De Anima (On the Soul)
Lecture 23: Temperance, Purity, and Catharsis: Four Types of Purification

Transcript
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The key thing there is an objection to this, right? To say Anastas is an integral part of temperance. Because he says the spiritual beauty is found in all the virtues, right? So why is Anastas taken as being an integral part of temperance in particular, right? And Thomas says, well, in these matters, reason is most often extinguished, right? So when the light of reason shines through, right, in these matters, it's more striking. It's not the brighter end. And therefore that spiritual beauty seems to be particular, right? So I compare thee to a summer's day, Shakespeare says, right? The art more lovely and more, what, temperate, right? So, one time we were trying to, I was in graduate school one time, and you're just kind of talking about some mind and Shakespeare. When a fellow comes in to kill his wife who he thinks is going to think of the right, he doesn't want to name what you think she's done, right? Don't talk to you, right? He says, let me not name it to you, you chaste the stars. Now, why does he call it a star? It's chaste, right? Well, part of it is because of metaphoria, right? Anastas, right? The stars at night are very beautiful. Why? Because the sky around them is black, right? See, if everything is illuminated up there, it would be purish and not beautiful at all, right? My mother used to say, you know, that a diamond doesn't look so good in her light like this. My mother said that a diamond looks best under candlelight. And a diamond kind of what? Sparkles, right? But it's because of the darkness around it. If they show you a diamond, let's say, or something like that in a jewelry store, they'll put me on a piece of black velvet, right? You know? Rather than a piece of white paper. We wouldn't stand out, see? So it's the idea that opposites alongside each other stand out more, right? Like Heraclitus says when the fragments are from opposites comes the most beautiful harmony. Remember that fragment we had in Heraclitus? So for the light of reason, most of all seems to be extinguished, then what? When it shines forth, it is especially what? Beautiful and striking in. And it's something related to what you're saying there about the word purity, right? It's a little bit for a somewhat similar reason there. Because reason and the higher nature, then, especially gets contaminated, I'd say, right? Soiled, right? In those matters, right? So the purity is more striking there, right? Just as the light of reason is more striking in those matters. I can't remember the exact words of Shakespeare. There's one place I know where, at least in Hamlet there. I don't have Hamlet here, but when he speaks, when he's up reading, I think his mother there, right? I don't have the exact words there, but he says, the blush and grace of my, or something like that. Well, the blush, of course, is a, what, metonym for varicundia, the effect there, the sign for the thing, right? And grace is, what, running for the spiritual beauty, right? You know, like you say, gracious, you know, graceful, you know? Graceful, not grace, you know, it's a matter of grace, but graceful, right? You know, the graceful movements of somebody or something, you know? Gracious. I was a host, you know, I saw on TV the other day there, they were talking about the statements of the White House. And, of course, butchers had just two, you know, one for the president of Mexico, and then one for the president of Poland and his wife, Amor. And so they were interviewing the social one for the Clinton administration, which she was a very nice lady, but just, you know, talking about all the things they do, right? And then they interviewed the, you know, the Bush's social secretary, the one who was in charge, you know? And what a gracious woman, just, you know, just a really, you know, just a wonderful woman, you know? You just tell the way she is. But in this kind of business, you have to be very, you know? Of course, the flowers, you know, for the president of Poland were to represent the flag of Poland, you know? And I guess it takes three months to plan on just to stay dinner, I see. And they have to find out, you know, there's any dietary needs of that person, you know, that they're going to be honoring, right? And apparently the president of Poland is especially fond of American beasts. That was a big American beast there, you know? And dessert and other things, appropriate for the season, all that sort of stuff, you know? But, you know, very graceful, you know, gracious, this woman, I thought you might be. It's just, and, you know, more of course there, you know, talking about the dinner and bringing in the chef, you know, and he's talking a little about it. So, you know, so, no, it's the blush and grace and modesty, something like that, yes. He touches upon the two integral parts, and I see some of the places where he does that, huh? I understand it. It's so clear. Really, he's striking, he's being shaken, he's just, he's got so natural, you know? And, but Thomas has this question there on the integral parts and temperance. See, you see something like that, the word chaste, chaste means, you know, go back to the verb there, chastise, right? It means in a way to moderate these things and so on. But these emotions especially