I'm going to be a Catholic Priest： AMA (exqf6LmwUNY)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=exqf6LmwUNY

All right, we’re going to go live. All right. So hello, world. Hello, internet. My name is Deacon Eric Seitz. I’m a transitional deacon from the Diocese of Fargo, looking forward to being ordained a Catholic priest in August. And on the Bridges of Meaning Discord server, there were a whole lot of people who had Catholic questions. And I’m here to provide Catholic answers. Joining me is my friend Deacon Riley Durkin, also from the Diocese of Fargo. Say hi, Riley. Hello, world. All right, so we are taking questions. And we are hoping that we can generate a little bit of interesting discussion here tonight through these questions. Yeah, so if you’ve got questions, we are monitoring the chat here on Discord and then also on YouTube so you don’t have to be a part of the Discord server in order to participate. So at this point, I don’t think we need any more introductions. We’ll be ready to start taking questions. So somebody come up with a question. Well, do you want to talk a little bit about yourself while people are thinking? Sure, like a five-minute vocation story? Yeah. Yeah, OK. Who you are, where you come from, where you’re going. So I was born in 1992 in Rapid City, South Dakota. Both of my parents were members of the United States Air Force at one point. And yeah, so we moved around a fair bit. My dad was in the Air Force for 23 years. My mom did not renew her enlistment once the two of them were outnumbered. I’ve got three older brothers and a younger sister. So I moved around quite a bit from South Dakota to South Carolina, spent two years in Stavanger, Norway, four years in Montana. And then my dad retired from the Air Force, and he got a job in Fargo, North Dakota. I was in high school at the time. Let’s see, in high school, I just kind of had this inkling that God was calling me to be a Catholic priest. I’m not one of those ones who is like, from the age of five, I knew God was calling me. I really, you know, I was kind of, especially at that age, kind of torn between the question of marriage and priesthood. So I just kind of wasn’t sure, threw a lot of high school. After my junior year of college, I realized I had to start getting serious about this, because people were asking me that nasty question, what are you doing after high school? And I had to come up with a good answer. So I’m going to stop you real quick. You talk about your after your junior year of college. That’s college seminary. Sorry, I meant junior year of high school. Did I say college? Yeah. Yeah, I meant junior year of secondary school, high school. So I went to a discernment retreat, just a little, I think it was about three full days, learning about the priesthood a bit more than I had known, and having some time for prayer and quiet reflection. And I hadn’t made any decisions there, but it gave me a lot more to ponder and contemplate. So that was in June. And then in August, I had an experience with a priest at my parish in the confessional. And after I’d made my confession, I just kind of mentioned I was thinking about the seminary. And he challenged me to stop thinking so much and start praying more, which turned out to be great advice. And so I made an effort to spend more time in prayer and less time just thinking about things. And so by October, I had decided that going to seminary was a good idea. That’s October of my senior year of high school. And it was enough just to have it as a good idea. I didn’t need to, I realized I didn’t need to have it figured out when I went to seminary. So I went off to seminary. That was Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit, Michigan, kind of a long ways from North Dakota, and I thought so too. It was a great experience, those four years. And I found out that I really enjoyed learning about philosophy, which was something I hadn’t expected. And I started forming the kind of friendships that are going to last lifelong, especially with my friends from my own diocese, which was a real blessing. During my fourth year of college, it was kind of near the beginning of the year. I had done my four years of undergraduate, starting my fourth year of undergraduate. And it was starting to get to be to the point where I had a fair amount of time behind me, but not as much before me. And I was just like, OK, the Lord’s going to give me an answer in his time. And I was praying on Isaiah chapter 35. That’s all about the renewal of Israel and the water springing forth in the desert and going from being a desert to an oasis, to a fertile land instead of a waste. And I was just meditating on that. And it seemed to me that that wasn’t just a prophecy for the Israelites in the ancient times, but even a prophecy about our own day that even though we talk about the eclipse of God in the West, the death of God, as Nietzsche would put it, and declining church attendance, declining priestly vocations, there was going to be a renewal coming through the church. And I just thought how exciting it would be to have a part of that, to be a part of that renewal. And then just this little voice