Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: Father, thank you so much for being with us. It's a real privilege to be able to have you on the show to talk about philosophy and in particular, I guess, the conversation du jour, which is politics and democracy and all sorts of stuff like that. But before we even get into any of that, tell us a little bit about your role. You are based in Rome at a place called the Angelicum. What does that mean?
And what happens at the Angelicum, particularly for our listeners, perhaps, who maybe are not even Catholic, who are watching?
[00:00:31] Speaker B: Right. Well, I'm a Dominican priest, and I'm a. Well, so I'm a Catholic priest in the Dominican order, which is one of the major religious orders historically, most famously associated with Thomas aquinas, founded by St. Dominic 800 years ago. It's got a lot of famous figures in Catholicism associated with it, like Catherine of Siena or Martin de Porus.
Anyway, the Dominican order has a university in Rome that's one of the seven pontifical universities that serve the Holy See. It's technically called the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, but the shorthand is Angelicum for the Angelic Doctor, which is the nickname for Thomas Aquinas.
And like all the pontifical universities, what we do is we seek to serve the universal Catholic Church and the broader academy in the whole of civilization, you could say, to train and cultivate knowledge in philosophy, theology, canon law and social sciences in the service of learning for evangelization.
So the Angelicum has been around since about 1577, but it's sort of had its modern phase from about 1906 onward. We train about every year. We have about a thousand to eleven hundred Catholic priests, Catholic seminarians, women religious and lay people, about 20, 30% lay people who study especially philosophy and theology, but some other subjects here as well. And so we've trained countless numbers of diocesan priests over the years. The two most famous alumni of the university would have to be, in recent times, Carol Woj Tila, who went on to become John Paul ii, who did his doctorate in theology here, and most recently, Pope Leo the 14th, who studied for his doctorate in canon law at our university in the 1980s.
[00:02:33] Speaker A: So that's. That's two pretty impressive alumni right there.
And I always like to ask people, too, about their.
Their faith journey. And I was reading somewhere recently that you actually converted to Catholicism during your undergraduate studies at university. Can you tell us a little bit about that, what, what that looked like for you?
[00:02:54] Speaker B: Yeah, well, in my case, I sort of read my way into Christianity, and then I read my way into Roman Catholicism. Over a period of about four years, I was interested in, I guess, the best way to say it was ultimate explanations.
And so when I was a freshman in our first year in university, I started studying religious theories about human existence, sort of questions of ultimate explanation. And I. I got actually very interested in Buddhism as well as forms of Hinduism, but then made my way into Christianity reading some major theologians. And I realized that Christianity had this very profound philosophical, theological kind of depth to it.
And I started experimentally praying and had an experience of Christ.
And so I sought baptism. And once I got baptized, I got, you know, that. That really deepened my sense of the presence of Christ in my life. But it was a kind of intellectual journey as well as a spiritual one. So I kept reading and I studied early Christianity. And as I read more about early Christianity with Augustine and Origen and Gregory of Nazianzus and other great figures, Athanasius, I began to think that ancient Christianity looked a lot like modern Catholicism. And that moved me more toward exploring, like, eucharistic adoration and the Catholic Church's spiritual teachings. I guess I. To put it briefly, I discovered in college that in Cleveland, classical Catholic Christianity, there's some amazing synthesis of deep philosophical and rational reflection with profound theological ideas about the revelation of the Trinity in Christ with a deep spiritual, mystical aspiration. And that triad of philosophical depth and theological intelligence and spiritual profundity drew me in, and I decided to become Catholic eventually.
[00:04:55] Speaker A: That's beautiful. It's a great way of putting it. If I remember my reading, just in preparing for this conversation, I think you joined the Dominicans, if I'm not mistaken, somewhere in the early 2000s. And I was thinking to myself, that was really the pinnacle time, too, of the new atheism. Was that something that was sort of on your radar during this journey? Because I'd imagine, you know, being a Dominican, obviously, there's some very deep and profound things to say in response to that particular ideology.
[00:05:25] Speaker B: Yeah, I became more interested in understanding atheism philosophically. As a Dominican. One of the things that's part of our charism or gift to the larger church is to study modern scientific and philosophical trends and other religions, other forms of Christianity. You know, we're very involved in ecumenism.
So I really, after I had a philosophical training from the Dominican order, became more interested in understanding the sources of modern atheism and theological reflection as well as philosophical reflection on atheism. And I've always been interested in the arguments for the existence of God as a dimension of Christian intellectual life. So there's always the question of whether the classical kinds of arguments like Aquinas formulated, people like Aquinas formulated are still viable, or whether thinkers like Hume and Kant and Heidegger have in a certain way radically problematized any claims to philosophical knowledge of God. And I'm one of these people who thinks that the classical metaphysical questions are still very important and that they, when treated well and rightly, lead to reasonable reflection on the rational belief in the existence of God. So I'm not that impressed by the philosophy of the New Atheists. I think they actually in some ways are a derogation. You might say that the classical atheism of a Hobbes or a Hume or a Nietzsche is a, probably a lot more sophisticated and viable. Even though I can't myself find my way to agree with it. I think it's a lot more intellectually, like serious.
What I think the New Atheists did was they tried to attach the narrative of inevitable atheism to the, to the advent of the modern sciences. And I think that argument just fails. I don't think there's anything we've discovered in modern physics, chemistry or biology, including the natural history of evolutionary emergence of forms of life, which requires of us to distance ourselves from more profound theistic claims about the origins of being or the origins of the human soul, or the spiritual nature of the human person or the moral dignity of human life. I just don't think modern science and religion, when rightly understood, are opposed to each other. So I think that, you know, I think there's a sophism in the New atheists, a very powerful sophism that's captured the minds and imaginations of many people.
