation, as though dead. Or like the Transfiguration, they hide themselves.
God's glory. And yet then there's the glory of the saints. But the glory of the saints is God affirming forever the goodness he's brought about in people. So it's like he's saying, just as he said at first, at the beginning of creation, let there be light. And he saw it was good. Let there be everything. And he saw it was very good. And now, not only does he say, it is good that you exist, but look at the good I've made in you, and you are actually now in your own glory.
It's a reflection of his glory, but it means that they cooperated with his grace and his work so that they've earned their own glory. It's a secondary glory. He saved them, and they didn't deserve to be saved. So it's all him. But they cooperate, and they rightfully are affirmed by him. And that's the meaning of in the fifth letter I think it is. First he corrects the people saying, you've got a reputation for being alive, but you're dead.
You're masquerading as holy people, but you're not holy. It's a phariseeical kind of correction. You're using religion for the trimmings and the trappings, but you're not converting.
And he tells them to seek.
[01:04:36] Speaker A: There is no truth.
[01:04:37] Speaker B: Yeah, he tells them to seek a higher justice. He says, I don't find your acts perfect. In other words, you perfectionists are getting on my wick because you're nothing like perfect. Because perfect is about being other oriented, not being self glorifying. Self glorifying is a very immature thing. It's not at all perfect.
You're perfect when you.
[01:04:59] Speaker A: It's an imperfection. Yeah, state of imperfection.
[01:05:01] Speaker B: When you've completely forgotten about yourself and you've given yourself away fully in love, you'll be says. So to seek the right kind of wealth, it's seeking the Holy spirit, it's seeking the true worship. And then he says, for those who conquer, I will. What does he say? I will proclaim your name in front of the angels and my father. In other words, don't seek your glory. Here, let me give you your glory, heavenly forever, when we celebrate the fact that you forgot yourself and your glory and you gave yourself completely away as a servant, and at that moment you became glorious.
[01:05:42] Speaker A: Yeah, well, whoever honors me before man, I will honor him before God.
[01:05:46] Speaker B: It's like Jesus'hour of the cross, which should be his most shameful hour, is his most glorious hour.
[01:05:50] Speaker A: You are about to see the son of man lifted up. And that's what he says.
[01:05:53] Speaker B: He's heading out to the cross and now is the hour. Glorify your son, Father. Doesn't just mean the resurrection, it's the cross.
Yeah, exactly. So that's the key to.
Well, it's always about forgetfulness of self, you could say, but not in a stoic way. It's quite interesting to compare it to Buddhism or to stoicism.
[01:06:19] Speaker A: I want to come back and talk about stoicism because there is a bit of a resurgence of that going on and I want to sort of dissect that with you. But one other thing too. I'm thinking about Aristotle and what Christianity brings to completion.
You really see that deep understanding of morality. The moral life now as an act of love or an authentic moral life is, it's not simply a set of commands I obey because I'm fearful. And it's certainly not the modern concept where I only do things that make me feel good. Instead, it is a total giving of myself and love to truth and to.
[01:06:49] Speaker B: Goodness and to another that I care about.
[01:06:53] Speaker A: Yeah. Because I can't love a command, but I can love the giver of the command. Who's Christ? Right?
[01:07:00] Speaker B: Yeah, that's it. We don't love universals.
We don't love humanity. We love people. Particular people. Yes.
We can love the thought that we're all made by God. We can love ideas.
[01:07:14] Speaker A: Yes.
[01:07:14] Speaker B: But actual fact, love is really manifested in the particular act for one person to another person.
That's very important. And that's even with God's love for us, it's particular.
It's not. He loves everybody the same. He doesn't. He loves everybody exactly as they need to be loved for them because he loves them.
It's never amount of quantifiable thing. Love isn't quantifiable anyway. It's a quality.
[01:07:44] Speaker A: Yeah.
Have you got two portions or four of love?
[01:07:48] Speaker B: Yeah. No, not a little bag of gold.
[01:07:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
On that point, what I see happening in our culture today is because I wanted to ask you about this because I think it's important I look at it.
I can't see how you can have an authentic conception of virtue without the conception of a higher sacred good, which underpins and motivates that. What I see in our culture is we mentioned the stoics. We see a return to a sort of stoicism amongst some people. Now, there's a certain natural law truth there, but it'll only take you so far. And what I also see is a return of that Nietzschean Ubermensch, the will to power. And where Nietzsche looks at Christianity, he doesn't just disagree with it, he thinks Christianity is immoral because it's holding us back. And we need to imitate the pagans, and they worshiped greatness and strength. And so that stoicism, I see people returning that because the sacred, transcendent idea of God is missing in our culture.
[01:08:46] Speaker B: The biggest difference between Aristotle and christian view of virtue is actually around the question of humility and pride.
Because Aristotle doesn't have humility as a virtue. He doesn't disparage it, but he has a kind of pride as a virtue. It's like honor.
You want to be an honorable man, but honor should be authentically deserved because you've done good things and people look up to you, and that's all good. Christianity doesn't focus so much on everybody looking up to you. It focuses much more on you realistically knowing that you are nothing without God. And with God, with the grace of God and with God's help, you're able to have been whatever you are.
[01:09:34] Speaker A: You're an earthened vessel made of clay.
[01:09:36] Speaker B: Yeah, but all glory to him if it's worked out well, kind of thing.
Humility comes in deeply when you first realize you're truly made.
It's not a virtue that arises naturally with, shall we say, normal interactions of friendship. You have to be humble enough to be realistic because nobody likes a person who's sort of in their own world of themselves, and they're so unrealistic in the way they think of themselves and others because they're looking through selfish lenses. They're not humble, and that would get on everybody's nerves.
The only person's pride that doesn't get on our nerves is our own. That's right.
So there is that. And you could notice that.
[01:10:33] Speaker A: The sacred, transcendent good of Christianity is essential to that. Right.
[01:10:37] Speaker B: Humility in Christianity is so much more massive because God himself humbled himself first of all to become a human, which was already completely different to what he was, and then completely lower, and then humbly yet to accepting death and then the death of a criminal on a cross. He's gone as low as you can go, and that's our Lord and God. So if that's our Lord and God, like we said before, it's the whole theme of in Philippians.