need to be chastised, right? It's easy to get out of hand. So, you know, Thomas, you know, he talks about temperance there, you know, he says it's very important for the, not just for the spiritual life, but for the life of the mind, you know? Well, you know, there's other kind of, lower is the mind, right? As Gustin would tell you from experience. So the purity of the mind, right? In a sense, he's done by that. But Proclus is an interesting statement there. He's talking about the study of geometry of all things, right? And he says geometry, in the Latin where it's quoted, It purifies the eye of the mind, right? And it's because, in a way, the mind is kind of what? Tied to material things in the beginning, right? And it had a hard time rising above the immaterial. But in geometry, in a way, you kind of what? Is that it coming to material? Yeah, yeah. You see, you know, Plato has kind of, just the soul is turned, you know, towards material things, right? That's kind of, you turn around to turn towards immaterial things. You go from sensible things, in a way, to the, what, to geometry. And you're getting something a little less sensible, a little less material. And then you can finally turn around to these immaterial things, right? Now, most Indianians said that logic, purify, fat, opium, it is even more. Because that's even more immaterial science. In some sense, logic enables you to begin thinking about the immaterial. Lodgy is even more immaterial. So, well, that's a good idea to this, right? And that's not talking about moral vice and anything like that. But nevertheless, the mind is kind of what? Tied to material there, huh? And of course, you know, you read about the dark night of the soul and this sort of thing, you know? These higher things where the soul is turning away from sensible things, right? And it's being purified, right? It's just not mixed with these things. Um... You see, when what's-his-name, St. Paul there, right, he speaks about, I know a man, he means himself, came up to the third heaven, right, you know, and I don't know if the church has ever fully pronounced upon this vision, you know, but the two greatest minds, the church, St. Augustine and St. Thomas there, they both say that he saw God face-to-face in a passing way. It is the privilege accorded to him and to Moses, I guess, right, those two, but, you know, he says whether in the body or not, I don't know, he didn't know whether he saw the body all the time, he's got to the third heaven, right, but that's obviously, you know, a great purification, right? Now, if you go to the Thomas's Comandazione and Partizioni, you know, a sacred scripture, and probably, you know, the best explanation of the occasion for these is the one given by Weissel, you know, in the biography of Thomas, but apparently when you begin your lectures on sacred scripture, you would make these inaugural things, and there's, it was done in two days, you know, and these correspond to the two days that Thomas is going to begin his formal lectures on the sacred scripture. But, you know, when it gets down to dividing all the books of sacred scripture, it gets down to dividing those books there, three books in particular, the Proverbs, yeah, and Ecclesiastes, and then the Song of Songs, I guess, there they go. And they're all dealing with different virtues, right? And the Proverbs is dealing more with, what, human virtue, right? The virtues whereby a man lives in this world and uses the things of this world, material things, in a reasonable way, right? And then the Ecclesiastes is in order to kind of a contempt of the material world. You know, like St. Paul says, you know, it's all trash, he's even a rougher word than trash. You know, compared to Christ, right? It's in the Korah. And that's what the soul is in a way is turning away from the material world, right? Not because the material world is bad, as such, but because, you know, it prevents us from seeing good things. And then finally you get the Song of Songs, right? They use the term, you know, the purgative virtue, you know, and eventually you get the purified soul, right? So it's kind of, you know, in Scripture something like, you know, the order that you have in, you know, St. John the Cross and people of that sort, St. Jesus Abba, you know, the different stages of the soul, right? It's got to kind of be purified from the, what, material world, right? Turn away from the material world in order to have a purely intellectual contact with God. So again, going back to temperance, they say, I can say these things, most of all, immerse us or attach us to material things, in our affections, in our desires. So, like the annotations for, I remember these annotations for a woman's perfume, like one time on TV or something, somewhere in the magazine, you know. If you use this perfume, he won't be able to get you out of his mind. That's kind of funny, you know. This is the annotations, right? But in a sense, it's what it is. You're going to have these material things all the time on your mind, right? A friend of mine was in some kind of a gourmet club, you know, just, you know, went to the annual dinner, right? And the guy, after he got sitting down next to me, got talking about, you know, some of the complications that had arisen in getting all the ingredients for this grand meal, right? And how I almost didn't get this ingredient, you know, but