popped into my head and said, yes, and you’re going to do it as a Catholic priest or something along those lines. And I knew it wasn’t my thought. I knew that it come from somewhere else. It wasn’t my own thought forcing it upon me. And so at that point, I was like, OK, I’m in Lord, let’s do this. And I haven’t really looked back since then. I feel like I’ve made a good discernment. And so far, my experience has been very happy. So looking forward to that ordination in August, finally. Deacon Riley, you want to give us a five-minute version? Yeah. I mean, both of our stories are kind of rather boring. So I first thought about the priesthood when I was, gosh, how old was I? I was probably in middle school, maybe, early high school. But after I graduated, I’m the same age as Deacon Ericus. After I graduated in 2011, I went to college, normal college for one year. Wasn’t really thinking about being a priest much at all before that. But when I got there, I knew what to do. So my family did a good job of teaching us what a vocation was. And that is a call from God. And I realized my first semester at university that if I was going to be honest with myself, I needed to at least give this seminary a chance. I thought to myself that I want to date the church, in a sense, see if it works out. And then I come back, go back to NDSU, because I would always be there. I liked my major. And then so I went off. That next year, I also went to Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit. I had a good first year, had a tough second year. I did not like my philosophy studies as much as Deacon Eric did. But I was able to muscle through. And it eventually got to the point of be praying every year, every semester, God draw me to come back. Do you want me to come back to the seminary? Do you want me to keep trying this? Or do you want me to leave? And a few years in, it got to the point where I realized that God would need to ask me to leave the seminary rather than continuing to call me back. I had found a comfortable place in my vocation. And that’s basically when I knew that I’d likely be a priest. But as they say, you don’t for sure know your vocation until you’re ordained. And so that’s what I tell people is when I became a Deacon, that’s when I knew that I was called to be a priest. And now I’m here. I’m finishing up my last year of studies. I’ll graduate in about three weeks. And then I’ll be ordained a priest with Deacon Eric in August. And it’s going to be great. It’s going to be huge. Why don’t you, Deacon Eric, why don’t you talk a little bit about what was so fascinating about your philosophy studies in college and how you’ve been keeping up with it now? Oh. And how it ended, working in how it was, why we need to study philosophy at all before theology. Sure, sure. So I’ll just give you a little bit of my story. At the time I was discerning, didn’t want to study philosophy because I didn’t know how you could use it to make money. That’s basically what it comes down to. I kind of had that very utilitarian outlook on college that, and it’s not a horrible outlook. You shouldn’t be going there and spending a ton of money unless it’s going to be a worthwhile investment. And so that was the kind of attitude I entered into seminary with. I had kind of this thought in my head that I was going to spend four years in seminary, and then God was going to call me out, and I’d be stuck here with this philosophy degree, wondering what to do. So that’s just kind of my 18-year-old high school punk thoughts about things. Yeah, I think the point where I started taking philosophy seriously was in my first semester. And we had a professor, Dr. Victor Salas, who his way of teaching was basically he would adopt the position of whatever philosopher we were studying at the time. You would just argue with him. And there was just this day where I made an argument, and he just utterly shredded it to pieces. It was something about what it means to be a human being. We were studying Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics at that time, and I think I was trying to say there was something related to consciousness. Like a machine gun just shot that argument full of holes, and it was like, yeah, wow, I really have no idea what I’m talking about. And it was at that point that philosophy really started to intrigue me because I just kind of my vaguely well-educated Catholic framework started to become more sophisticated, because I realized that I didn’t really have all the answers. It was a humbling moment. It was basically just a humbling moment. I realized I didn’t know what I thought I needed to know. Philosophy really started clicking for me when I took philosophical anthropology. That was, I think, my first semester of my second year of college, and that was with a different professor, Dr. Philip Blasser, and his approach wasn’t the same approach as Dr. Salas, where he was kind of honing your ability to argue. He would just present a lot of ideas and try and present why these ideas were important. So I think in that way, they were actually very complimentary, because this was a small liberal arts seminary. We didn’t have a huge