We can't be on our high horse if he's gone so low and he's led us the way. The way of the cross is the way we follow. In other words, it's our life journey. He's actually gone ahead of us in the humblest way possible, and that's the only way to heal some horrible divisions. Yes, he made peace by his blood on the cross, and it's in that mystery of self descent, if you want to call it that. It's like God came all the way down, and therefore he is raised all the way on high. But on his way to being raised, he took, first of all, the human body and soul with him. So it's been raised up into God, but also he takes all the souls of the people. He's freed from the dead with him. Saints are starting to go up there, and he's taking, in the end the whole of creation with him.
When we have glorified bodies again back into the father, so he comes down, and then he goes up with us. And in the middle there was the marriage where the two became one. Therefore, we rise with him as we died with him. We rise with him, as we say in the funeral, in baptism, they died with Christ. May they share the.
[01:12:26] Speaker A: Yeah, it seems to me, then, what you're saying there is the christian sense of versus the pagan sense. The pagan sense. And this is the Nietzschean thing. No, you must take dominion, whereas the Christian is, you surrender dominion, because Nietzsche's.
[01:12:39] Speaker B: Big confusion is between project and. Yes, and it's true when you're. We are creative, and that's a gift from God. We image God by being creative, because he's creator. That's the lowest way. We image God. You could say it's great, but it's the lowest way.
The next way up is when we seek the truth, especially for the truth's sake, and we delight in the truth. We can seek the truth practically, as in, how is the best way to live? And we can seek the truth because we love the truth and what is the highest truth? And we can contemplate it. So that's also our quest for more than just dominion, which is in our projects, but truth, some of our projects are also reflecting our quest for truth. By being so beautiful, they make people think about truth.
[01:13:27] Speaker A: Can I say with Nietzsche, that point is very salient, you've just made there. And I think you see that very clearly in his earlier history, where he had this idea around music and the arts as being, like, a way to revolutionize society. But then he grows disenfranchised and he just abandons it, because, in a sense, it is his project that he has dominion of. It's not like something beautiful you surrender yourself to. It's like. No, it's a utility for him.
[01:13:50] Speaker B: But even a great piece of music, you could look at it in two ways. You could look at it as. And for him, he's german, isn't he?
[01:13:57] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:13:57] Speaker B: So the greatness of music will always be a german composer, and they are.
You don't get much better than that. But in the great stature of their compositions, you kind of compare it to, like, a great gothic church or something like that. Amazing thing. If you really come to understand it, it's phenomenal. But it's still, on one level, it's a great achievement of man, and it's what man is able to do, and it shows you the greatness of man. On another level, it's pointing way beyond that, because it's pointing to the deep. Like, Beethoven hated people who thought that he was just trying to do beauty. He said, I'm not after beauty. I'm telling the truth in my music. It's the truth. He was trying to make musical truth. It turns out very beautiful, but for him it's profoundly true. But he couldn't never explain why because it's not got no words, but it's just what the heart wants to do. It's the truth, and it's beautiful, too.
The arts point us to a truth they can't give us. Exactly. They're like John the Baptist pointing to a messiah that they aren't.
The trouble with Nietzsche is he makes man making himself the great superman. So you end up with man is only in a project. He's a project of self construction. And anything that gets in the way of his self definition is imposing itself on him.
And that's the original sin. In the end, you will be like God. You will be the author of good and evil. You will be the author of truth because you will be the ultimate creator, and everything will be whatever you made it.
[01:15:46] Speaker A: Well, that's so clear in Nietzsche. Right? Because we become the new gods, he says God is dead, he says, basically criticizing the enlightenment. No, you can't talk as if God's real with all these humanistic constructs of morality without God, because God's gone. We've unshackled the sun from the sky. We are the new gods now. And that's literally the creation and the fall all over again.
[01:16:05] Speaker B: And I think, too, he had that secret worry that, well, we've all been good because we thought we had to be good for God. Now that God's gone, what's going to keep us being good?
[01:16:16] Speaker A: Where will we get our morality from?
[01:16:17] Speaker B: Whereas in actual fact, there is a layer of goodness that doesn't rely on following commandments. And it is the layer of goodness that's exactly in Aristotle. So it's basically somebody else's goodness because we are good. Essentially somebody else's goodness wakes up our love, and our love wants to be true to them, and so that wakes up our virtue. So in actual fact, it's an echo.
[01:16:46] Speaker A: Of Eden that's in us, right, in a sense of before the fall.
[01:16:48] Speaker B: But we don't need theology to tell us no, we just need experience of life. We need to know people. We need to find good friends. We need to have helps if you had a good family, because they start to teach you the essence of love anyway, and then you start to reach out and find it in other people, and then you get swept up and you're in something already good.
[01:17:09] Speaker A: Can I say on that because somebody.
[01:17:11] Speaker B: Told you commandments or laws?
[01:17:12] Speaker A: No. And on that point, you know what? Before people say, oh, but hold on, isn't this maybe moving away from Christianity? No. What does St. Paul says? St Paul says, all of know there's a natural pointing to God already. And then revelation sits on top.
[01:17:25] Speaker B: He says in Romans, we're actually guilty in our conscience because we should know from.
[01:17:34] Speaker A: I think, what we often do, the mistake a lot of people do is they interpret that as being, oh, I should look at a beautiful sunset or a beautiful beach and see God. And that, no, it's also about human beings are created and Aristotle is one.
[01:17:45] Speaker B: Of the best ones at know. Luther thought, oh, no, we can't come to know the existence of God without revelation.
And the church says, oh, yes, you can. We've always said you can. Well, Aristotle did it, so, I mean, he said, at least one guy did it.
[01:18:05] Speaker A: It's not easy. It's the grace of salvation.
[01:18:07] Speaker B: Bright need to be really attentive to reality. And he was that, and he did do it. He's one example.
But then, so that you don't have to be a genius just to get to the truth, he also reveals truths that we could have worked out ourselves. But the thing about it is, how does Jesus even reveal the father? Think about that. He's the son who eternally knows the father. But that's an inexpressible light. It's not a thing that's got a bunch of concepts and words associated with it. He comes down to trying to explain that to dumbos. Yeah, and we can't see anything he's talking about. And he can see it in the grace of his intelligence and human intelligence, because he's got the beatific vision. He can see the father while he's trying to explain him, but he also needs a translation desk to say, how do I get from inexpressible wowness to what I'm going to tell you?
And that's the infused knowledge he had to get the right way to tell us, because we can only understand a thing by comparing it to what we.
[01:19:15] Speaker A: Know, what we already know.
