Prima Pars
Lecture 2: Creation, Divine Providence, and the Canons of Faith

Transcript
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It is kind of strange, but that's the way it is. And so you want to emphasize that God is supremely happy in himself and from himself. Interested in my favorite book, The Summa Contra Gentiles. That's the end of the first book. It shows that God is supremely happy in himself and from himself, right? And that's the culmination of book one. And inexpressibly, what, loftier than anything besides himself, which either exists or can be, what, imagine, right? In which nothing greater can be thought, right? Okay. Well, it's up to this part, this kind of profession of faith, we want to call it that, it's been mainly about God in himself, right, and his distinction from the world, huh? Okay. Now, this next part is going to talk more about God is the, what, creator, right? Okay. Why God created him. This one true God, huh? By his goodness, right? Because God is good, we are, as Augustine says, huh? Goodness is what? Diffuse of himself. What? Diffuse of himself. Yeah, yeah. And, of course, goodness is tied up in which kind of cause, among the four kinds of cause. Right. Mm-hmm. So God is both the Alpha and the Omega, right, huh? So by his goodness, there might be power. It's interesting that they mention his goodness first, huh? Because the end is the most fundamental, the cause is, huh? And if God was aiming at some good other than himself, huh? Then he wouldn't be the first cause. That would be the good itself, right? And God would be the Demiurgeus of the Demiurgeus of the Big, right? So by his goodness and almighty power. And incidentally, you know, I've been thinking a little bit about that word almighty, huh? And the word, why do you use that word, right? Because what is the English word that is common in our creeds, right? Mm-hmm. You know? Well, what's the Latin word there that's been translated in that? Omnibotens. Yeah, yeah. And you say, well, potencia is the word that would be used in the ninth book of wisdom, right? You know? Actu set, potencia, right? Yeah. And potencia can be translated into English, you know, can kind of transliterate it as potency, right? Mm-hmm. A lot of times people use the word potency, you know. Um, sometimes people translate potent by powerful, you know, way for power. Um, why do we say almighty rather than all-powerful? Or maybe we do say sometimes all-powerful, but it seems more common than it's almighty, right? Mm-hmm. Well, if you just cut off from what you know would be all, right? Mm-hmm. And just look at the word here, might, huh? It's kind of strange that word a bit, huh? Mm-hmm. And it's a little bit like, reminds me a little bit of the word able, right? Because sometimes we say that what is able to be is able not to be. That's one meaning maybe of able. This, um, ability for our contradictories, right? Can be able to be and not be. But there must be another meaning of the word able that can be said even if necessary. Because if you say what is necessary is not able to be, then it's impossible to be. And then you've got a real contradiction, right? So you have these two senses of able, right? The sense in which what is necessary can be able, right? And the sense in which we divide necessary against able, right? It seems to be something like that, the word might, huh? It might rain today, right? It might snow today. What does that mean? Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain, rain. It was not with the intention of increasing his happiness, huh? What if I made a world or universe? Nor indeed of obtaining happiness, right? Of course, you know, the Marxists, you know, think that man gets his ultimate perfection from what? Making, huh? Okay? And seeing himself in a world that he has made himself. If God would be happy to see himself in his products, right? But in order to manifest his perfection by the good things which he bestows and what he, what, creates, right? There you see the connection again between affection and good, huh? Now, how God created in the order of creation? By an absolutely free plan, right, huh? I mentioned before how Thomas and I will spend a lot of time there in the second book of the Summa Conte Gentile as he talks about creation and so on, that this is a free act of God's part, right? That the universe doesn't proceed from God by a natural necessity, huh? Which is the way Spinoza would see it and the pantheists would see it if they see this at all. Together from the beginning of time brought in, again, that's something that, what, we know more by faith than by reason that time had a, what, beginning. It doesn't say in the book of the Apocalypse that time will have an end, okay? That's kind of an example of one of the ultimate questions, right? Once you realize a father can be a son and a son can be a father, right? And the question arises, is every father a son? Or is there a father who's not a son? Like Adam, right? And is there some son who's not a father? Well, the same way here, you realize that today, you know, is after yesterday and before tomorrow, but is there a day that's not after some day? And is there a day that isn't before some day? Is there a first day and a last day, right, huh? Okay? Well, we say there is, but can you do that by any reason? Well, we say there is, but can you do that by any reason? Thomas argues, you know, in the treatise on the Trinity of the World and so on, that the arguments from reason for or against, right, are not necessary, right? They might incline you to one side or the other, but they're not necessary, huh? You know it only by faith, huh? Aristotle, you know, in the book on theological reasoning, speaks of this as a thing we'd like to know whether the universe