[00:07:58] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great point about the marriage of, or attempting to marry it to science. I mean, that was very much Sam Harris's attempt. Right, to try and explain morality that way. I, I think I, I like Dr. Edward Faser, who, his book the Last Superstition I thought was really great. And one of the things that really resonated for me was he talked about the fact that the New Atheists, they, they didn't really go back to the original sources where the deep magic is really found of, of, of theistic philosophy that they're arguing sort of against a very mechanistic view rather than actually engaging with, you know, deep and particularly Catholic and Christian theistic philosophy on its own terms.
[00:08:41] Speaker B: Yeah, I think Edward Faser's work is absolutely helpful and I'm really, I mean, he's a friend, but I also Find him very intellectually compelling.
[00:08:51] Speaker A: My kids have told me to ask you about the Hillbilly Thomas because we love the Hillbilly Thomas in our house and I believe you had something to do with them. Were you a founding member or something like that?
[00:09:03] Speaker B: Yeah, that. That's a poster somehow behind me. I wonder if I can move my body so you can see it. Anyway.
[00:09:08] Speaker A: Oh, there we go.
[00:09:10] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm a member of the Hillbilly Thomas. So we're eight Dominicans who as a hobby play folk, Americana and bluegrass music and we're about to come out with our sixth album soon and I was one of the co founders of it and I play the banjo and the guitar and sing and write songs. But it's a kind of a fun hobby. It's on Spotify. You can find it all on YouTube and Spotify.
And I guess, yeah, it's a. Got a huge following among young Catholics. I mean, especially the under seven crowd. That's a big demographic for us.
[00:09:48] Speaker A: No, look, I'll tell you, wherever I speak often I speak in New Zealand and certainly around New Zealand a lot. In Australia now as well. I'm always introducing people to your music. I. I'm a guitarist myself. I have a friend who's a fiddle player and I've got a bit of an Irish background, so a whisky and an Irish tune is not unfamiliar to me and I really like.
There's just something about it. I'm not a bluegrass guy, but I have been, shall we say. I've experienced a sort of conversion, if you like, through that, through what you've done.
[00:10:14] Speaker B: Bluegrass and Irish music are cousins, you know.
[00:10:17] Speaker A: Yeah, let's get into the serious stuff.
Does deep metaphysics require a mediator? I. I think here and, and why I'm asking this question is I think about the sort of. The serious Greek philosophy and you know, the pinnacle of Greek philosophy, the likes of Aristotle and co. Would probably want to suggest to us that you really, you know, you can't even begin to do philosophy until you're in your Middle Ages. And then for some of it, some of it, in a sense there's to really understand it. Well, like the liberal mind would say, no, I as an individual can just reason my way to anything. But it feels to me like in actual fact, those who have wisdom, who possess wisdom because they've actually grown in that and nurtured that, they have an obligation in a sense to be mediators and they can be mediators for us in a way that perhaps we can't be for ourselves. If we lack that wisdom. So am I right in that? Is it true?
If it is true, what are the implications then perhaps for liberalism, because the liberal assumption would be that just every single ordinary Joe can just reason their way to the fullness of truth.
Or is it a bit more complicated?
[00:11:26] Speaker B: So, first, let me say I'm, you know, I'm more of a theologian. So my speculations about political life are, I'd say, less honed or less developed. So take anything I say here with a grain of salt. However, on the one side, I would say liberalism, as it's expressed in a lot of contemporary mainstream forms in secular Europe or maybe Australia, New Zealand, United States, for sure, is actually pretty hierarchical.
It does function through elite institutions, industries, ways of making decisions about priorities in terms of what's best said, best expressed, best believed forms of education that then work through institutions like the government or the media or the universities.
So, I mean, it might be that liberalism aspires to a universal inclusion and a universal upward mobility, but it doesn't function without a very elaborate hierarchy. That's the first thing I'd say. Second thing I would say is hierarchy is part of nature, if you believe in the acquisition of the virtues. So Aristotle and Aquinas basically say there's moral virtues that take time to acquire and some people don't get there on. On various fronts, or some people get there better than others. Justice, temperance, prudence, fortitude.
And then there's artistic virtues, like we were talking about music, the violinist, or the person who's, I don't know, a great actor. You know, those are things which not everyone can do just because they want to, or that it's intuitive. And then there's intellectual virtues, like being a great mathematician or scientist or having medical knowledge or becoming a really insightful philosopher.
Okay, the point is, most of these things are hard to do and we want everyone to do them.
It's right to want an inclusion of everyone in the process of acquiring the virtues. But it's also realistic to know we're going to need some kinds of experts that we depend on in various fields. Like, you don't say, well, I'm really ill, but instead of seeing a doctor, I'm going to just follow my own intuition.
It might be that I want to understand the medical science, and by understanding it I might participate better in the healing of my own body.
But really I need to get to someone who clinically is going to have that experience and insight of many years of practice of medicine so that they can virtuously act to help me. And it's like that also a lot with, in a great, to a great extent with people who are prudent and just, who have a good sense of the practice of the arts and so forth. So, you know, look, I think if you think about human potency or the capacity to acquire the virtues, then I think we want to be as universally inclusive as possible and say it would be good that we make available to everyone to participate in the just life or acquire artistic excellence or acquire, you know, scientific philosophical knowledge and so forth. But we're going to need to follow experts. The problem is we're all agreed more or less on experts in science. We're not agreed on experts in philosophy, we're certainly not agreed on experts in religion.