[01:19:17] Speaker B: And if we hear God's good, will we go, oh, he must be really good. So what is good? Well, good. I know what a good holiday is. I know what a good ice cream is. I know what a good person is. I know what a really good mum or dad is. I know what a really good friend is. And the more those things are higher, not just if, I just. I know what a good sparkle is and I know what a good ice cream God is good. Is he like an electric blanket?
[01:19:41] Speaker A: Well, isn't. Ironically, that's the faith. That's a problem, Sam. But we have today, God is Santa Claus. Because the concept of the good is not high.
[01:19:48] Speaker B: Yeah, because it's like a little child's idea. Why does it have to be raining? Can't it be sunny every day? Why can't every day be Christmas? Why can't we have holiday every.
[01:20:03] Speaker A: Now the soccer player, literally this week, this is a classic example of this. She came out because she's got an injury to her achilles or something. Woman's soccer player from America.
[01:20:14] Speaker B: She said, what is a woman?
[01:20:17] Speaker A: She said that, basically, she said, and she said this in an interview, not that I believe I'm not a religious person, but the fact that I've got an injury that will prevent me from playing soccer, that's proof that there's no God. And you're like, that's about as immature as it gets.
[01:20:31] Speaker B: Yeah. That's a very self centered world.
[01:20:34] Speaker A: Not even children think that.
[01:20:38] Speaker B: Well, evil can scandalize, but when it's just the evil of a sore leg, you wonder how far they've looked.
Yeah. Holocaust didn't put her off.
[01:20:47] Speaker A: That was my achilles.
[01:20:51] Speaker B: Mass starvation didn't put her off. False walls, but saw the.
[01:20:56] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, I've heard of one. That's my greek philosophy.
That's crazy. That natural goodness, that's what Paul's talking about. That in creation, there's already an order. There's a natural law that's knowable.
[01:21:13] Speaker B: I think we've got to see that. It's not like the natural law is one thing, unless we call everything natural law. That's just our nature. But we have our nature. I look at the way Rosalind Hurst house looks at it. Say some of those, the great virtue ethicists, they don't actually believe in God, but she argues it from the bottom up. She sort of takes a look at, what do we mean by the word good?
The word good doesn't have a kind of meaning just by itself. It has to be a good something.
And to know what is a good flower of that species, well, you sort of have to look at a whole lot of them and see what they do characteristically and what a good one does as opposed to that particular one. That's a bit wilted and not doing so well. But there's others that are doing this.
What do humans do characteristically?
And you can say, well, we can walk and run. And then somebody say, oh, well, hang on a minute. I know a guy with no legs. He's saying he's not human.
Well, he's not doing well as a human runner.
[01:22:24] Speaker A: He won't be running a marathon.
[01:22:26] Speaker B: Yeah, but when we look at what makes a good horse, we could say, what makes a good lamb? From the point of view of us putting the lamb on the table or from the point of view of the lamb in itself. Yes. And what is its flourishing? What is its thing?
And why would we change our logic when we get to human?
What makes a good human? Well, you have to look at what are the sorts of things humans do and what do the really good ones do.
You start to see the people that stand out in their virtues, the people that stand out in their skills, say, intelligence, or whatever the things are that humans can do. Creativity, sportsmanship, fitness. There's all sorts of potential humans can reach. And then you're looking for what's the deepest goodness humans can have. And all of that, in a sense, you're reading nature. You're just reading.
It's also. You're living life, you're knowing people.
[01:23:20] Speaker A: Eventually you'll get to love, I think, like an unintelligent person. Right? Like, even a very uneducated child, very young, very uneducated, could know, oh, that's a good father or a good mother, or that's a bad mother or good father based on how do they treat me or others.
[01:23:35] Speaker B: Yeah. Because at the end of the day, a lonely person is not happy, and the kid at school who can't make a single friend isn't happy. And all of that. Everyone's been through a bit of that struggle and you've tasted it in some way or other. You're in a foreign situation. You can't quite connect. You don't quite know how to start.
But we can't really imagine no love in someone's life. Like, it's pretty horrific when you think of, well, that's.
[01:24:06] Speaker A: Wouldn't that be a psychopath, in a sense? Wouldn't that would be a total probation to the sense of deprivation.
[01:24:11] Speaker B: I mean, even they're growing up, maybe they were just born into some gang of mistreated from day one or something, I don't know. But I suppose some poor children have had terrible lives. But normally, to pin our idea of goodness on from another, the.
[01:24:31] Speaker A: Let's say I was sold into Fagan's pickpocketing gang, but there was still one guy there who always gave me an extra bit of bread at dinner time.
[01:24:39] Speaker B: Yeah, there's the one guy that looked out for you, somebody even winked at you once and you thought, oh, he.
[01:24:47] Speaker A: Yeah, can I say too, I see here a bit of a corruption, well, not a bit, but an actual corruption that comes into the west via enlightenment liberalism here because it's this obsession on the reasoning individual who will reason their way to the truth and this obsession with reason. So we have this notion of an ordered reason, but they've had an obsession with reason. And what that does is all of a sudden that natural goodness is lost because you can't reason around that kind of stuff.
[01:25:15] Speaker B: That's why you need to respect experience. Yes, Descartes is very strange when you think about him because he is trying to kick start philosophy in an independence from theology, because it got very interwoven during the time from fourth century on. And he wants to get back to philosophies pure, if you want to say, without revelation in it. So he's looking for a starting point, but it's very unusual what he's doing because he's sort of going, wait, now what can I start at? I can't really start at what my teachers teach me because people get things wrong. I can't even start at what my senses tell me because senses can be deceived. I can't start up this, I can't start at that. Everything could possibly have an error or a mistake now and then. So therefore, how do I know I'm not in one now? So how do I know it's not this and that? And you talk yourself into acting like you don't know anything at all. That's right, as your starting point. And then you go, but wait, I'm doubting. Oh, hang on, if I'm doubting, I'm thinking, oh, if I'm thinking I'm existing, yeah, well I've got one person existing, me. How am I going to get anyone else? I think you're there, but you might be an illusion. Yeah, wait on what if it's a dream? First I'll prove gods exists. And he does it by some, they call it a geometric proof. I think it's just one of those proofs that isn't quite a proof. And he gets to God and he goes, oh well, if there's a God, he's not going to want me tricked all the time. So that guy, I can see if there probably is over there, because God wouldn't want me to just wander around in a big trick in the end. But that's a very weird thing because you tried thinking all that without any words?
[01:26:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:26:53] Speaker B: Where did you get your words from? People talking to you all or through growing up?
[01:26:58] Speaker A: That's right.