I tried to do it again. See, he quit the club after that. It's like good food, but he didn't like it that much, you know. This guy was, you know, almost like, you know, nervous breakdown, you know, that some ingredient, you know, that's hard to get, you know, almost wasn't gotten or something, you know. You know, you could see the genuine worry about it, being like, you know, what a close call that was. I mean, you're kind of completely absorbed in your food, right? And you're really attached to the material world, right? You can't get the wood out of your mind because the perfume is... I mean, you know, purity in a broader sense, right, includes, you know, even kind of turning away from the sense of the world, right? Yeah. In the higher stages, you know, of the kind of contemplative life and so on. You know, when they talk about how man is easily deceived, it's because this mixture of the senses and especially imagination with his thinking, you know, also imagination easily deceives us. So if the vice is opposed to this that most of all attaches to material things, right, then the virtues, right, that purify us from that attachment to material things, right, we very naturally speak of them as a kind of, what, purity, right? Anger doesn't attach to material things in the way that concubicence and various sorts attach to material things, huh? So Don Giovanni in Mozart is not simply a comic opera, you know. Mozart's the title there, right? When the statue comes at the end there, you know, Don Giovanni still can't. You can't, right? Well, coming back to food, huh? What does Danisha say, you know? The higher angels are, what, food for the lower angels, huh? Sibus there, I remember in the Latin text, it tells us, it's called, Sibus, food. I said, that's awfully concrete way of speaking, right, huh? Birds back in the nest, right, there, you know. Other bird comes back and feeds them, right, you know. That's talking, you know, about what? You know, the illumination, right? Purification. Thomas is clear that they're not being purified from, what? Errors, right, huh? But from what? Yeah, yeah. But notice in English, how we say, it's a marvelous language. No, you're mixed up. You know? You're mixed up. If I say you're mixed up, what does that mean? Couldn't you be mixed up? Well, what does that mean to see you're mixed up? It's not a border. Confused. Yeah. Mistaken. Yeah. It means either mistaken or close to being mistaken, right? And they're all mixed up, you know. You know, it's mistaken or very close to that, you know. What's the opposite of mixed? Scripture says in a... Dallas says the same thing, that the man who sins is always, what, mistaken, right? In some ways he's thinking that what is bad is good, or good is bad. So he's needed a what? A purification, a what? A catharsis, right? Okay. Now I think pure is, what, is that a Latin word, I guess? Pure? Latin derived word? Pures. Pures. Now sometimes we translate the Greek word catharsis, right? By purification, right? Sometimes it turns out by purgation, right? Okay? The kind of purgation and purification are two sides of the same, what, coin, right? In other words, when you purify something, you purge it of whatever is bad in it, right? Right. So purgation emphasizes more the elimination of the bad, right? But that renders what's left pure, right? Uncontended, right? Now, catharsis, the Greek word, was apparently used first in a medical sense, huh? So if I swallow a poison, I'm in need of a what? A catharsis. A catharsis, right? And the catharsis is going to eliminate something, what, bad or harmful, right? That's infected my body, see? Well, then, well then, Aristotle uses it in the book of Poetic Art, right? He speaks of a catharsis of the, what, emotions, huh? And he says that tragedy produces a, what, catharsis of pity and fear, huh? And in my article on comedy, right, you know, I was talking about what is the catharsis of comedy, right? And part of it is a catharsis of, what, elimination of melancholy, okay? And if you go through the English comic news, which is my source for what I'm saying, or my experience, I should say, all the English comic poets, right, starting with Shakespeare, going back beyond that, before that, they all see that as part of the catharsis of comedy, huh? Okay, this, I wasn't going to talk about this here, but, you know, the taping of the shrew, huh? And it's kind of a play, sort of in a play, right? Because they pick up this guy who's drunk, right? And they say, let's put him in the master's bed and pretend that he's woken up from his illness, right? He's really a lord, you know? And so on. And they're going to have him, have a, they have comedy performed for him, right? See? And, uh, what's the call it? Sometimes they call it the induction, you know, into a servant. They've got to cut the guy in bed now, see? Your honors players, hearing your amendment, are come to play a pleasant comedy. For so your doctors hold it very neat. Seeing too much sadness hath congealed your blood. And melancholy is a nurse of frenzy. Therefore they thought it good you hear a play. And frame your mind to mirth and merriment, which bars a thousand harms in Lincoln's life. Okay. So, in part, comedy is going to be a creation of melancholy and sadness, right? And, uh, even, you know, in this minor scale, a joke sometimes, you know, dispels a student, what? Melancholy or sadness, huh? Oh, and one, one time DeConnick would say he was, you know, doing some reading with these guys who can't distinguish between a computer and the human mind, right? You know? I guess kind of, you know, depressing after a while to see that they can't see any difference, right? And so he's a little bit, you might say, melancholy, right? You know, all this stuff. And then there was a cartoon he saw in, uh, Punch, huh? And there's two scientists in front of the computer and there's a printout, right? And one guy's pretty puzzled by it. He says, what does it say? It says, I think, therefore I am. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's just to eliminate something that is, what, harmful in the emotions, huh? So the simplest kind of catharsis, you know, is when somebody cries sometimes, right? And they're relieved, right? Because they have a good cry, as they say, right? How can a private good cry? Well, you're kind of, you know, letting off some of that sadness, right? Okay? Just like a person, you know, sometimes let out steam, you know? They say, you know, they raise some of their angels or something like that. But that's not the most profound kind of catharsis, right? But notice, let's call it a purification there, right? Or a purgation sometimes, you know, because that's the side of the coin, right? Now, Plato speaks of a catharsis of what? A reason, right? Now, when you have a catharsis of reason, this is what Sacrifice is doing when he examines somebody, right? Because the man has some thoughts that are good and true, and some thoughts that are bad and false, right? And what you're trying to do is to eliminate, you're trying to purge him of the, what? Mistakes or errors, you know? So those are three different kinds of catharsis, right? The catharsis of the body, when they, so they induce sovereignty, you know, they're different things, they do different poisons, you know, it's something that induces sovereignty, right? When you purge the body or something, right? There's the catharsis of the emotions, right? Which create heaven and other things to do. And there's the catharsis of what? Of reason, right? Okay? Now, there's one more kind of catharsis, and there's a place called purgatory, right? Okay? Now, is purgatory a catharsis of the body? Okay, you don't have any body there in purgatory. Is it catharsis of the emotions? No, because emotions are something bodily, right? As we saw in the premium here today. Yeah, no. Isn't it primarily catharsis of reason? Okay, it's very clear to you, you know? You know, it went to hell, you know, what is in the screw tape letters there at C.S. Lewis, you know? When the devil talks about that peculiar clarity, you know, of hell. You know, but what it is, is basically, I think, a catharsis of the will. See? So you have a catharsis then of the body, which is maybe the original use of the word. Then a catharsis of the, what, emotions, which Aristotle talks about in the definition of tragedy, right? Then you have a catharsis of the, what, reason, which Plato talks about. Well, then two of my characters. And then there's a catharsis of the, what, will, right? The purgatory is named from the purgation, or catharsis of the will. You're purging the will instead of some attachment to sort of attachment to ever enough to go to hell, right? So there you've got that word pure in all of those, right, huh? Okay. But now, if the man who sins is mixed up in some way, it's mistaken there, you know? Well, Aristotle, interesting, in the second book of the Nicomachean Ethics, at the end, actually he's defying moral virtue in general. He illustrated this on. Then he gives some rules for acquiring moral virtue, right? And he gives three rules, okay? And he says, I'm... Sometimes a virtue is closer to one vice than the other, right? That's very often the case, huh? So, if you have, let's say, courage. Is courage closer to foolhardiness or to powerless? Yeah, yeah. So the courageous man sometimes seems to be able to be foolhardy. Like Coriolanus, who's very courageous, seems to be able to be foolhardy, or is he? Now, is temperance closer to drunkenness, let's say? Or to not drinking at all, or something like that, see? But seems closer to the defect, huh? So we're still saying, you know, you have to kind of bend, you know, a lot of things are being equal, you have to bend in the direction, right? It's less opposed to the virtue, huh? That's kind of interesting, I think, because if you take, say, temperance, the defect is usually called puritanical in our society, and the excess is called intemperance. Intemperance is more opposed to temperance than puritanism is, right? And an old Dominican told me one time, you know, that seminarians have to be a bit puritanical, see? But then, better off, they're kind of straightened out, you see? But the point is, you have to incline a little bit away from the extreme that people are apt, you know, that you have to go to, right? The second rule is similar, but it's taking into account you in particular, right? What are you, as an individual, more implying to, right? So St. Francis de Sales was implying to irascibility, right? So you have to incline to the direction, actually, very well, see? Someone else might be kind of pusillanimous and he has to be fortified, right? He has to bend in the other direction, huh? You see? Those two rules are very similar, huh? But one is based