is eternal or not. Aristotle thought it was, but, I mean, maybe he didn't think he knew, right? Something, again, maybe probable reasons for saying one or the other, but not a reason that shows it must be so. So one thing he's saying is that it's absolutely free on God's part, right, to make the universe. So you should thank God for having chosen you, okay? So why should he choose you among all those who could have been? Your mother and father, you know, is there only one person they could have married? No, no. But, I mean, you know, if what they tell us is true, you know, that even in one male omission, let's say, right now, there's hundreds of these things right now, you know? Your chances are not very good. Looked at from the outside, right? You know, so God chose you, you know, and he arranged for your parents to meet your grandparents, you know, to meet all the way back to Adam, you know? And you say, see, this is one hell of a guy. But how gratuitous it was, right? And he could have always made us, right? But with the beginning in time, right? And this is the way we understand those first words of the Old Testament. In the beginning, God created heaven and earth, right? It was the beginning to the time. He brought into being from nothing, right? He didn't start with some kind of what? Matter, right? So I suddenly just asked students when you get through studying, you know, the great fragment there of Anaxagoras, right? You have a kind of theological footnote, right? Has Anaxagoras arrived at the divine mind, or what we call the angelic mind, huh? Well, the mind of Anaxagoras is not, what? Created matter, right? It may move matter and order it, but it's not responsible for the existence of matter, right? So his position is still kind of a dualistic position, right? So he's really arrived more at what the angelic mind is. A mind's, you know, quite distinct from matter, not material and so on, and then can act upon matter by change of place, but not a mind that's responsible for the existence of matter. And so I sometimes, you know, Karl Marx and Engels, you know, they give you division of all thinkers. They're either materialists or idealists, as they would say, right? But either they say matter is the beginning of all things, even of mind, right? Or else they say that some mind is the beginning of all things, even of matter. Now, as a logician, I say, is that a good division of thinkers? But either they say matter is the beginning of all things, even of mind. As Karl Marx says, mind is the highest product of matter. Or, like St. John said at the beginning of the Gospel, you know, says there's some mind, some thought, right? That's the beginning of all things, even of matter. Let's see, is this a good division of thinkers? What's wrong? Is it a good division? Yeah, yeah. Where would you put Anaxagoras, I say, right? Because he doesn't say that this greater mind is responsible for the, what, existence of matter, right? And you have a similar position there in the Timaeus of Plato, right? Where the Demiurgos, right? Acts upon matter and reduces the chaos of matter to some kind of order, but it's not what's responsible for the being of the matter. So there's an in-between position there, right? But in leading out that in-between position, not only do they have a, what, a bad division, because it leaves out one of the historical and real possibilities in this position, but they make kind of impossible, right, to go from the thought that men kind of start out with, that matter is the beginning of all things, to the truth, which is that there's some mind that's responsible for all things, even for matter. You can't really go from one to the other, by reason I mean, alone, without going to the intermediary position. Thomas Aquinas thinks that Aristotle understands creation, right? But you couldn't get to that until you saw mind as something independent of matter. You wouldn't even begin to ask, is there a mind that can be responsible for the being of matter? And so by leaving out the middle one, it's like leaving out the bridge. You can't get across the river. So you're going to stay on the materialist side. So there's something kind of, you know, diabolical about leaving out the intermediary position. It's not until, you know, Anxiaigus sees that there's some mind that's independent of matter, and then later on Plato and Aristotle will see that the human mind, right, can exist after death and so on, that you would, you know, be open, right, to saying, you know, even to raise the question, could there be a mind that's responsible not only for the order of matter, but for the very being of matter? That's extremely difficult to arrive at that by reason, but most men would never do that. But Aristotle seems to have arrived at this, because he has a cause even for the necessary things. Of course, Aristotle's very clear that the human soul didn't exist before the body, right? And yet, in the book on the generation of animals, he says the human soul didn't come from the parents. Well, if it didn't know it exists, it didn't come by the transformation of matter, it must have come to be by what we call creation. And so in that way, Aristotle is arriving at the idea, that's one place where he's arriving at the idea of creation. But he was a wit, huh? A wit Tim Wits. He brought into being from nothing the two-fold, what? Created order. That is the spiritual and the bodily, the angelic and the, what? Earthly, right? And thereafter, the human, which is, in a way, common to both, since it is composed of spirit and body. And notice, that is the theological order. So when Thomas takes up creatures there in the Summa Theologiae and the Prima Paras, you take up the angels first, the spiritual ones, then you take up the, what, physical