[01:26:58] Speaker B: You got a whole bunch of thoughts and concepts that you just used that came from growing up communally. There's no way you've got that in your head and you've never met anybody.
[01:27:07] Speaker A: No, exactly.
[01:27:09] Speaker B: You haven't got any single word in your head if you've never had a language. And yet you've grown up in a whole community of people, and you get to an adult and you start reasoning like, how can I prove that I'm not the only person on the earth? Well, open your eyes and remember yesterday who breastfed you, bro? It wasn't mean. What happened to just remembering things and seeing them?
It just sounds a bit. I mean, people think, oh, Descartes being sophisticated, and this is a very naive way to look at him, but basically, we've got to respect normal human experience and the normal things that humans say and do, because they give away how we really think.
Our proverbs even give a lot away the little wisdom tucked away in the way we phrase everything.
[01:28:01] Speaker A: Do you know what that is, too? I see in. That is, I see again that western problem, modern western problem of the loss of a sacramental vision of reality. We've separated into these fears. And it's like my mind, my mind, my mind, rather than acknowledging, yes, there's something happening here as well, that you can see and experience, and it's speaking to the things your mind is trying to understand.
[01:28:20] Speaker B: And one of the big Things of the Aristotle is he let every experience have its own logic. So he didn't think that he would find one logic to explain. Project friendship, family, workplace politics, contemplation of truth, the human body, life, all the different spheres of philosophy.
He looks at each one and says, what's the deepest thing in that one? Oh, it's your creative idea that makes everything work in a project.
It's not your creative idea that makes everything work in a relationship. No, that's being romantic. You can go, oh, I want a nice setting. I'll get some nice.
That's your creative idea, but all you're doing is setting it up.
[01:29:02] Speaker A: Yes.
[01:29:02] Speaker B: Now what are you going to do? Have a creative idea about how she's going to love me back?
No. Get to know her, make sacrifices, treat her like she's another self, and treat her like she's more important than you, and she'll start doing the same back.
And before you know it, you've got something to reflect on.
[01:29:24] Speaker A: And that never goes the way you think it does. Like a project. A project is quantifiable. This is not. It might go on all sorts of twists and turns you never foresaw.
[01:29:31] Speaker B: Exactly. Which is why practical wisdom is the thing governing virtue. Coming back to where we started, because.
[01:29:37] Speaker A: By Robert Loretz.
[01:29:38] Speaker B: My new book, Practical Wisdom, is not a formula. It is not a set of rules. It is not dropped down from on high. It is not in a book somewhere.
It is us using our intelligence in real situations based on our experience and perception of people. And all of that has to be done unbiasedly. So in other words, we got a ditch. Just looking for our success, just looking for our pleasure, just looking for our status, just looking for what will further us. We're not networking with the useful people and ignoring the people we think aren't going to be any use. We're actually meeting every person as an adventure and going, there's someone to discover here that's beyond me. That'll never be understood fully by me. I can't put him in a box. I can't say I get that guy. I know your type. You're this. Then you haven't met me. You don't know me. You've made a quick judgment.
[01:30:32] Speaker A: That's social media, right?
[01:30:34] Speaker B: Exactly.
[01:30:34] Speaker A: I'm distanced from you, and I judge unvirtuous.
[01:30:37] Speaker B: Yeah. It's teaching us to judge and dismiss, label and dismiss virtue signal. So without virtue, you're signaling you've got virtue.
It's the opposite. It's like what the Lord always said was spoiled in the telling you keep your good deeds to your chest sort of thing.
If they're for your glory here, you've had your glorious reward here kind of thing. But that's a very christian perspective on it. But even normally speaking, it means you're not doing it for them, you're doing it for you. So it isn't yet a virtue. It is only a warm up or an imitation or a caricature.
[01:31:19] Speaker A: And what I love here, too, is, so we've talked about the enlightenment and the hard rationalism and descartes, etc. I think one of the other problems that can creep in is Rousseau, Jean Jacques Rousseau and his natural state of goodness. And that's what I see, is Christianity cuts through all of that, and it doesn't fall into either extreme. And so what it would say to Russo is, no, you're failing to recognize the effect of original sin on the human person. So you need to actually begin a process of seeking virtue. You're not born with it.
Also, what that means is we have this modern, sort of the free market of ideas and, well, it doesn't work that way. It's not like virtue just suddenly sort of rises to the top. A good moral life rises to the top. You actually have to work at it. You're not born with it, in a sense. You're born ready if you are willing to give yourself.
[01:32:07] Speaker B: And because we are a certain being, and we do have a certain flourishing, there's all these commonalities. Even though the way everybody will live, even if you take marriage and say, well, there'll be a whole lot of ways that people are living their marriage, a whole lot of different vibes in their interaction, and they've got to know each other and they know what hurts the other one and what doesn't. How to be sensitive, how to be thoughtful.
It would be silly to give her flowers, she's allergic, blah, blah.
[01:32:37] Speaker A: Yes. Unless you really don't like her. Yeah.
[01:32:41] Speaker B: Peeva off one day, just get her sneezing. Within the complexity of the million ways you can aim at being kind or good, there's a whole lot of things that are clearly not that. There's a whole lot of things that are clearly vices that are clearly crossing the line the other way.
[01:32:58] Speaker A: Be kind.
Well, we did hear that a lot. Right. And you could clearly see. Hold on, hold on. We did don't go to church.
[01:33:04] Speaker B: And you wonder what cruel is a. If that was kind kindness, which was be kind. Yeah.
[01:33:10] Speaker A: That was preached from the pulpit.
[01:33:11] Speaker B: It's a bit like Hitler saying, be kind. Be kind.
I raised the economic prosperity of some Germans. I'm kind.
[01:33:19] Speaker A: Yeah. There's a couple other things I want to talk about before we wrap this up, because this has been a great.
[01:33:23] Speaker B: You want me to sing a Jacinda song?
[01:33:25] Speaker A: No, let's keep her out of it.
[01:33:27] Speaker B: Let's keep her out. Let's have a nice day.
[01:33:28] Speaker A: Let's be kind.
We're all trying to forget.
[01:33:32] Speaker B: No, she saved us. Let's face it. If she hadn't done everything she did, we'd all be dead. Believe it. If you want to.
[01:33:39] Speaker A: Yes.
All praise to you, Jacinda.
[01:33:42] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:33:42] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. That's for the censors, that one there. The ministry of truth.