But it's not the case, I think that we can just follow our intuitions or you might say that the shadows cast on the wall to use an image from Plato by the media to decide our own best moral impulses or our own best religious impulses. So what we've done is basically, I think by a kind of despair of consensus about religion, morality, metaphysics, philosophy, we've left those to be sort of unformed, you might say, feral impulses that we follow and then that get manipulated, I think often by whatever's, whatever's on sale in the media that could be the news, that could be like boilerplate academic simplifications, that could be whatever's on, on sale on Netflix.
And then we acquire a kind of intuitive source of religious or non religious moral or not very moral views of the world and political opinions. And we don't really believe there's a formation necessary. But classically, Even into the 19th century, everyone thought that to have a, you know, a political vision required a formation.
And I don't see, I don't think that's a particularly elitist claim. You know, I don't think that's needs to, I certainly don't think that needs to result in an authoritarian view where you say, well, since only a few really understand they need to be put in charge of all the others.
I think people who have more knowledge and more authority should be the people who are empowered to, to share it. And then the people who are capable of sharing it should be everyone. So, you know, education remains always a kind of key to, to formation of, of culture, you know, and there's a lot of despair of education really.
And so we result then to demagogy and sorry, yeah, we kind of have recourse to demagogy or we have recourse to sophism or to kind of simplifications and slogans and politicization rather than real education.
[00:17:00] Speaker A: This seems to relate nicely to this very excellent article that you wrote in 2018 that was published in First Things called the Metaphysics of Democracy.
And before I ask you about a couple of quotes in particular that really sort of resonated, it seems to me, and this I think applies to what you were just talking about, if I'm understanding correctly, that democracy does seem to assume, well, certainly the modern variants of it, what we're living under now, really does seem to assume a lot about human nature that possibly isn't entirely correct.
And like, like the, the. Our capability to truly understand everything. And then also in, in turn, it feels to me like it places burdens on us, like we are sold, you know, the democratic franchise as like a great empowering. Right. You know, you have the power of a vote, but if you don't get the majority to go with you, it doesn't really do a lot. And then on top of that, I've now got to be more than just a humble husband and father. I've now got to understand economic policy, you know, which is really, is beyond my, my pay grade. But I'm expected to understand that in order to vote well in an election in regards to that sort of stuff. And obviously we don't want to be unthinking, but it does seem to me that there's a balance here that's been lost and we need to recover that sense of the importance of hierarchy and particularly in relation to democracy, if we're going to perhaps see some of the current challenges resolved or worked through.
[00:18:21] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I mean, I think it's one thing. So let me just talk about Robert Bellarmin for a moment because Bellarmine, the Jesuit doctor of the Church, wrote during the kind of advent of the splits between Protestantism and Catholicism and was very concerned with governmental forms or forms of government that are healthy. And I mean, he stipulates that in any balanced civilization you're going to need kind of equilibrium of different branches of government or ways of communication, of knowledge. And one of those he thinks is we could call it executive branch or, you know, he thinks it's monarchy because he's in early modern Italy.
And, you know, monarchies have checkered histories. But there are definitely some monarchical forms that have been more protective of the common good and some that have been more despotic or unenlightened.
[00:19:24] Speaker A: But I mean, the point is, on that point, can I understand Can I ask you about Aquinas in particular? Because I think if I understand Aquinas correctly, he favoured a monarchy, but one where the people could actually democratically vote the monarch in Iran. Is that right?
[00:19:38] Speaker B: Voting in the king?
Now the Kings in the 13th century would have much less power than monarchs from the age of absolute monarchy. And they'd have much, much less power than current people like the president, United States or you know, elected officials in who have the sort of war powers and economic influence of modern democrat. Democratically elected executives who just have so much power compared to the. The past. But yeah, he believed that you could vote in kings on a cyclical basis from. In some kind of voting mechanism. I think that if I understand correctly. But you know, the point is you could have a cycle or you could have even kind of colleges of more monarchical personages. Now by the way, just the Catholic Church is governed this way because bishops. It's a monarchical system and it's been incredibly stable over time. But then, you know, then the thing is, Bellarmine also thinks you need an aristocracy and by that he doesn't just mean of blood, but he means a kind of mechanism for promoting higher culture and understanding and ideas. And I think aristocracies that are healthy could be like in the form of positions of judges or. Or could be university officials, but people who have staying power in the culture and project an understanding of good principles over time.
And then he talks about democracy because you need ways that you can allow social movements to express themselves and allow the base of personages who are governed to articulate their concerns and worries in collegiality with aristocracy and monarchy. So look, I think that there's a little bit of different ways these things work themselves out, but they're all in the natural law and they reassert themselves over time. So it's really hard to eliminate them from society altogether. They find forms if they're radically suppressed imbalances, I think then arise.
The problem is liberal secular democracy might be an anemic form of democracy precisely because counts out from the start the possibilities sources of knowledge that come from revelation. Also sources of knowledge that come from classical pre Enlightenment philosophy.
And probably also especially I think of this especially because a lot of forms of secular Enlightenment democracy are based on a liberalism that has a truncated, an importantly erroneous view of what it is to be human.