world, you might say, and then you take up man. And you see this in the psalm sometimes praising God or in the psalm from Three Men in the Furnace, right? You know, you have the angels praising God and then you have the material world praising God and then last of all, man, right? Okay? But Thomas will come back to that when he's talking about the appropriateness of God assuming human nature, huh? Because it's like he's assuming the whole of creation. Man is a, as Democritus says, a microcosm, a little universe, huh? Because he has something in the material and in the spiritual. And so, in a way, he's assuming the whole of creation. But notice, that's the theological order. That's not the philosophical order, right? Because the angelic thing would be the last thing known in that twelfth book of wisdom. You'd study the human soul. That's kind of the gateway to the material world for a reason, actually speaking, That's where we studied the soul before. We go to wisdom, And Aristotle, you know, he talks about, in the first book of Wisdom, he talks about there being something besides just material things, right? You'll point to the soul, right? And that's kind of the gateway, these material substances. So the order in theology is quite different than the word in Scripture. It's quite different, huh? You've got the angels before the soul. The angels are much more like God than what? The soul, right? So, I read the fate of the introduction to philosophy, but that's about the soul, not about the angels. It would be very inappropriate to have a consideration about the soul there in the beginning of philosophy, huh? And then about the angels, okay? And of course, you're in the delusion of doctrine now. Most people today, they already think the angels are real, right, huh? I mean, it's kind of, you know, myth, huh? One philosopher whose wife thinks, you know, it's funny to talk about the angels. And I was teaching a class at the time, and all the angels came up, you know, and some guy, I think he was a seminarian, too, you know. He looked at me kind of puzzled, like, you know, do angels really exist? And I told you my answer, I think. I said, they're more real, I said, than you are. But, you know, people, they don't, you know, aren't aware of this, huh? My teacher, Akashuric, said, you know, you should make an act of will, opening up your mind to your guardian angel, right? So he'll direct you, huh? Don't have any secrets from your guardian angel, huh? Now, part three is about God no more as the what ruler, right? It's kind of interesting how, you know, when you talk about the practical reason there in the Nicomachean Ethics, right? The two virtues of practical reason are art and foresight, huh? Art and prudence, huh? When we talk about God as creator, we think of God more as the artist, right? When we talk about God as the end and divine providence, then we're talking more about the divine prudence, and the divine foresight directing us, huh? So, the statement of divine providence by the consul. Everything that God has brought into being, he protects and governs by his, what? Providence, right? So the consideration of divine providence would be in the third book of the Summa, Contra Gentilis, huh? And providence, if you look at the treatise on prudence, on the summa, one of the integral parts of prudence will be providence, huh? And, of course, the objection to that being an integral part is it's the same thing as prudence. Apparently, the Latin word prudence comes from the word providentia. And the proper English translation of prudence is really not prudence, that's kind of a transliteration, but the translation would be foresight. And so it's interesting how there's two virtues of practical reason that we know in ourselves, huh? When we talk about God, something like them, right? Much superior, of course, to our art and our foresight. But we talk about the art more when we talk about his maker and the foresight of providence here. So everything that God has brought into being, he protects and governs by his, what? Providence, huh? Which reaches from one end of the earth to the other and orders all things well, or some of the translations say all things sweetly, right? Mightily. Yeah. All things are open and laid bare to his eyes, right? Naked, huh? Okay. Even those which will be brought about by the free activity of creatures. So he knows what we'll freely do, right? Before we do it, huh? Now, for each of these chapters, you'll see that there are certain things called canons, right? Which kind of put in kind of a form of propositions or statements, you know? That if you don't accept your anathema, your curse, right? You suffered shipwreck, huh? Okay. So, what time do you want to stop here? 4.30 to late. 4.30? Okay, well, let's look at the canons here for this first one here. So these are canons that go with the first chapter of the work, huh? If anyone denies the one true God, Creator and Lord of things visible and invisible, let him be anathema. Right. That way speaking, they dropped in Vatican II, as you know, right? We noticed. Yeah, John XXIII. Yeah. Listen, clarity, right? Okay. If anyone is so bold, Now, boldness is a cause of error, right? Socrates is always indicating fear, right? Fear of being mistaken. If anyone is so bold as to assert that there exists nothing besides matter, let him be anathema, right? We could say most, I suppose, most scientists today are what? Materialists, right? If anyone says that the substance or essence of God and that of all things are one and the same, let him be anathema. Let's direct it against the, what? Pantheism, right? Okay. If anyone says that you become a part of the force after you die, would it be the dark side or the bright side? Let it be anathema, right? If anyone says that