philosophy department, just mostly just the two of them, and then there were a few other professors who would have a few classes. And so it was a lot of the two of them, and they really complemented each other, because I could get kind of a bigger picture from Dr. Blasser and then really how to think properly with Dr. Salas. So it was that philosophical anthropology that really showed me what the stakes were in philosophy, and that’s when I was utterly hooked into it. So the second part of that question was about why philosophy, right? Yes, yeah. Yeah. So St. Thomas Aquinas, he’s got this great way of putting it. He says that philosophy is the handmaiden of theology, and he meant by that you use philosophy, which is a human science in order to use the tools of philosophy in order to make theology more clear. And so a good philosopher should be able to make important distinctions. A good philosopher should be able to structure an argument properly and avoid logical fallacies. And just that whole philosophical mindset of placing yourself in pursuit of the truth, especially as given to us by the Greek philosophers, he saw that as complementary to becoming a theologian. So it’s like you first have to learn how to think before you can think about God. I think that’s the central mindset. And that was the tradition of the church, at least from the scholastic era on, to study philosophy before you study theology. And that’s been passed down through the monastic schools, down through the universities to our time. So it’s a very time-honored tradition. OK. We study a lot of St. Thomas in our philosophy. We’ll stick around the philosophy for right now. Who are some of the other major figures that we studied? Well, certainly the classical Greek figures. So it’s impossible to ignore Plato, Socrates, Aristotle. And I think in particular, Aristotle. We did study quite a bit of neoplatonic ideas, just because those were especially important in the early Christian era. We also had kind of a survey of the entire history of Western philosophy. So we had ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy, modern philosophy, contemporary philosophy. And those same Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, a little bit of the very modern ones, like Heidegger. And even some of the postmoderns we studied. We studied a little bit of Foucault, a little bit of Derrida, a little bit of Lyotard, especially in our contemporary philosophy class. So the bread and butter was the scholastic tradition, St. Thomas Aquinas. But we were exposed to kind of the gauntlet of it. So that was why kind of my first year seminary, I kind of missed the stakes. But when it came down to the brass tacks with philosophical anthropology, it’s like, whoa. If you believe that man is merely material and is determined by strictly physical causal sources, as explained by the scientific method, that’s going to give you a very different view of humanity because you cut off the entire transcendent realm. And I probably wouldn’t have been able to put it like that. But that was just sort of the problems I began grasping at, especially studying like even Freud. And he wasn’t necessarily a philosopher. But his ideas had an implicit philosophy behind it that if you miss it, then you’re just going to swallow that implicit philosophy, hook, line, and sinker without noticing it. And then just a lot of the materialist determinists, that was just something I really grappled with at that time. Can you explain something a little bit? We don’t have any questions submitted yet. And this is more for me. So when you go through the intellectual tradition of the church, a few major figures that come up are Augustine and then Thomas. Now, Augustine was more of a Platonist, and then Thomas, and after, are more Aristotelian. Can you speak a bit about that transition of thought in the intellectual tradition of the church and the role of Aristotle now in contemporary Christian thought? Sure, sure. Well, I’ll just say this is that when I propose doing this, ask me anything, my fellow bridges of meaning folk. There was a lot of like, yeah, do it. That would be great. So I’m here. Let’s get some of those questions going, because I know a lot of you are very good at questions. Are we free to pose questions from the Discord? Yeah, I think. Let’s post it in the chat. Maybe raise your hand in the Discord and then get the go ahead from Deacon Riley. Does that make sense? Oh, I see what’s going on here. Yeah. I’m looking at the wrong thing. OK. OK. My colleague didn’t know how this was working. Are there a bunch of questions already? No, why don’t you go ahead and answer mine, and then we’ll move on to that. Sorry, guys. OK. We’re learning here. So we’re talking about Plato and Aristotle in the history of the church. So most of the influence of Plato came via the Neoplatonist, right? Especially Plotinus. He was a huge influence on St. Augustine. And you can see how that would be a very easy fit for Christianity, because the Neoplatonic philosophers were all about there being the realm of ideas and that coming down into the realm of matter. Now, the Neoplatonists usually had, they didn’t