In other words, I don't know that it's always the form of government that's the problem.
It might be more the ideology or the lack of Wisdom about what a human being is that then makes that form of government misfire, miscalculate.
Now what you say about the guy who needs like someone else to tell him how the economics works? That's right, but the problem is that that argument cuts both ways, right? So you could look at the contemporary Chinese government, which of course secular and authoritarian, and say, well, they, they clearly aren't going to be held hostage to the whims of democracy or the manipulation of trends in media or entertainment. They, they really have a complete control over all those forces. They're giving everybody what they should believe about economics as, you know, receive science and wisdom, which they're getting from Marx or a certain version of Marx down through centuries of experience.
And partly it's working economically on some level and some. And in other ways it's just a gravely mistaken, inhuman kind of approach to like the family, to religious freedom, to intellectual freedom, to freedom of speech, you know, so authoritarian proposals are also a risk. And really what I think you need is some kind of balance of equilibrium between, as it were, some strong executive powers that do provide ballast in storm, some forms of democratic expression, some forms of aristocratic staying power, wisdom. But all of that only works if you've got a true philosophy of the human being and a true theology of human existence. And I think partly our secular culture doesn't have a coherent profound vision of what it is to be human.
And then people say, well, so you want religious theocracy? Well, no. I mean there are authoritarian forms of religion that are also dangerous and there's even authoritative forms of Christianity that historically have been kind of opaque and stupid. But I do think that there are historical forms of Christianity that have shown that they have a lot of wisdom.
And I do think Christians can have leadership, show leadership in principle in a modern pluralistic world according to principles of natural law and a deep understanding of what a human being is in ways that also respect the religious rights of non religious people, the right to be non religious and the religious rights of non Christian religious people, the rights to be religious in non Christian ways. I think Christians need to try to articulate a philosophy of sanity in the midst of the absolute chaos we're in philosophically and politically, where we have very little understanding of what it means to be human and very little understanding of what it means to organize ourselves as a polity based on genuine forms of justice and rights. I don't know how we get out of this, but I don't think it hurts. I don't think it hurts to have Christian, good Christian political voices and philosophical voices.
[00:25:04] Speaker A: This sort of ties into something I wanted to actually ask you about, which is there's a quote that really stuck out for me in your article in 2018 where you say this. I'll quote it. The mounting rejection of the liberal project has precipitated a crisis, and one felt most acutely in the political realm. It has taken the form of a resurgent nationalism, an inchoate response to the suppression of faith that is inadequate and perhaps dangerous. And it seems to me part of this is exactly what you're just talking about here is it's about anthropology.
You know, it's anthropology stupid. And it really is like, if your anthropology is flawed here, then I can't remember the Polish philosopher who talked about the idea of the thick self.
And if you don't have that from faith, then you will go looking for it. Nationalism or other forms of the thick self. Because we can't be beings without a deeper sense of existential meaning and purpose, surely.
[00:25:56] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, well, it sounds to me like. It seems to me like in the contemporary world you can try to superficialize yourself in sort of limited honors and pleasures and wealth and the augmentation of your individuality. And we do see people trying to live without marriage and children, without commitment, really, to maximize their autonomy of freedom to have the most experiences, if possible.
And I think that can lead to a kind of. Well, besides the fact that it leads to the desolation of our population and the kind of demographic collapse, I think it also just leads to a kind of superficial form of human existence that then gets reinforced because people are insecure. If you start to tell them that the way they're living is basically insulated against depth, they resent that. And then, you know, they just live in the world of, I'd say, philosophical, just information.
And philosophy gets reduced kind of to commercials.
And then, yeah, against that, people then want to seek a stronger identity and they sometimes go back to something like national polity, because at least in a nation state, you've got usually some resources to think about a deeper meaning of human existence.
Like, you've got the history of the art and the philosophy or the. Yeah. The culture, maybe the religion of a given nation. And maybe you don't say you're a British person. You don't really, you know, like a typical British person. You're not really sure if Anglicanism is true at all. But you're. But you're connected back through that to the royalty and to hundreds of years of, you know, Great scholars and thinkers and architecture and art. And you think, well, somehow this needs to be reasserted. But it's part and parcel now, this kind of, you know, let's call it nationalistic drive toward religion. It's part and parcel of a more general connection with national ethos. Now national ethos is like not entirely negative, of course. I mean, it's actually kind of natural and part of humanity. But it's not ultimate. It's not a reference point that can get you a final adjudication as to why, why we exist. And there's something about, you know, internationalism that isn't just the liberal, cosmopolitan, kind of boilerplate secular internationalism of the jet setting elite, but a deeper internationalism of universal human community, nature, the human condition shared by all, trying to find reason in and through all different historical times and places, seeking the truth where it can be found, trying to find a consensus about what it means to be human and made in the image of God. There's elements of a deep internationalism that are also real, necessary, important.
So like that's, there's classically, I think, kind of three sort of communities that you need to take account of. One is the family.
Any civilization that doesn't revive continually in the family is a doomed civilization. And we have a lot of those around us right now.
The family is the most fundamental political unit. As Aristotle rightly noted. People are born into families, educated in them.