finite things, both corporal and spiritual, or at any rate spiritual things, emanated from the divine substance, that's kind of a natural thing, huh? Flows of it. I guess, was it that Spinoza says, you know, that follows from God, like equality of angles, the two right angles follows from what a triangle is? Oh. That kind of a natural necessity, huh? Or that the divine essence, by the manifestation evolution of itself, becomes all things, huh? That's kind of the way Hegel would speak, right? Mm-hmm. Hegel identifies, what? The being which is said of all things with, what? God, right, huh? If you look at Hegel's logic, huh? He identifies a being that is said of all things with the one who says, I am, who am, right? As I mentioned, Thomas has a chapter in the first book of the Seminole Gentiles, he said, God is not the Essay Formal, the Obium, right? He's not the being that is said of all things, huh? But if you say he is, you're going to identify God with all things, huh? But then Hegel has, by some kind of mysticism, the universal, what? Producing the particulars by some kind of, what? Evolution. A little bit like the evolutionists have matter developing into all these forms, okay? But not really explaining how this can be. Because how can ability give itself the act it doesn't have? But that's the way Hegel speaks, and that's the way the materialist speaks, huh? Because, in some sense, Marx is correct when he says, you know, we're going to set Hegel on his head, right? Or on his feet. This is really matter that is evolving into all these forms, right? Not the universal, but the mind is evolving into it. But that kind of reflects this, right? Okay? But there is some likeness there, because the genus is taken from what is material in the thing. And just as the matter can be formed in various ways, so the genus can be differentiated in various ways, huh? So just as the wood is able to be a chair, a table, or a door by a different form, so a triangle is able to be equilateral, saucy, scaling, right? So in some ways, the genus is to the species, or the differences, like matter is to what? form, huh? That's what I was saying, you know, if you ask somebody, you know, when a piece of clay in the shape of a sphere is molded into a cube, what has changed? The clay or its shape? Well, it's meaning the clay that's changed. What you're speaking is if the shape, right? Is if the gene is to change from one species to the other, right? But you speak that way because there's a likeness, right? That shape is to these two different shapes, something like matter is to these two different forms, huh? So the average person will say the shape has changed. We'll say if the sick man becomes healthy or the healthy man becomes sick, we'll say his condition has changed. Has his condition changed? Has his condition changed from health to sickness? No, his body has changed from healthy to sick. But there's much a likeness there, huh? So you've got all this stuff here with Hagel, you know, he's the... They describe, you know, modern philosophy, especially in Germany after Hegel, you know, it's kind of picking up his corpse, you know, the decomposing corpse of Hegel that's being made into all kinds of philosophies, you know. And, you know, when a corpse decays, you get all kinds of living creatures, and they're all living off the corpse of Hegel, right? So he's a kind of universal cause of corruption, huh? They say one reason why there's two judgments, right? That all the evil you've done is not clear until the last judgment. Because, you know, in your writings, huh? You influence all kinds of people, right? So all the evil that Hegel's done or Marx has done or somebody else has done will not be clear until you see all people down through the years after they died reading their books that have been led astray, right? And all the harm they've done, huh? Or finding, this is even more like Hegel, in finding that God is a universal or indefinite being, right, huh? Okay? So he's identifying God with the being which is said of what? all things, right? And that being in Christ for Hegel, it first passes over into its opposite which is nothing, a non-being, right? So that shows you how indeterminate it is. So this is explicitly talked about Hegel, you know, most clearly, he's saying, huh? But it runs through the whole of this German idealism, huh? That God is universal or indefinite being which by itself, which by self-determination establishes its vitality of things. Distinct and generous species of individuals. Let him be anathema, right? Okay? So this is very much, you know, reacting, you know, and condemning mistakes that are especially prominent in the 19th century because I hate good people like that. They're not hot character I'm saying about the consul, right? Okay? Because they say Thomas is already condemning the era there and refuting it there in the first book of the Summa Contra Gentiles. Marx is kind of a satirization of Hegel, you know. He says, what does Hegel do? He's got an apple here, he's got an orange and a pineapple and so on and he abstracts the idea of fruit in general, right? And now he's got to figure out a way of evolving from the general idea of fruit, apple, and orange. I mean, I'm not going to talk. That's what Hegel does. If anyone does not confess that the world and all things which are contained in it, both spiritual and material, were produced according to their whole substance out of nothing by God, right? Or whole that God did not create by his free, his will, free from all necessity, right? But as necessarily as necessarily he loves himself. Well, you know, Thomas will take this up in the very first part of the first book of the Summa Contra Gentilis, right? That God necessarily loves himself, right? And although