No. So there's two other things I want to. A couple of things I want to talk about, and one is more talking about the philosophical and to finish what I want to talk on, sort of finish on a practical note with you. But the philosophical one is, I see, in the modern west today because we've lost sight of this. It's so frustrating to me because in one sense, we don't expect virtue, but we demand it. We don't really train for virtue. We don't encourage you to be schooled in it, but then when someone does the slightest thing wrong, we want to cancel them. It's this sort of schizophrenic mind, almost.
[01:34:22] Speaker B: And we expect more of others than we're prepared to give.
[01:34:24] Speaker A: Yes.
The ultimate virtue signal is, remember, is a projection. I project onto you what I'm not going to do myself.
[01:34:32] Speaker B: It's quite a mature way.
Did you even hear of a lady called Janet Smith? She used to do presentations.
[01:34:40] Speaker A: Dr. Janet Smith. Yeah, I still follow her.
[01:34:42] Speaker B: Great woman. Yeah. I remember one of her talks that I had once I recorded, and she was saying, some teachers will get up in front of a class and say, oh, write down the ten things you want in your perfect spouse to the teenagers. And they might list down and some of them might concentrate on looks for a while, but they'll eventually get to some qualities and some virtues. Some things. They want them to be honest and they want them to be true, and they want them to be faithful and they want them to be whatever forgiving or the flaw in it usually is that that's where it ends. And then you're wandering around with your little list in your head going, oh, well, I found somebody's got six of the ten. I can work on the other four.
And you're looking for the imaginary person that you've invented. And where is the person? Who's that person? And that one? I thought they had it, but then they ended up having this one fault. So then I'm off. So there's that. But she said what she would do with that list is then flip it around and say, okay, so that's the qualities you want to have in a spouse. Are they also the qualities you want to have as a spouse? Wow.
Are you going to magically get all those virtues great on day one of your wedding, or do you need to start working on them now? What are you doing right now about being honest? What are you doing right now about being brave and courageous and generous?
I thought that was good. And that inspired me to do a little trick on a group of girls I took on retreat when I was teaching at St. Mary's college years ago. And you know that thing where you all got a blank bit of paper and you look at the person or you write your name on it, then you write something really nice about the person, about. Is it the person next to you?
[01:36:24] Speaker A: And then you fold it over, it.
[01:36:26] Speaker B: Goes around in a big circle before it gets back to you. And then you meant to read all these lovely comments everybody wrote about you. So I did this exercise, and they were passing it round and round around, and just before the time where you hand it back and you get your own one back, I collected them all and I said, right, we'll throw these away now.
Well, no, I want to read.
[01:36:47] Speaker A: I want to read them. I want to teach.
[01:36:49] Speaker B: Read them, read them. I said, what would be the point of that? The whole point of the exercise was you forgot yourself for five minutes and you started thinking about what was good for other people. And now you want to revel in yourself at the end and just ruin the whole thing.
[01:37:00] Speaker A: Brilliant.
Some harsh lessons in humility.
[01:37:04] Speaker B: Yeah, tear it all up. Beautiful.
[01:37:06] Speaker A: You are dust. And under dust this sheet of paper.
[01:37:09] Speaker B: That reminds me, can I tell you another game we played on retreat, the Cushkian mate. Yeah. So the theme was unity. Yeah. Anyway, I said, well, you get unity by doing lots of things together, like games. So we're going to play cards today, and I'm going to show you a new card game. But before we do, let's just warm up. We'll do it. No, before that, I had them tie a bit of string from one wrist to the other, and the other person, their partner, has the string woven around their string, and they're tied from one wrist to the other. And you go, right, you guys got to work out by cooperating how to get untangled without cutting the string or anything like that. Just work it out. And off they go. Now, it can't be done. So they're trying for ages, all sorts of things, but it doesn't happen while that's going on. I go around to the naughtiest ones and I go, okay, this whole thing's impossible, actually. But the reason I'm doing it is to keep those guys busy. What? I tell you the real plan.
So the real plan is we're going to play a game of snap, but you guys are going to be the cheats. So what's going to happen is you start playing normally. Just snap two. Two. Snap. Is it called snap?
[01:38:22] Speaker A: Yes, snap.
[01:38:23] Speaker B: Snap.
But then you start snapping when it's not a snap. So just make up a rule so two even numbers snap, although they were the same color snap. Or anytime a king followed by two, it's a snap. Just make it up.
And if it turns into trouble, just say that's how we always play it at home. And if it turns into real trouble, just call me and I'll back you.
[01:38:45] Speaker A: So this is near a sociological experiment.
[01:38:47] Speaker B: And they're like, yeah.
[01:38:48] Speaker A: Mr. Yeah.
[01:38:48] Speaker B: Mr. So I got about six of these cheats, three pairs of these cheats. I make them numbers one to six. They're the leaders. And then you number everyone one to six so that everyone's got one cheat in their team. And off they go to play snap. But they're sufficiently spaced out that they can't hear that every group is fighting because this cheat is ruining the game in every group. And they're calling me over and I'm like, what's going on? And they go, he's cheating. Mr. I'm not cheating until we play it at home.
And I said, oh, hold on, hold on. There's more than one way to play snap. Don't be judgmental. Try and get on. This is supposed to be about unity, okay? Tolerance. And I walk off and they carry on. And they're not big, huge fights. And then at the very end, I call them all together. I say, now, who won? And of course, all the cheats hands go straight up, and the other, they didn't win. They cheated. They all cheated.
They're all like dogs barking. And the whole thing is you can't have unity without truth.
[01:39:43] Speaker A: Brilliant.
[01:39:44] Speaker B: You've got be in different universes and think you're going to connect. Yeah, we've got to be in the same game.
[01:39:51] Speaker A: Sacred, transcendent truth. See, this brings me nicely into the other part of the question I wanted to ask. Is it? Because I guess the conversation really pointed was, it seems to me now that because we've lost sight of the sacred sense of truth, we're now elevating things and calling them virtues. They're not virtue. So tolerance, which you've just talked about, it's not a virtue.
[01:40:10] Speaker B: No.
[01:40:10] Speaker A: It's a real doubt and irrational skepticism are now held up like, oh, that was the new atheist problem. Everything should be, we should be skeptical.
[01:40:18] Speaker B: About everything and even trust.
On a positive side. It's not a virtue to trust every single thing. No, you got to discern.
[01:40:28] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right.
[01:40:29] Speaker B: It's not a virtue to tolerate everything. You've got to discern. Sometimes tolerance is good for a while. Tolerance by definition means you're putting up with something bad for a while.