They gain their first sense of being loved and of being, you might say, human beings in communion through knowledge and love, through a family. And families provide the most fundamental service of formation to nation states. So that without families, nation states really can't fully function. Then you've got the nation state or the larger community which obviously provides support for a whole set of interim middle term goods, middle level common goods like the arts and universities and education and economic well being and exchange of services and, you know, a pathway towards economic prosperity for all and health care and so forth. And if you don't have nation states helping organize a series of public and private goods like that, you just can't really survive. Families can't survive, people can't survive. But above all that, you've got a third community, which is the community of the church, which provides something that the state cannot provide and even the family cannot provide, which is orientation towards a transcendent meaning in life, what it is to be human, an understanding of how we can direct our lives corporately together toward God. That gives the nation an ultimate reason to exist. It gives the family an ultimate reason for hope. It gives people reason to form families and to support nation states. And without the church, or you might say, the higher register of a communal life orchestrated around the search for transcendence. Without that, the state sort of ceases to have a reason for being and the family ceases to have a reason for being. And then what happens is we try to invest either the family or the state, usually with some kinds of religious significance, or we just give up on religious significance. And often we give up on the transcendent reasons for the family and the nation state and we sink into just consumption, individualism. Individualism as consumption of very, you know, basic goods and pleasures and. And then the narrative of life kind of unravels, even if people don't recognize it.
[00:31:26] Speaker A: My sense is that basically we are living through obviously a time of great upheaval and I think a collapse of sorts. What comes next? Who knows? But it seems to me that it is the liberal order that has sort of failed or is failing here as in a state of collapse.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. If, If I'm right in my assessment of things, is liberalism a victim of its own success? In a sense, this perpetual unshackling from tradition, from community, basically has resulted in what I think Zygmun Bauman called it liquid modernity. Nothing is for certain.
Obviously there's an anthropological component like we've talked about, or. Or could the liberal project. Do you think it could have survived perhaps and weathered the storm if it perhaps had limited, like under different, you know, different conditions, limited, perhaps the scope of what it unshackled people from?
Or. Or was it always doomed to failure? Is it even faster?
[00:32:22] Speaker B: Well, I think. I think some kind of. Let's. Let me start with the more, let's say conservative statement, which, in terms of conserving liberalism, I think that you have to have in any society some kind of acceptance of mutual acceptance of the mutual rights of each person according to the measure of justice, so that people who have differentiated views of the world can coexist and respect each other's natural dignity despite the differences that might come about between them. Right. So I think just because you have to have civic justice, you have to have some degree of mutual tolerance and acceptance of different differentiated viewpoints. And so you need a certain amount of political liberalism or liberal magnanimity where you share the space with others.
And I think that not only should exist, but has to exist or will exist predictively just because it's a part of the fabric of how Human beings accord each other's space to mutually coexist when they don't see eye to eye.
It's too minimal to build a culture around.
So if you start to say that that's the only criteria for a civilization, it's not an apt criteria. It doesn't tell us enough about what we should live for. And laws that both indicate goods and prohibit evils do need to think somewhat about what we're made for, what's best for us, not only about what's permitted to us as most minimal.
And I think the kind of solve liberalism as a solvent on traditional values tends to arise when it becomes more aggressive in trying to be inclusive through dissolving all indications of why we ought to live, what we ought to live for, or what we ought never to do. And so it maximizes permission and it minimizes commitment. And when it goes that direction in an increasingly aggressive way, it. It tends to dissolve both religious, national, national and religious patrimonies. And it tends to leave people a little bit spiritually homeless. And then there's a reaction often.
And we've seen it happen with the family. I mean, we've redefined the family so radically that really any. Anything can be called a family. I mean, nobody really. And you can't. Now they can't even define as, you know, I mean, this is a serious point, not a, not a. An aside. It's. It's seen as intolerant to try to define what a woman is because it could, you know, it could exclude someone's definitions of gender fluidity. So, you know, it's really interesting how to be more and more inclusive, you have to in some way become, in a way, I'd say, more destructive.
Now that. So I've said two things. One is that we need a certain amount of inclusivity, and secondly, that this is a kind of reductivist, universal ecumenism of liberalism that tends to try to dissolve all commitments. And I think the space between the two is found when we allow people to have thick commitments of what it means to exist and at the same time to accord them the rights to hold those views without Orwellian cancellation, while also trying to find ways that there's space between persons and communities to live alongside one another.
I don't know what's going to happen because I don't really see there might be a resurgence of Christianity. There are due to be some signs of new religiosity.
But I. But I also think that what may happen is that people who drift into more and more secular civilizational modes either find new ways to invent it as a prevailing philosophy or they cease to reproduce themselves and cede their place to civilizations that have a thicker commitment of non liberal norms. And of course, here you think about the Islamic community. It's very unclear to me whether, and Islam's many different traditions, but it seems unclear to me that there's a mainstream movement in Islam towards something like broadly liberal values. There are, there are Islamic persons, you know, Muslims living in contemporary Oceania or you know, Europe or America who have a pretty strong commitment to like liberal dimensions of culture. But on the main, in the main, you wouldn't say that that's a religion that seems to be headed in the way of deep and wide scale embrace of liberalism.
The Chinese government, the Russian government, the secular governments that seem not interested at all in the liberal project.
Europe seems completely, unquestionably committed to it.
And maybe it will find a way to revive and re articulate it and to maintain a demographic, you know, community sufficient to assimilate the immigration of people who could then take on some form of liberalism through education. And you'll have a secular Europe that continues to exist.
You know, the United States is just totally unpredictable.