always have a personal vision of God. And so you can think of the project of St. Augustine and even the people who came before him, but he kind of gave the definitive word, so to speak, on that. You could see how that notion of participation that are being here on Earth is participation and something that’s going on in a higher realm, how that would be an attractive idea to the Christians, and how they would want to look at that philosophical framework and see a concept that they could utilize. This is a useful philosophical idea, this idea of participation in a higher realm. And then what the Christian Neoplatonic tradition, which also includes Dionysius the Areopagite, gave to that is the notion of providence. So they kind of brought in that notion of the providence of God, the personal providence of God, which is certainly present all throughout the Old Testament, all throughout the New Testament. And they kind of synthesized that with these Neoplatonic ideas and these sort of conceptual categories of that participation of even the idea of forms. St. Augustine was one of the first, I think, to talk about the eternal exemplars in the idea, in the mind of God, which is how he would solve the problem of universals at that time. And Dionysius the Areopagite, working along the same lines. And so that was sort of the vision of certainly the West, the West in general that took hold, and St. Augustine’s vision. Now, when you come to Thomas Aquinas, what you have to remember is that he was a man firmly rooted in tradition. So his number one citation throughout all of his works was the sacred scriptures. That would always be the first source he could go to. After that, it came the fathers of the church, especially St. Augustine, Dionysius the Areopagite, and St. Gregory the Great. Those were his three main sources. And so with all of that influence from St. Augustine and Dionysius, you have to acknowledge that Thomas Aquinas was himself a type of Neoplatonist. He didn’t see himself in a disjunction with that Neoplatonic tradition. And what he was doing is he was… So at this time, there was a lot of controversy around the texts of Aristotle. The texts of Aristotle, which are basically just his lecture notes, had been recovered in the West. They hadn’t had much circulation, if any at all, prior to the 12th century. And a lot of them came via the Arabic commentators, Avicenna and Averroes. And so his goal was to integrate Aristotle into this Neoplatonic framework. And he did it with just spectacular results, taking the, you know, the hylomorphic dualism form and matter Aristotelian categories. You see especially the four causes, form, matter, efficient cause, final cause, play a huge role in his thought. He would make all of his, you know, theological arguments that were supposed to be in deduction. He would have those in the form of a syllogism without having the, you know, so like the meat, the bones of his argument were a syllogism and the meat of his argument was, you know, philosophical reasoning. So it wasn’t like you were just sitting there reading syllogisms all day. So I think when people play up that whole Aristotle changed everything for Thomas Aquinas thing, I don’t really see that as being a legitimate move, given, you know, how much he relied on Saint Augustine and Dionysius who were very much in the Christian Neoplatonist tradition. It’s like impossible to say all of a sudden that Thomas Aquinas is an Aristotelian and that’s just kind of the end of the story. It’s not. Well, that’s good. That’s very helpful. Let’s switch gears a little bit to something a little bit, a little bit more human. You’re talking a bit about your vocation. How was your family’s response to that? Well, my parents were thrilled. I really learned the faith at home first. That was where I was grounded in. And so, you know, I know some people had more, some guys had more misunderstanding and reservations from their parents, but from day one, my parents understood first off what the Eucharist is and then second off what the church understands of priests. And they thought that this was just going to be a wonderful gift from God that I could be a priest. So that’s my parents gung ho from the get go. It’s really hard to gauge the reaction of some of my siblings. I’ve got two brothers who are no longer practicing the faith, are in some sort of, trying to be fair here, but some sort of an agnostic twilight where they’re not really committing one way or the other. One of them was a committed, you know, new atheist type for a while. And he settled down a little bit more and it’s easier to have a conversation with him, frankly. And neither of them have ever been hostile to what I’m doing. They seem to be in a kind of a libertarian mode of things where it’s like, well, if that’s what you want, Eric, then you go for it and we’ll support you. But not the same excitement that my parents or maybe a few other of my siblings who are still practicing their faith would have had. And then, you know, maybe kind of the same thing from like my extended family, cousins and such. They maybe don’t fully understand what I’m doing, but they want to support me