by loving himself he loves other things, right? He doesn't necessarily love other things. And when you say that God is able not to create us, right? You're using the word able in this metaphorical sense that Aristotle distinguishes against the ones he talks about in Book 9 at the very beginning he goes, oh, he's back to that, huh? What does that mean? That's a very subtle thing that Thomas has done. But anyway, or denies that the world was created for the glory of God, let him be cursed, huh? Anathema. Right, son. Now, starting in chapter 2 and 3 and 4 we'll be talking and I think we're primarily reading this for, right? Now it's kind of a transition, right? But we're learning some things about God too. But I want to talk about revelation and faith and then revelation and faith and then transition. So we'll meet next, what, Thursday? Thursday. Okay. I'll start with chapter 2 then. Thank you. Okay. Maybe even in merely human terms, we can talk about the necessity of belief. Augustine has some little treatises on the utility or the usefulness of believing. And Thomas sometimes repeats some of those things that Augustine points out. But one thing that Augustine says is, don't you believe that this man, woman, are your mother and father? Unless you believe that this man, woman, are your mother and father, you're not going to give them the honor due to your father and mother. So if you don't believe, you've got a real problem there. But is it necessary for the learner to believe? It's in human terms. I mean, suppose somebody comes to me. Let me give you a couple of simple things here. Suppose someone comes to me and he says, I've heard about this Pythagorean theorem. That the angles, I mean, that a right-angled triangle, the square on the side opposite the right angle, will always be equal to the squares on the sides containing the right angle. Now, could you show that to me, Mr. Berkowitz? And I say, well, I know a pretty good proof for that. And it's Proposition 47, Book 1 of Euclid. But you have to go through 46 theorems before that. And you've got to familiarize yourself with some definitions and some postulates and axioms, right, before we go through these 46. Oh, I don't want to go through all of that. That's an awful long way to go. Well, then you're not going to know the Pythagorean theorem. You're not going to learn from me. That's the only way I know to get there. Well, now, yes, you do believe me that that is the road to follow, right, to the Pythagorean theorem. He's not going to plow through 48 theorems unless he believes that that is the road there, right? But will he know that that is the road to the Pythagorean theorem until he's gone through the first 46, see? And if you go back to, you know, a homely analogy there, how many times in your life do you ask somebody directions? Sometimes they give you the wrong directions and so on, right? But you're believing him, right, that this is, you know, go down two blocks and turn right and then so on. You're believing him, and that's why you go down there and follow his directions. And if you get to the place you want to get to, your belief now gives way to what? Knowledge, huh? But if you never believed anybody that this was the road to take to this or that place, right, and just tried roads at random until you got to the place you wanted to go to, you wouldn't get that far in this life, would you? But the same way in the life of the mind, huh? As Aristotle often calls philosophy a methodos, right, which means over a road, huh? Philosophy is a methodos. Knowledge over a road, knowledge that follows a road, huh? And you don't know where that road's going until you get to the what? You go down that road, right? And so you're believing the teacher, right, until you go down the road, huh? But once you go down the road and get to where you want to go, then knowledge replaces, what? Belief. That's one way, right, that belief is necessary just in human teaching. Take another thing, huh? Often there's fundamental things in any part of philosophy or any part of knowledge, really, that illuminate other things, right? And a good teacher will point out these fundamental things and emphasize their importance and so on for you, right? But when you first hear these things, can you see how important they are and how many doors they open up for your mind? No. It's only if you listen to the professor and focus upon those fundamental things that he says are very important for the rest of your study of the subject, right, that you will eventually, through them, come to see other things and realize how important it was and how right it was that he emphasized those things in the beginning, huh? I've always told you a little story of me when I was a freshman in college, haven't I? And my brother Richard had, when I knew I was interested in philosophy, he arranged for me to have a private meeting with Dr. Bissert, right? We thought he was the best philosopher around. In the college, anyway. And Kuseri, you know, became my kind of mentor, you might say, in my four years at the College of St. Thomas. But anyway, when I was a freshman, I come up with my list of courses I'm taking and so on, and Kuseri looked at me and says, Dwayne, where's your Greek? Now, I'm not very good at learning foreign languages. And he says, where's your Greek, Dwayne? I said, my Greek? Yeah, he says, why aren't you taking Greek? I said, well, other things I'd rather take. He says, that's not a reason. Other things you'd rather take, that's not a reason. You're going to send any philosophy to take Greek. So he twisted my arm and had enough docility that I took the Greek, huh? And this opened all kinds of doors to me, right? Now I realized how important it was. Not that I'm a great pastor of Greek, right? But in