[01:40:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:40:40] Speaker B: So you don't tolerate good things, you tolerate bad things.
[01:40:43] Speaker A: And it's only tolerate, it's not indefinitely.
[01:40:45] Speaker B: Because they're not going to conquer everything, but because there'll be a better way out of it than if you don't tolerate that.
[01:40:50] Speaker A: Great point.
[01:40:50] Speaker B: Yeah. And when I was once on an.
[01:40:52] Speaker A: Aeroplane, sorry, before you say that question, then our culture doesn't really want tolerance. It wants indifference. Just ignore.
[01:41:00] Speaker B: Well, they say they want tolerance while they're in the group that don't have the ascendancy.
So, for example, if they perceive that there's a lot of christian values everywhere in a society, but they want to live in an anti christian way, then they'll ask for tolerance.
[01:41:14] Speaker A: Do you know who the first to really do that was? John Stuart Mill. That was his big thing.
[01:41:18] Speaker B: What was his thing?
[01:41:18] Speaker A: This whole thing of tolerance. And that was his whole progressive thing.
[01:41:22] Speaker B: They always argued their way in by tolerance. Yeah.
[01:41:24] Speaker A: And he wasn't thinking for everybody. His idea was against the dominant christian thought.
[01:41:29] Speaker B: Yeah, well, it will be.
And it's part of Christianity to be merciful and to be tolerant to a degree, because Christ is tolerant of us.
He's gentle is what it really means. He's gentle. He doesn't hammer us with all the truth about ourselves that will crush us on day one. He actually slowly leads us, and sometimes we take a long time to convert. And he's very patient. He's gentle.
You could use the word tolerance there. It's not quite the right word.
[01:41:58] Speaker A: Well, but here's the thing. It always has a limit. A limit, though, because he's always engaged in a movement of love. But then it comes to the point where he's like, okay, I'm no longer tolerant of your decision. At the end of time, the final judgment, you're going in that direction because.
[01:42:10] Speaker B: He respects your freedom, even if it's radically against him.
[01:42:14] Speaker A: He doesn't say, I'll keep tolerating the sin. Now, come on into heaven.
[01:42:18] Speaker B: No, well, heaven is only possible.
The whole meaning of heaven can't be made by a person who rejects him.
[01:42:27] Speaker A: You have to be intolerance there to.
[01:42:28] Speaker B: Make it, to have heaven.
But what has obviously happened, I mean, it happened quite a long time ago, but it's very obvious now that the groups that argued their way through tolerance to get to the ascendancy have suddenly become the most intolerant of anybody ever. And all the idea that there was ever a christian inquisition.
And one day we'll do a session on the inquisition, because if you think there was a massive inquisition in middle ages and how evil it was, the real inquisition that goes on now.
Did you say the word trump without spitting and frowning?
You must be an insurrectionist.
[01:43:09] Speaker A: It's even worse. Now, have you posted anything against Israel on your timeline today? And just silence now is enough to.
Before the inquisition?
[01:43:18] Speaker B: Yes, exactly. So you've got this most intolerant, judgmental, narrow, ridiculous group of people that are persecuting normal people, living a life in the name of a woke agenda that they've canonized as the new virtue.
[01:43:35] Speaker A: And they think they are the victims, which what makes it so dangerous is you have all that power and you think you're the victim.
[01:43:42] Speaker B: Yeah, built on victimhood and bullying.
It's the ultimate irony.
And the trans agenda is the biggest, most obvious one because the claim is that any poor character that doubted their identity would have been bullied.
So the solution is they become the ultimate bullies of every single person on earth.
You have to call me what I say you have to call me. You have to bow your head to this trans agenda. If you won't do that, you've got no place in our society whatsoever. And you're dangerous and you shouldn't be allowed to work and you shouldn't be allowed to do anything.
In the end, you'll be in prison because you have to bow down to me. And Jordan Peterson summed it up quite well, I think, when he talked about the way two year olds play and the way four year olds play. So two year olds are going to make the rules. I'm the king and you're the servant. You have to stand over there and you have to call me sir.
You can't move without calling me sir.
That's the tranny performance.
By the time you're four, you might learn to share your toys. They just haven't got to four yet.
[01:44:52] Speaker A: Well, and the funny thing is, again.
[01:44:55] Speaker B: It'S not them anyway.
It's not even them. They're just the tools in the game. I think that's being played by the liberal elites because the liberal elites aren't all trannies, but they're using that as a way to bludgeon Christians and anybody with traditional values. Yeah.
[01:45:12] Speaker A: And then your average liberal is powerless because their enlightenment liberalism doesn't give them a objective standard and a measure to hold it all. It's like, I'll just live and let live. And so what they do is they say, okay, you've got to live and let live. Robert, I identify as a woman. You must live and let live. And what they don't really mean live and let live because live and let.
[01:45:30] Speaker B: Live would be, must conform or die.
[01:45:31] Speaker A: Yeah. So live and let live would be okay. Then, Brendan, you identify as a woman. Go and live your life. No, in actual fact, the whole of society must be restructured now. And you must call me a certain thing. Their birth certificate, laws must all change and you must let me not live in it.
[01:45:44] Speaker B: You must even let me put on my Od garments and talk to your four year old. And if I can convince your imaginative four year old that they might want to be something else, then I'll take them off to get the surgery done. And it's none of your business.
[01:45:58] Speaker A: Yeah, and that's held up as all part of this grand new virtue.
[01:46:02] Speaker B: At the end of the day, he then wants to come back as a woman and beat the pulp out of some poor girl in a boxing match. That's his right, too.
And anyone who says anything is phobic.
[01:46:16] Speaker A: They lack virtues.
[01:46:17] Speaker B: But that's the thing of if you make a thing that's not an actual virtue. A virtue. It's like respect. Respect is good for what should be respected. Respect for things that shouldn't be respected isn't good. Well, trust in things that shouldn't be trusted isn't good.
Tolerance for things that shouldn't be tolerated isn't good. And part of the virtue of courage is working out what should we tolerate? What should we endure and what should we crush? Yes, because if you've got an idea that the babysitter might be molesting the children, you don't tolerate.
[01:46:56] Speaker A: No, you've got to stop that.
[01:46:58] Speaker B: You've got to absolutely act.
And to tolerate that in the name of some woolly philosophy of tolerance is going to just be child abuse.