So, you know, I don't know what's going to happen. I, I think though that whatever the case may be for the, you know, world of peoples, I think Christian intellectuals need to try to articulate a common philosophy of human dignity and human nature and natural rights based on a metaphysical vision of the human person, to share that with secular people, to share that with religionists, and to try to foment a kind of sense of why there should exist laws of mutual respect and freedom of conscience of others because of a deeper commitment to what a human being is. And not just because everyone should be able to believe whatever they want to and everyone should be able to do whatever they want to. Those two views are not really, I think, feasible. They're not views that you can maintain a civilization around. You can believe whatever you want, you can do whatever you want as long as you don't hurt anybody. These, these are not really viable principles for, for real political life.
[00:38:17] Speaker A: Yeah, it's interesting, isn't I, and I sense that the growing nationalism and also I'd say there's, there's certainly even in this part of the world now there is a growing conversation about the immigration question.
It's like finally these ideologies have started to have practical implications that people don't like. And so there's just this very hard pushback which this is. You know, we're living through this crisis now of this. Like you talk about nationalism in the article, which to me does raise a question here. If the church is going to grapple with this, if people of goodwill are going to grapple with this, are all expressions of nationalism equal? You know, would Thomasm. Would Christianity actually recognize that there maybe are authentic and good forms of nationalism? If so, what do they look like as opposed to aberrant forms? Because we've certainly got loud voices at the moment proposing what at times seem like aberrant forms of nationalism.
[00:39:06] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I think that, as I've suggested, I think there is, there are reasonable forms of nationalism and I think, by the way, a good form of nationalism would celebrate positive elements of national identity in, in other nation states.
But I mean, we, okay, we have obviously 20th century, obvious 20th century examples of toxic nationalism, and everyone's terrified of those. And I think they're right to be concerned about them because both in terms of the, I don't know, more ethnic forms of Nationalism from 20th century National Socialism in Germany and Italy, it was more ethnic in Germany, but basically some kind of really highly defensive, toxic view of national identity is related to ethos or race. And then like the nationalism that was related to a kind of manifest destiny in the Soviet Union, a Russian greater world ideology, I think that, you know, we can say those things are, those are the kinds of things we want to exclude.
But if nationalism is something positive, it's because it's about the preservation of a set of practices.
I mean, one thing that Aquinas says is very helpful is the natural law then gets appropriated in given times and places and cultures by what he calls the jus gentium, the use or the law of nations, which is how people appropriate the natural law. So, for example, let's say it's of the natural law that human beings are artistic and they create music. But then, like the music of 19th century Ireland is different than the, the music of, I don't know, 20th century jazz and in New York City. And I would think it'd be a sad thing to lose the jazz traditions of the world because somehow we no longer had a culture that could cultivate them. And it'd be a sad thing to lose Irish music that if you're committed to music, you're committed to both those forms of music. Those are pretty innocuous examples. But that, you know, there's things like British education or there's things like American medicine or whatever, you know, that you can think about excellencies that have arisen through time that are worth preserving. And nationalism at its best, I think is about having a kind of pride and happiness and even more profoundly, a commitment to healthy forms of life and government and culture that have been sustained by a nation state. And that requires judgment about what, again, what's good for human beings. And it can be defensive because you have to defend good patrimony. You don't want to, if you have a good medical tradition, tradition, medical knowledge. You don't want to like, you know, trade that for some kind of, I don't know, folk remedy system. But at the same time, it's also about trying to share it in a measured way. I mean, like, you know, Americans have famously thought that democracy as they understood it, was worth sharing. Whether they've succeeded in doing that, well is highly.
But you know, they have. I mean, probably, probably they have succeeded in modern Japan and southern and South Korea and Germany in, in like inculcating a kind of sharing of some positive elements of their political history.
And you know, so maybe those may be controversial things to say, but I think that out of World War II, I think out of World War II, in the Korean War, some, some positive political emergence just took place.
So the question is, a good nationalism has a certain permeable character to it. You want other people to come share it with you and you want them to take it back to where they come from. You want to take in some people who are immigrants. You want to be able to have some people from your own culture, have a reasonable immigration to other places, to take your own values with them and to share them. I mean, there is a kind of without utopia, there is a kind of internationalism that arises from a healthy nationalism. It's kind of like the old rule, if you don't love yourself, you can't love other people. If you love other people, you learn to love yourself and you know, so love of self and love of others goes together. Hatred of self and hatred of others go together. There's a lot of anti nationalist self hatred going on too, in terms of the radical university kind of questioning of the good of Western culture and so forth.
Now that doesn't mean all in everything in Western culture has to be engaged with positively or we don't have to overreact the other way. But there are a lot of things to love about Christian or it's not the same thing, Western culture, which can be shared with other cultures, you know.
[00:43:44] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. It seems to me, I think I can't help but sense that Perhaps an authentic understanding of tradition is quite a key component in all of this. I think about someone like Edmund Beyond Burke, who, you know, famously articulated that idea that, you know, an authentic conservatism is about holding in tension, you know, the. What G.K. chesterton calls the democracy of the dead. Those good traditions that are handed to you, plus looking ahead to consider the unborn who are yet to come. And you sort of hold that tension. But it feels like to me that there's been a massive. Liberalism has probably gutted tradition from the west. And so now people go looking for it in other places and not recognise what they do, have their own riches. And then secondly, there is often, I think, a mistaking of nostalgia, it feels like, for tradition, I think, even in, say, you know, not to be a critic of the United States. But a lot of what is appealing about, for example, the current moment in the Make America Great is it's heartening back to Ronald Reagan and a time that people go that felt safe. The liberal side, it seems they're trying to harken back to perhaps FDR and the New Deal. That's their nostalgia. But it's not really grappling with where we're at and understanding tradition. Well, I think in its role in all of this.