reading Aristotle, reading Plato, without that Greek that he insisted I get, I wouldn't have got anywhere. And opened all kinds of doors, and even to reading the sacred scripture. In Greek, huh? The New Testament, at least. But I didn't realize when he first said this, how important it would be. But now, looking back, I realize I'm very thankful to him, right? Left to my own scrubby... In aptitude, I wouldn't know anything to that at all, right? You see, I wouldn't even be able to look up over the dictionary, let alone read some Plato, Aristotle, and Greek, huh? Do you see? So, when somebody emphasizes something fundamental, and you start to focus on that, and make it a part of your thinking, and then you start to see other things through it, and from it, and by it, then you realize, hey, this is good that he insisted upon this, but you had to believe him that it was important. Do you see that? Now, those are kind of more obvious examples of how you depend upon even a human teacher in human sciences. The third thing that you find out, when I read Aristotle, or I read Thomas, I'm like, that was way above my mind. I don't understand everything I read, at least at first I don't understand anything I read. I've learned, you know, to say, well, I'm going to understand some things, but not everything, this first time I read them. And then the second time I read them, I'm going to understand the things I understood the first time I read them, even better. And now I begin to see some of the things I hadn't understood at first, right? So as I read these things again and again, I start to understand them better and better, right? But how do you know that's going to be true? But it requires a certain amount of belief, right? There's some things you don't understand at all, or don't understand well, unless you continue to what? Think about them, right? And the more you think about them, if you have a good enough mind, you'll start to understand them, and then you'll realize, right, how good it was that you persisted in thinking about them. You see that? I'll make a little comparison here to music there, huh? My brother Mark and Richard there, they insisted upon only good music in the house. But I remember in particular the time when they brought home the magic flute of Mozart, right? It's something to listen to, right? So it's the whole magic flute. And I don't think it really hurt anything. You know? But the more I listen to Mozart, the more I, what? Hurt, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the more I recognize his excellence, huh? And, you know, I tend to agree with what Wagner says, you know, Mozart is above all the masters in all the arts, he says, and in all the ages. That's incredible, you see. When I first heard him, I didn't even hear, right? Just like when you first read Aristotle or Thomas, you don't understand anything. But if you continue to listen to Mozart, the more you listen to him, say, hey, this is really... Good, right? And sometimes they're in the automobile or something like that, and a piece of Mozart comes on, the 102.5 or something, and driving doesn't use up much mental energy, as you know. You tend to listen to the piece maybe more than you do at the house, where you might be reading a book at the same time. You say, oh, this is really good, I didn't realize how good this was, huh? You see? So, it's something like that with reading Aristotle or Thomas or Cato. The first time you read it, it's kind of a, what, dense force, huh? But then as you start to read it again and again and think about it, it becomes more and more clear, and more and more, you see the, what, profundity of it, huh? Well, what made you persist in thinking about something before, until you understood it? I mean, you could think about Hegel or somebody, again and again, you never come to understand anything, you know? In fact, Hegel was writing, I guess, you know, in an obscure way, so he'd be admired, huh, for its obscurity. But no, unless I was convinced, right, that, unless I believed that Mozart was such a great composer, I would not have listened to his music so, what, carefully, right? And I would not have come to appreciate it and to really hear it. And the same way, unless I believed that Aristotle or Thomas or something like that was very wise, I would not have thought about what they said again and again until I finally understood it. So these are three ways in which you can say that, what, even learning from a human teacher, you have to, what, believe first, huh? Okay? Now, the higher the science is, though, the higher the knowledge is, you could say, the more necessary is the, what? Belief, yeah. If you take the extremes here, right, reveal theology and, let's say, geometry, huh? Okay? The names are revealing, huh? Geometry and arithmeticae are called, what, mathematics, right? And the word mathematics comes from the word the thesis, huh? Learned. And in a sense, mathematics means the things that can be learned. Now, not the only things that can be learned, right? But the things that are most easily and fully learnable by us, right? So you could say that in some way, mathematics is named from the learner, okay? Now, like you'll notice, maybe, the summa, Thomas will use the term sacra, what, doctrina, huh? Or the famous work of Augustine, huh? Doctrina Christiana, right? Christian doctrina. Well, sacred doctrine is named from, what, the doctor, the teacher. So it's interesting, right? In mathematics, the student is most, even there he's not self-sufficient, but there he's closest to being self-sufficient, right? Or you could say belief there is less required, right? Or required for a lesser time, right? Okay? While in sacra doctrina, as the name indicates, huh? Sacred teaching, is what it means to speak in