regardless. Good. And then I know you’re a sci-fi guy. You’re into that kind of stuff. Can you speak about the 1984 Dune movie or the Sci-Fi Channel series? Oh, well, I read the book in high school and when I was a kid, I saw parts of the 2004 sci-fi series. I’ve never seen the 1984 movie. I’ve heard it’s kind of out there. Boy, what to say about it. You know, it’s just been so long since I’ve read it. I know I remember the basic outlines of the plot, but I was reading it as a high schooler and I’m sure if I revisited it now, there was gonna be all sorts of things that I missed at the age of 16. So I might put that down on a list, just buy that on my Kindle and reread it. That and yeah, so as far as other sci-fi goes, in high school, I read a lot of Isaac Asimov. I really loved his world building ability and I, you know, and his, I’ll be honest, in high school, his rationalism appealed to my rationalistic tendencies. And so, you know, kind of that idea he had in his foundation series that you could with enough data predict the broad outlines of history. I thought that was really interesting when I was in high school. So that was what his foundation series was about and then I also really liked his detective novels with the robot, the robot detective novels. I thought those were very interesting. And then I watched a lot of Star Trek too when I was younger. Do you still watch Star Trek? I’ve heard good things about Picard. I’ve heard mixed things about Star Trek Discovery. I’m starting to notice how hokey a lot of the 1980s next gen stuff was and I’m thinking maybe, I’m kind of terrified of Deep Space Nine because if I get into it, I’m gonna get really into it and there goes all of my free time because I’ve heard that one’s pretty excellent. I watched a lot of Doctor Who in Seminary which as a series is just all over the place, right? Any given episode, you have no idea what’s coming at you. I haven’t watched, I haven’t watched much recently. What was the last sci-fi thing I consumed? I think the latest sci-fi thing for me has been the video game No Man’s Sky that’s set in a artificially, what a procedurally generated universe with 18.4 quintillion unique planets and I’ve played that a lot unsurprisingly in the past month, month and a half. Well, there hasn’t been a lot going on anywhere in the last month and a half. Yeah, so that’s, I maybe could have had a more virtuous response but this was the response I had. Can you speak about obedience, what it means for obedience to be a virtue and how it plays out in the life of a priest? Yeah, so what I find most interesting about obedience is kind of its etymology. It comes from kind of a little Latin phrase to mean to listen carefully. It’s like, wow, so that’s what the Latin’s meant by, is to, it’s not just, you know, they didn’t have like a mechanistic understanding of what obedience was, it was to listen carefully. And I certainly think St. Paul’s understanding of obedience, you know, in the letter to the Romans, he talks about, pretty sure it’s the letter to the Romans, talks about the emperor getting his legitimacy to govern from God himself somehow. That’s a really interesting idea. And the idea that all authority eventually comes from God, all legitimate authority eventually comes from God. And so that’s kind of where you wanna start is, you know, first off, man has a primordial obedience to God, an obedience to his word, which isn’t merely a mechanical obedience, it’s not merely, we could say a slavish obedience but it’s an obedience that comes through careful listening. And then, you know, they’re looking probably specifically for priestly obedience in that question? Yeah, how it plays out in the life of a priest and what it means to be virtue probably in the Aristotelian sense, pro-Thomistic. Okay, okay. So how it plays out in diocesan life? Well, the diocesan bishop is supposed to be the representative of God here on the earth for his diocese. And that’s below the level of the diocese. And that’s, boy, like the first thing a bishop should think of is what have I gotten myself into? That is a tremendous responsibility. And we remember the words of Jesus, to those whom more has been given, more will be expected. So that’s sort of the context that a good bishop would be thinking about, you know, not what can I get from this diocese, but certainly the ideal is how do I bring the people in my diocese to Christ? And then everything should flow from that. So that’s sort of the symbolism in the priesthood is, you know, I’m ordained to be an assistant to the bishop, both deacons and priests. Our task is to be assistants to the bishop. And that’s where the promise of obedience comes from. You know, the bishop’s job is to bring the gospel to his diocese, and my job is to assist him in bringing the gospel to his diocese. And so insofar as everything that the ministry of a priest should be about is about bringing the gospel and cooperating with the mission of the bishop, he should have a posture of respect and obedience to that bishop because the bishop is the one who has been put in that place of authority by God through his active or passive will, or certainly his