[00:44:56] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I mean, I absolutely agree with your first point there, that you see the evisceration of tradition in terms of philosophical wisdom and theological knowledge and spiritual practice and the trust in domestic virtues like getting married, having children, and also the arts. I mean, there's so much junk that's trafficked on the Internet as, like, art.
And.
Yeah, I think there's also kind of forgetting of what is what beauty is. To appreciate beauty, like in literature, it requires some work. You can't get it just through a YouTube video. You have to actually read a book.
And so, you know, I think that there. I think there is a kind of oblivion, massive oblivion. And I don't think artificial intelligence is going to.
I don't know if it's going to be that catastrophic, really. I think it might just be okay, but I think it's going to make things worse, a little worse, because I think it's going to make people less attuned to the work one needs to do to appreciate traditions.
And it's going to make it easier yet still to push a button and get a download of information that isn't necessarily the same as the acquisition of a formation.
So, you know, I think it's really important to try to maintain traditions and not to worry initially about how politically conveyable they are. In other words, you know, I can study classical thinking about poetry and Aristotle without worrying about whether there's going to be somebody in charge of the next regime in my country to enforce it on everybody else. I can just try to know it so that someone knows it and study it into the light in poetry and then communicate it to other people.
And, you know, I think that that's okay. It's not a defensive posture. It's just a kind of, a, kind of a taking, taking responsibility for where one is.
Yeah, I, I, I don't, yeah, I don't know what's going to happen with the, the prevalent political nostalgias. I, what I see also is in Christianity, in Catholicism, for example, the, the new resurgence of interest in tradition can be allied with a kind of Twitter level or Internet level familiarity with traditions. So you suddenly get people like Pope Boniface from the Middle Ages, but they don't really know anything about the historical development of doctrine. So you get a kind of nostalgia, as you say, for like radical tradition, but it's not, it's not contextualized. So now you know that that sounds maybe a little bit elitist because I think the Internet is good because it makes lots of traditional ideas available outside of being policed by people who are scared of that. But it needs to be, you know, there is a, there is a reasonable sort of science to theology and there's an integrity to philosophy, and we do have to have teachers, you know, so, you know, I think, I think picking stuff out of the Internet and saying, well, this is tradition today is a little, is a little unwieldy and we're gonna have a lot of that.
[00:48:04] Speaker A: Unfortunately, I, I wanna, I'm looking at the time here and realizing that gossip, it slipped away on us, which is great. That's always a good sign of a good conversation when you realize, oh, we've lost track of time.
So I want to just jump ahead and a couple of quick questions to, to wrap up with St. John Henry Newman, declared a Doctor of the Church. Now, I'm a bit of a fan of John Henry Newman's work.
Do you feel that this is a perhaps prophetically divine moment in movement of the Holy Spirit in the life of the church, and particularly in the history of the Church? It feels to me like some of his big projects, in particular the question of the limits of papal infallibility, which we've never really had to grapple with, I don't think, until of late. And also the development of doctrine is another One and of course he's a big part of the authentic conservative movement in his time as well. So it feels to me like this is very much something of the now and of the moment, that that has some deeper weight to it. Do you feel that way or am I reading a bit too much of my own fandom, if you like, for Newman into the moment.
[00:49:05] Speaker B: I completely share your view. I mean, I, I, I don't know, I don't know how God is going to use the designation of the church that Newman is to be considered a common doctor and a doctor of education.
I mean a doctor of, a doctor of the church and doctor of Education. But I, I think he's an extraordinarily important person because in some sense he lets the texts and the teachings and practices of classical Christianity inform his consciousness as a modern person in such a way as to really fruitfully engage with the challenges of modernity in a creative way. I mean, in some ways a super classical mind, really well read and educated and thoughtful based on his knowledge of the past. In another sense this gives him a kind of power to think clearly and engage responsibly with the emergent secular, as he calls it, liberalism and indifferentism to religion of Britain in the 19th century. He's a very prophetic figure, I think for our era.
Also beautifully clear writer and a powerful witness to the, to the importance of the search for the truth and the human conscience in seeking the truth about God and the, the, as he says, to not sin against the light, to try to find the light of Christ as a guide to how to be a human being.
So I mean I think that one cannot do better really than to read figures like Newman and Aquinas as guideposts from the past to help us live creatively in our own time.
[00:50:51] Speaker A: Where would you recommend someone starts then? If someone says, okay, this is great Father, but where do I begin my journey of Newman esque discovery?
[00:51:00] Speaker B: Well, Newman's not so easy. So Ian Kerr Ker wrote, It's a massive biography. It's about 600 pages from Oxford. It is very clear and accessible and it is in fact a comprehensive introduction to Newman's whole thought. So if one has the capacity to sit down and read over time a 600 page book, it is an absolutely per lucid way of understanding Newman. He's got some shorter books on Newman too. Kerr has short shorter books on Newman, like 200 pages that often act as excellent guides. But in terms of Newman himself, I look, the apologia takes a little work. Apologia For Vitasua, the Defense of His Own Life, which is a history of his religious opinions, it. You have to figure out who these people are, like, who he's talking about, like Watley or Keeble, and what they represent, like liberal Anglicanism and more traditional Anglo Catholic Anglicanism, you know. But once you start to figure out what the types are, who these people were, which the Penguin, you know, edition allows you to do, if you read the notes a bit, you know, there's a fascinating search for the truth throughout the course of the life of Newman that he documents very powerfully.