English, huh? Holy teaching. The emphasis there is named from the teacher, because you're most dependent there upon the, what, teacher. The teacher. Yeah. So you could, you know, make a kind of spectrum there as you go from revealed theology, sacra doctrina, down to mathematics, right? As you go towards mathematics, you are more, you're less dependent upon the teacher, let's put it that way, right? As you go towards theology, you're more dependent upon the, what, teacher, right, huh? Okay? And the same, and of course with this goes, the idea that belief is required for a longer time, and so on, right? And, and you go towards sacra doctrina, and less as you go towards geometry, huh? Okay? And then you can't just lump everything like he does, that's the simplicity, you know, of that, huh? Okay, let's come back now to the text here in Vatican I. I think we kind of looked at chapter I, right? Okay? Now as you know, one of the things I'd emphasize is the rule of two or three, right? Okay? And to apply it to this treatise, let's go back to something else here. We talked about this thing before. Nothing is more necessary in philosophy than what? You want to complete that? Begin well. Yeah, hey, how'd you know that? You told us? Yeah. Yeah. So, if you read Plato and Aristotle, there will always be quoting the Greek proverb, the beginning is half of all, right? And Plato, after quoting it, says, or Socrates will say, I really think it's more than half, right? Okay? Because everything else depends upon the beginning, right? So if you begin well, you're helped through the whole philosophy. If you begin badly, right, you're going to be harmed through the whole philosophy, huh? And you often use that comparison in the road, right? Where a little mistake in the beginning is, say, what? Great one as you go forward, huh? You take the wrong turn, there's a little distance between where you should go and where you shouldn't go, right? If you go where you shouldn't go, the further you go, the worse off you're going to be, right? Okay, a little mistake in the beginning is a great one in the end, huh? And I can say the same thing about, what, I think, theology, huh? That nothing is more necessary than to begin well. Now, how would you divide the beginnings, huh? Well, there are some beginnings in the mind or the reason, and knowing powers in general, and some beginnings in the what? The will. The will. Okay. So when Plato and Aristotle pointed out that wonder is the beginning of philosophy, right? Wonder is the beginning in the desiring powers, huh? Wonder is his natural desire to know what and why, to know the cause. But in reason, you can distinguish two beginnings, huh? Two groups of beginnings, if you want to say that. You can distinguish the beginnings about things and the beginnings about our knowledge of things, huh? So Heraclitus and Socrates in the Phaedo, Aristotle in the first book of Natural Hearing. They talk about how change is between opposites, right? Okay. And that's the beginning about things, right? But even more fundamentally, the axioms are beginnings about things. The whole is more than a, what, part, right? The same thing cannot both be and not be at the same time the same way. These are beginnings about, what, things, right? Okay. But now we've talked before about the roads in our knowledge, right? The natural road in our knowledge, the road from the senses into reason, and the common road of reasoned out knowledge studied in logic, and the private road of each reasoned out knowledge and so on. Well, those are beginnings of our, what, knowledge of things, right? Okay. They're beginnings of philosophy, let's say, or theology of that matter, in our mind, right? Okay. The beginnings about the things, and the beginnings about the knowledge of the things, huh? Okay. But besides these beginnings of the mind, we can speak of the beginnings and the, what, the will, all right? Okay. Now, what's the distinction here between the first chapter and chapters two, three, and four? In the, this treatise. Some way it would say the, um... compare it as God is like the thing and the other is the knowledge about it? Yeah, the first chapter in a way is a kind of creed you might say almost, right? Maybe a little bit, you know, specialized for certain problems that the contemporaries are having, right? Okay. Earlier as I mentioned in Vatican I there's a profession of faith which is basically the Nicene Constantinople Creed with a few additions from the Council of Trent, you know, spelling out some things about the sacraments and things of that sort, right? Okay. But basically the Apostles Creed or the Nicene Constantinople Creed or the Athanasian Creed or the Creed of the Fourth Vatican, the Fourth Lateran Council and so on or the Credo of the People of God there by Paul VI and so on, right? Those contain beginnings about the things, right? The articles of faith are beginnings about things, huh? And so St. Thomas says, you know, I guess in the exposition of the Epistles of St. Paul, you know, that a man who doesn't know the articles of faith yet, time is going against him, he says. Okay. So if a man doesn't have the beginnings about things, he doesn't have the creed, he's not ready to begin. I had a colleague years ago, you know, and he would say some kind of strange things. Finally one day I said to him, I said, Neil, do you accept the Nicene Creed? I said, and he said, no. I said, okay, that clarifies things, I said. One time I was at a social function there and I was introduced to the new man in theology, right? The new guy coming in, he just being hired. And so I was introduced to him and I said, are you orthodox? And he says, what do you mean? And I said, do you accept the Nicene Creed, I said. He said, yes. Okay, I said, fine. Okay, but