[01:47:07] Speaker A: And that's where you go back again to Aristotle, it's a disintegration that happens.
And Christianity explains why the devil comes as the angel of light. He will come to parody that which is good, to try and pull you into disintegration.
[01:47:20] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:47:21] Speaker A: And then prudence is essential to order the virtues properly.
[01:47:23] Speaker B: Exactly. And supernatural prudence will look to the supernatural end, so the natural prudence will look to the natural end, which is good family, good society, good friends, good life, and good life properly discerned. So, like, the higher things higher, the lower things lower. That's already good. And not many people are even at that natural level of virtue.
And then the supernatural virtue is whole life oriented to full communion with God in heaven.
How does that influence the way I bring up my kids? What do I do? I teach them to pray, I teach them to be grateful, I teach them to give thanks. I teach them to seek God's help. When they're in trouble, I teach them to trust their parents and the church for advice and help and support.
It's going to overflow in lots of infinite number of ways, really, on that point.
[01:48:15] Speaker A: It can be very easy to fall into despair at the state of culture and their lack of virtue around us. But you know what the funny thing is? Speaking of people seeing in the natural things that point to God, there's been a couple of very high profile cases recently, people seeing the disintegration and recognizing there must be a God. So JP Sears, who converted recently to Christianity, said he looked around and saw the evil in the world and thought, there must be a God. There's that case of the baby who has just died by court order in the UK, and the father who wasn't a Christian, he said, I've been dragged through hell and that's made me. He got baptized because of it and became a Christian.
[01:48:56] Speaker B: That's the 6th trumpet in apocalypse. Okay?
In the 6th trumpet, the angels are told, okay, let the winds blow. Now the angels are told to blow before they were the angels holding back the winds. They were holding back the winds until we've been marked on the forehead, in other words, until we've been sealed by God and so that they won't destroy everything.
And then in the fifth trumpet of apocalypse, there's so much smoke coming from the pit, there's false messiahs emerge. Basically, the messiah before was described according to four living creatures. A lion, an ox, the face of a man, and an eagle. Christ, the lion of Judah, the victory. The ox is the animal of sacrifice, giving himself in sacrifice, the merciful face of Christ, showing us the real heart of the Father. And then the gaze of the eagle into the Son is the contemplative Christ, contemplating his father. Those four things were summing up Christ's incarnation in the earlier part of revelation. And suddenly you get locusts and they are weirdos. They have noisy wings, so they have wings like eagles, but they're not contemplative eagles, they're noisy eagles. They have teeth of lion, so they'll tear you apart. They have scales on their breasts, so they don't want to give themselves a sacrifice. And they don't have the merciful face of Christ, face of a man. But they do have women's hair. So it's like seductive something around. I imagine it's purple tranny hair. Actually, it's not actually real woman's hair.
[01:50:29] Speaker A: That's Robert's personal scriptural commentary.
[01:50:32] Speaker B: But they're like promising you everything Christ promises you and they can't deliver. And it's interesting, in the book of, in the trumpets, death is actually conversion. It's like John says, at the beginning, I heard a voice, I turned to see him, I fell down as dead and I was lifted up again. In the first four trumpets, which aren't woes, a third of them die, meaning they convert. In the next three, when all the bad things emerge, the false messiahs can't kill, they can only torture, because they can't really convert you and lead you to truth. All they can do is promise that and then not deliver it.
It's like a torture.
[01:51:13] Speaker A: Do you know the other thing I was thinking about as you're saying that is about locusts is, again, it points to a privation again, because a locust strips you and leaves you with nothing.
[01:51:20] Speaker B: Right?
[01:51:21] Speaker A: There's total disintegration, like a raid.
[01:51:24] Speaker B: And the next trumpet says, okay, so what do we got? What is all the smoke? It's all the propaganda. It's all the false ideologies coming out from the underworld. Communism, it's going to be the great savior. It's going to make everybody equal and brotherly.
[01:51:40] Speaker A: Contraception.
[01:51:40] Speaker B: It's going to stop all abortion. It's going to make all families flourish. We're never going to have divorce.
All those things and they prove themselves to be completely hollow and empty. Transgenderism, if we can just get rid of a distinction between man and woman, we'll end up with everybody.
[01:51:55] Speaker A: Total equality.
[01:51:56] Speaker B: Yeah. And the more it's allowed to happen, the more we see this is empty nonsense. All of it is ruining our humanity.
[01:52:05] Speaker A: It's the locusts destroying our crop and our grain, our patrimony, our future.
[01:52:09] Speaker B: It's all being eaten to offer anymore. We can't even offer man, woman, child. So the family, the basic unit, what happens in that? It gets unleashed and a third of them convert from that.
We're seeing high profile conversions all the time. Jordan Peterson's wife's becoming a Catholic in Easter.
[01:52:32] Speaker A: Yeah, I saw that.
[01:52:34] Speaker B: Milo Yunopoulos has had a big inner conversion with a conversion with a thing to St. Joseph.
He's fighting for chastity now and helping others.
[01:52:44] Speaker A: It's interesting.
God is at work even in the midst of the desolation.
[01:52:50] Speaker B: That's why he allows it, because he's actually doing his work in the middle of it.
[01:52:53] Speaker A: There is still virtue. The virtue of hope is not lost.
[01:52:56] Speaker B: Exactly. And hope is exactly the virtue of living that victory while you're in watching the defeat.
[01:53:01] Speaker A: Total despair.
[01:53:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:53:03] Speaker A: Tolkien talked about this abiding the long defeat.
[01:53:05] Speaker B: He called it Mary at the cross.
This is a victory. I haven't got the faintest idea how, but it's a victory.
[01:53:12] Speaker A: I'm still standing here.
[01:53:12] Speaker B: I have to trust in that. And I have to trust, even on the Saturday when he's in the tomb and everyone else has run off, that there's some victory in this. And that's why Saturday is Mary's day in the church, because she's keeping hope alive. She's trusting all the way to the resurrection.
[01:53:26] Speaker A: Look, honestly, it's fascinating.
Let's try and wrap this up because we're closing in on a two hour mark, but I think what we need to come back and have another episode talking about the book of Revelation, the book of the apocalypse, because we've touched on it today, and we definitely need to delve into that.
[01:53:42] Speaker B: That will take us 12 hours, but we can do it.
[01:53:44] Speaker A: Well, they're easy.
[01:53:45] Speaker B: Six. Two is a twelve.
[01:53:46] Speaker A: In fact.