You have to get used to his very formal British English prose of the 19th century, but it's absolutely gorgeous. He's a great, great writer. So, you know, I think between Kerr's introductions and then like, the apologia is a great place to start. But some of his smaller essays too, there's collections of Newman's writings that are, that are really powerful too, where, like, people have curated essays that he wrote so that you can get an introduction to him.
[00:52:46] Speaker A: On Aquinas, the good doctor, where would you recommend someone starts there? Because that, that really is a journey that. I mean, talk about a rabbit hole.
[00:52:55] Speaker B: Initially, Aquinas is initially more difficult. But all you really need to do, quote, unquote, all you need to do to understand Aquinas is an introduction to his metaphysics. Because once you understand, like these metaphysical terms like substance or essence or accidents or form or matter, after you've done a little work on that and understood this is not arbitrary, these are actually really deep. These concepts help you grasp really profound principles in the reality itself, then everything opens up. The philosophy and theology opens up. I mean, there's, you know, a series online that I was associated with beginning Dominic Leg got going Aquinas101. And that's. There's seven minute videos there that explain a lot of the basic concepts of Aquinas, it probably is the easiest place to start.
There's a lot of podcasts of the Thomistic Institute that are online that give you, like, thousands of hours of, like, introduction to Aquinas's philosophy and theology. I think you start with Aquinas 101, and then you look down in the, in the, you know, links below to podcasts that allow you to follow up. And if you go on the website of Aquinas101, you can find readings from Aquinas that help you. I think Edward Faser, who you mentioned, is an excellent introductory guide to philosophical principles.
There's, you know, a number of us Dominicans writing introductions to the theology of Thomas Aquinas that are available out there.
So, you know, it's, it's. It's feasible and it's worth, it's worth the effort. I mean, people work a lot harder to become engineers and medical doctors and even, even to become sports practitioners. They put in hours of jogging. You can, with. Within about 10 hours of work, you can really get into Aquinas. And then you can. And then it starts to help you really get oriented toward deep philosophical, theological knowledge of reality.
[00:54:42] Speaker A: So basically about two days worth of time spent on Twitter, reallocated.
One last question, and I think this is something for me. I'm a father husband.
What can families do? The domestic church? What can we do to really foster love, respect, and understanding of the importance of metaphysics in the family home? It feels like it's almost too late now to wait until your kids have got to university. You've got to prime them before that. What can we do to really help that flourish in the family home?
[00:55:12] Speaker B: This is gonna sound like a strange thing, but I do mean this intellectually. I think praying together is really important.
And I don't mean just like the kind of petitionary we want to pray for Aunt Alice, who's ill, though we do. I think. I think, like, really learning that prayer is a part of what constitutes a human being. I mean, if families can cultivate, like, if the father of a family actually has a prayer life, the children will sense that. And I think also reading the Bible, because the old New Testament don't seem like philosophical works, but they actually require there's something more than philosophy. That's the thing. But they require of us to think about the meaning of existence.
When the New Testament is taken seriously as an intellectual text and a child starts to think about how to understand it, the child starts to think about the invisible dimensions of reality and the dignity of the human self and the meaning of human existence. Inevitably, and also about, like, learn something about the virtues, the interior life of self examination, the practice of regular confession helps. But then I think if it talks about education, you know, we teach kids mathematics at a very early age. People can learn to read aerosols categories. It's one of his basic works, aerosols categories. And it. It starts to tell you the difference between a quality and a quantity or between a natural substance like a tree and a quantity like the tree is not just its material quantitative dimensions. It has properties that make it a living substance that aren't just to do with its material extensiveness. Well, It's a very basic point, but the thing is, it's a kind of. Once you understand the categories, you're no longer a materialist. You understand that there's form, there's quality, there's beauty in reality, there's purpose in the sense that things, living things, strive for certain ends. You start to see reality and, like three and four dimensions, instead of trying to reduce it to something only measurable or empirical. And I think that can be taught to children. And I think artistic imagination is also important things. Simple things like the Narnia Chronicles, which, of course, infinitely profound if you actually know what Lewis is on about. But trying to teach children to think symbolically, I think that's also really important because then that allows them a world, an access to the world through art and narrative, like, including, you know, more sophisticated philosophical narratives like novels and poems and the liturgy.
So I think basic prayer life, basic theology through the Scriptures, basic metaphysics and basic artistic orientation are all things that the parents can give the child along with, like, the virtues of living well that start to set them off on the right road.
[00:58:02] Speaker A: That's beautiful. That's awesome. And I'm encouraged because I'm listening, I'm ticking off these things. I'm thinking, yeah, we do that. And our teens have now said to us recently, can we read the cosmic trilogy by C.S. lewis? Because they saw Mum and Dad have got that on the shelf and so they graduated from Narnia.
And, yeah, I think even. I know lately with our kids, we've. The older ones. I've started to sit down and watch some of the more classic films that have that deep symbolism and engagement with the metaphysics and existential realities.
[00:58:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:58:30] Speaker A: Thank you so much for your time, Father.
I'm looking at the time realise, gosh, I've got to let you go.
But, yeah, it's just been a real blessing and a privilege and thank you so much for taking the time and the time difference to actually to have the conversation.
[00:58:46] Speaker B: I'm very honored to be here and thank you for all you're doing.