the Nicene Creed is a what? It contains the beginnings about the things, right? Okay. And sometimes, as we mentioned before, the creed divides it according to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, right? Sometimes, like I think in the Athanasian Creed and the Fourth Lateran Council and so on, it divides it according to the humanity and divinity of Christ, huh? Okay. Thomas does that in the Adovote Devote, too, huh? Humanity and divinity of Christ, huh? He says, on the cross, he says, the divinity was hidden, right? But here, humanity as well is a divinity. But then he says, believing both and confessing both, right? Okay, so those are two ways of doing it. In the first chapter here, it seemed more a division into three, but God in himself, God as the creator or maker, God as the, what, end and the provident one, right? Okay, into those three, right? But however you divide those beginnings about the things, right? This is containing the beginnings about the things, okay? But now the remaining chapters on Revelation and on faith and on, you know, faith and reason, this is more talking about beginnings about our knowledge of these things, right? Okay? Okay? We know these things by Revelation, by faith, and to some extent, reasons involved in knowing them too, right? Okay? So in general, the distinction between the first chapter and chapters two, three, and four is the distinction, like we make in philosophy, between the beginnings about the things themselves and about our knowledge of things, huh? Do you see? Okay? Beginning of Euclid's elements, right? You have these definitions and the postulates and the axioms, right? All of those things before theorem one are what? Beginnings about the things, huh? Okay? Euclid doesn't give us any beginnings about our knowledge of these things, huh? But Aristotle and Boethius and so on talk about, huh? The way of defining in geometry as opposed to the way of defining natural philosophy, right? You talk about the order in which you consider things, it's from the simple to the composed, right? The equal before the unequal and so on, huh? But those are beginnings about our knowledge of these things, huh? Okay? Or we're going to know these things as a great deal of rigor, right? They're learnable, right? Not in the sense that they're the only things that are learnable, but they're really very learnable by us, right? Okay? Very proportioned to us, huh? Okay? Natural philosophy and wisdom are not so learnable. Okay? They're much harder to learn, right? Do you see? So there are beginnings which Euclid gives us, right? Beginnings about the things, right? This is what a triangle is, this is what a circle is, this is what a point is, right? All right angles are equal, et cetera, et cetera, right? And then Aristotle in many places gives us the beginnings about the what? Yeah, yeah, yeah. How you define, how you demonstrate, right? Aristotle will contrast, you know, geometry with natural philosophy. In geometry, you go from the cause to the effect. In natural philosophy, usually from the effect to the cause. Okay? Well, this is the beginning about the way we know, huh? Okay? In natural philosophy, we define with sensible matter and motion, right? In geometry, we define without sensible matter and motion. Okay? This is the beginning about the way we know, right? Do you see the idea? In geometry, you know, something is going to be completely universal and natural philosophy will have many things that are true for the most part, right? A man is born with two hands, right? Well, occasionally, a baby is born without a hand or something, right? Or somebody is born with six fingers, they say. Handball, that's six fingers, I don't know what he had. What he saw in there, I don't know, but it turned me off, I think. It's physically kind of funny, you know what I mean? So there are exceptions, right? But that's a beginning about the, what? Knowledge, huh? Okay? So you see the distinction here then, huh? The first reading, I mean the first chapter, rather, is, contains beginnings about the things. But chapters two, three, and four are beginnings about the knowledge, right? I remind a little bit of Aristotle's premium, too, to the Nicomachean Ethics, right? Where he talks about the way of proceeding in ethics and how the teacher ought to, what he ought to do, right? And then, corresponding to that, how the student ought to receive what the teacher has to say. Well, that, in a way, corresponds to chapters two and three, right? Because revelation is on the part of the, what? Teachers, God, who ultimately reveals these things, right? But faith is on our side, huh? The way we ought to receive these things, huh? Okay? But since faith is, what? In reason, right? We have to talk about the connection, right? Between faith and reason, which will be the fourth chapter, right? Okay? So, though we have four chapters, we divide the first chapter against the last three, right? Following the rule of two or three, right? I told you how important that rule is, but it's, it's, you have to follow that rule to understand most things, huh? Anytime you, almost anytime, right? You divide it into more than three. To really understand that distinction into more than three, you have to, what? Distinguish it into two or three, and then subdivide one of those into two or three. Or else, crisscross sometimes, let's say, a division into two or three, but another division into two or three. Okay? You need to go through all these examples that we give of those things, huh? I know two famous distinctions in the ten. The ten categories of Aristotle, right? And the ten commandments, right? When you try to understand a division of ten, The ten commandments, right? The ten commandments, right? The ten commandments, right?