upon the fact that the virtue is closer to one vice than the other, right? And Aristotle compares it to a piece of metal, right? That's bent out of shape. You want to bend it back to a straight, you have to bend it a little bit in the opposite direction. Then it'll straighten out. You can't just bend it back to that. You see? A very interesting comparison he makes there, right? So those are the two rules he gives, right? Which is the vice, which vice is closer to, right? When you bend in the opposite direction, right? I mean, it may not be, excuse me, in the reverse. Which way are you more inclined to, right? The third rule he gives is watch out for pleasure. You see? As if pleasure more easily corrupts the mind, huh? In these matters than anything else, right? You see? You see? Yeah. What he's saying, in acquiring the virtue, right? You have to incline a bit, right? You have to bend a bit in the direction of the vice that is less opposed to the virtue, huh? Okay? You see this in soldiers, right? Soldiers are sometimes a bit, what? Foolhardy before they become courageous, right? They bend a little bit in that direction, right? They always quote the example, you know, George Washington, right? You know, he's out there and writing back, you know, you know, that he got shot at, you know, the bolts are whizzing by him. What a wonderful thing it was, you know? Of course, he asked Washington in the life if he had actually said this. He said, well, I might have, he said. But, you know, after what he realizes, you know, that it's not so wonderful a thing to be shot at, right? You know, like Winston Churchill said, you know, one of the most exhilarating things in the world is to be shot at and missed. You know, kind of, it's bravado, you know? You know, but, you know, sometimes a man's a little foolhardy, right? And then he sells down, right? There was a guy that was under Washington. He's known to history as Matt Anthony. So you have to bend a little bit in the foolhardy direction to become courageous because you're going to kind of, you know, if you bend a little bit towards cowardice, that's not the way to become courageous. The same way, you know, if you want to get to liberality, you bend a little bit towards extravagance rather than to stinginess, right? That's just given the nature of the virtue, right? And where it is. It's not equidistant from the two extremes, huh? The second one is to look at yourself because you yourself are inclined to, what, some things and other people to other things, right? So I used to say about drinking, right? In my experience of drinking and seeing other men drink, you know, they don't always incline these same things once they had a tank in them, you know? Some people, when they drink, they get, they want to chase a woman, right? Other men, they want to get in a fight or something. I had a friend who was an ex-Golden Gloves boxer, right? When he got a load of drinking to him, he'd be ready for a fight. But, you know, some people are inclined to, what, go to excess and concupiscence, right? Others are in the irascible, right? And when you drink, you know, your reason is less in control of your emotions, so a different side of, you know, every side you're inclined to comes out, right? So you have to look at yourself, and you say, if I'm inclined towards this vice, I have to bend a bit in the opposite direction, right? See, if I'm stingy by nature, right, then I have to try to be, what, you know, kind of overly generous, you know? And then you can kind of stay in the house and become either extravagant or stingy if I'm generous. But if I'm inclined in the opposite direction, right, I'm going to have to bend in the opposite direction. Some people talk too much. Some people are too shy to speak up at all, you know? Even though they should, you know? So some guy is shy, he's got to push himself to speak up, and the other guy has to... Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then after those two rules, they're somewhat similar, but a little different, then he gives a third rule, watch out for pleasure. As if that especially, or most easily, or most commonly, right, corrupts the judgment of people. So, in that sense, purity might be what? In regard to temperance, you know, you're not being let astray by pleasure, right? But if you're not temperate, then you're going to be especially let astray, right? Because pleasure is easily corrupts judgment. That's the one from the Old Testament there, Susanna, or is it the old man, right? You know, I mean, you know, the example is all around our society, right? Reading, uh, disordered minds, huh? Church, you know? That's sort of... That's what we want, what a private society is. It's drunk with these things, you know? So, St. Thomas, those three rules, would you say? No, those are in San Mexico, which is sort of like in the middle of the two Americas. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, of course, you know, in the front row, the old bishops of Texas lied up there, you know? Oh. I suppose there are other American bishops, too, but I mean, the, you know, the priest that was on EDPTN there from Corpus Christi or wherever it is, who said, you know, all the Texas bishops were down there, you know? I suppose there was virtually close to the, to Mexico. I think they were part of Mexico, weren't they? Texas was part of Mexico at one time, yeah. Oh, yeah.