[01:53:48] Speaker B: We don't want to stop at six. We better make it 14.
[01:53:51] Speaker A: No, let's just go. We'll go.
[01:53:52] Speaker B: We don't want six. Six, six.
[01:53:53] Speaker A: We'll lock ourselves and do a weekend live stream. Seven.
Let's see who the real 21 hours.
[01:53:59] Speaker B: We'll do 21 hours.
[01:54:00] Speaker A: Who wants to join our cult?
[01:54:01] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:54:02] Speaker A: No.
[01:54:02] Speaker B: Oh, I thought of a couple of ideas for a cult. I'll tell you later.
[01:54:06] Speaker A: Yeah, we'll see if we'll get them copyrighted first, then we'll start them. I'm with you, mate.
[01:54:11] Speaker B: One's the four corners of the earth.
[01:54:13] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:54:14] Speaker B: All you got to do for a cult is find one verse of the Bible no one's ever taken literally and insist that it's the main one. And it has to absolutely be taken literally. That's what the blooming 144,000 in heaven turned into.
[01:54:25] Speaker A: That's right.
[01:54:26] Speaker B: And the three sons of the three heavens of Mormons and all that. They just take one verse and that's it. Everything's literal. I found a verse that's number four, corners of the earth.
[01:54:36] Speaker A: There we go.
[01:54:36] Speaker B: There we go. We'll talk about that later.
[01:54:37] Speaker A: It's cubed. Okay. But we will do another episode about that. But on a practical note, because I think it would be good to sort of say, okay, we've had, I think, a very fruitful and flourishing sort of discussion here. Robert, what would you say? Just to wrap it all up, someone who says, okay, practically, how do I start living this? Then I understand the beauty of this theory here, and it's really grabbed me. But how do I now apply this practical wisdom? I've heard you speak.
[01:55:04] Speaker B: I would say you be attentive to the people around you, and it's the people you live with, it's the people you work with, it's the people you're in contact with every day, because presence is the only real food for love and appreciative of their goodness and grateful.
So, basically, the things that open us up, humility is one of the main ones. But humility comes through gratitude. You have to realize you're not controlling everything, running everything, manipulating everything. You are actually receiving everything, and you're giving thanks for everything beautiful. And in that, you start doing it to people, and you start to realize each person contains a treasure that's beyond our capturing. We want to adhere to them. We don't want to control them, we don't want to possess them. We want to discover them.
And maybe we should relook at the people that we've written off over the years. We don't have to be everybody's friend. We do in Christ, but that's a different matter. That means we want everyone to be in heaven with us. We have to spend our days with every single person. Well, we couldn't have been possible, but not yet. But that's a different extension of friendship. But in the immediate friendship, we have to watch out that we're not being sucked into that world of quickly labeling and dismissing. Seek out why a person's saying a thing that is, even when it's off, what's the hurt behind that? What's the wound?
What's the truth? They're trying to get out, but they've got it in the wrong way.
And we're looking for affirming the true and the good in every imperfect person we're meeting, because none of us are perfect. And no one we expect to meet should be perfect.
[01:56:49] Speaker A: And virtue is a movement towards the good, right?
[01:56:51] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:56:51] Speaker A: So we should be trying to move towards that.
[01:56:53] Speaker B: We're on our way, but we're not there. Yeah. If we're not there yet, we don't condemn someone else because they're not perfect yet in order we to condemn ourselves because we're not perfect yet. But at the same time, we don't want to settle for mediocrity. No, we want to actually strive for a full life. And a full life isn't me building myself. It's me finding others and rejoicing in them, and they'll rejoice in me. So it's not a one way street.
[01:57:22] Speaker A: So in essence, that essential christian concept of self giving, love is the key. And allow that to actually. So give yourself to that and then allow that to be your master of virtue because it'll teach you to do it well. You have to. And stick at it. You have to grow in virtue.
[01:57:37] Speaker B: Yeah, it's otherness. We have to find the other in their goodness and their truth and community.
[01:57:42] Speaker A: Is essential because annoying people who will call you out of yourself and call you to love only they have to be close to you. So you have to go where they are and be with them.
[01:57:50] Speaker B: And if we were really brave about it, we'd say, let's throw our phones away, or at least put them away for significant periods of the day and look for real presence instead of distance relationships, because distance is really open to the imagination, which can go anywhere. And I heard a priest say once, the devil wants to keep everyone in their imagination all the time because it's the one place you don't meet God because he's in the real.
So we need to rediscover spending time with each other. Children have to rediscover playing together outside.
It's not about being glued in front of a game or a dazzling tv because screen, because it's going to be a good babysitter. No, it's about all the games we used to make up outside imaginatively around the yard or something.
And then that's just getting kids right? Get them back to art, get them back to playing, get them back to spending quality time, families eating together instead of everyone dispersed on their own screen.
The screens are doing us a hell of a lot of injustice, actually.
[01:58:59] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree. And I think kills creativity as well, because we know if you're going to be creative, I mean, creativity is important. It's a way we image God. But it's also to do that well, you have to be bored because you are most creative when you are in a state of rest.
[01:59:14] Speaker B: The other thing is, it's for something. So what is it for? It's for making the world more conducive to human contact, to relationships and friendships and family and God. And if it's not that, it's going the other way. So we can use our creativity to destroy the world or to make the world better. Yeah, true.
It's a force for. That's what we got to remember about the human economy. The human economy is not a goal, it's a means. And if it takes over and swamps everybody's ability to have a family life, then it's killed it.
[01:59:48] Speaker A: Yeah, you become everything becomes we're slaves. Homo economicists.
[01:59:51] Speaker B: Yeah. Back to pharaoh and building the pyramids and not enjoying them.
[01:59:55] Speaker A: Yeah man, spot on. Well, right Robert, that was great. As per usual. I think we've broken our record too. Now that's 2 hours.
[02:00:02] Speaker B: Oh, there we go.
[02:00:03] Speaker A: So yeah, we're about to hit 2 hours. Okay, we've done well.
We're going to shut off the recording device in a second and talk about some other stuff, some ideas going forward because I want to pitch a few concepts to Robert for something for next year. Sounds good.
But before I do that Robert, I just want to say thank you again.
[02:00:28] Speaker B: Pleasure.
[02:00:29] Speaker A: Thank you for being such a good friend that you came here and hard cuz.
[02:00:33] Speaker B: Choice, bruh.
[02:00:35] Speaker A: So yeah, it was sweet ass man and just gave of your time to have this beautiful.