providence. Certainly we could see that as God’s act of the universe. And my job is to cooperate with that. But again, we’re talking obedience, and obedience to God and obedience to a human being have obviously got to be a different sort of obedience. Only God could command that absolute sort of obedience. There’s a different type of obedience that would be commanded to the bishop. And so, certainly the important caveat on the promise of obedience is that I cannot follow an evil order from the bishop. If the bishop orders me to do something intrinsically evil, then I’m obligated to resist that and to defy him. And thankfully, I’ve got a bishop that I admire and I fully intend to respect the promise that I’ve made and show that respect and obedience that I’ve promised to publicly. So I don’t anticipate ever being in that situation. But then a part of obedience to a human being is about communication, and communication is a two-way street. And so, if the bishop is gonna be a good bishop, then he needs to listen to his priests. So I see that just in a practical way played out in the way that assignments are decided. So in our diocese, we have the territory of the diocese broken up into different dineries. And each of those dineries contains a certain number of parishes, a certain number of pastors, a certain number of priests, a certain number of deacons. And there’s one dean who’s kind of the presider over that dinery. And it’s all of the deans of the diocese together with the bishop who talk about moving priests around, which priest should go to this parish, how can we best serve the diocese with our personnel because it’s been said more than once, personnel is policy. And he does that with consultation of these deans who are usually respected and proven priests of our diocese and who have a pulse on what’s going on in their dinery. And so, it’s not like the bishop should be just sitting down and deciding what’s best for the diocese on his own. If he’s going to be a good bishop, he’s going to have to listen to his priests carefully because he needs that assistance, he needs that assistance from his priests and also from the laity of the diocese in order to govern the diocese as well. So, I think if a bishop’s gonna be doing a good job, a large part of his job is going to be listening. Good. Hope that makes sense to everybody. If you’ve got a follow up, please let me know. So, this next one, I’m just gonna read as written because I don’t understand what the question is, but you will. Well, maybe I’ll just take a look at it. We’re talking with Dave W there. Yep. Yeah. So, I had a question about the phileoquian translation. A document was shared here on Discard that argued that preceding Greek seems to point to ultimate origins where proceed in Latin seems to mean something like issue forth from something. So according to this document and this in Latin, this issuing forth procession is referencing the divine essence being communicated through the son from the father to the spirit. Nevertheless, the Western church wouldn’t say that the son is the source of the spirit’s essence. It lies in the father only and comports well with Orthodox theology. Due to this linguistic difference, if you believe it is legitimate, do you think it would be possible to form a theological bridge between the Western and Eastern understandings of the Trinity where Catholics could still keep the filioque and the creed and the Orthodox still did not adopt it? Well, I can only speak for about one quarter of one half of the, uh, of the equation there because I’m, I’m very, very thoroughly on the Catholic side. Um, could we have the same creed with different wording? That kind of seems like the question that we’re being asked. Um, um, and I think the church ultimately could tolerate that kind of diversity. And in fact, they would be able to go into a position where they would, um, you know, it could be like a great teaching point on, um, you know, the difference between the Eastern tradition and the Western tradition. Um, I could actually, I could see something like that going in that way. Now, there’s a couple of barriers that would come up immediately. I think, um, there are churches of the East, which are in full communion with Rome. And so we call the, you know, the Byzantine church, the Chaldean Catholic church, the, uh, Syro Malabar church, the Russian Catholic church, the Romanian Catholic church. All of these are contained in that umbrella of Eastern Christianity, but still Catholicism. And I’m fairly certain that, um, they were required to adopt the filioque, uh, as a part of the deal. Um, so I would be very interested to see somebody who’s much more of an expert on ecumenism, um, to comment on that question because, um, it’s like, well, we, uh, we kind of made them sign onto this filioque where we’re going to tell them, uh, we were wrong all along. We just weren’t translating this properly. Uh, I don’t know. I really don’t know. Um, so that would be something interesting to explore, uh, with someone who’s maybe a little more informed on that subject than I am. Excellent answer. Um, let’s talk a little bit about, uh, about the, the Catholic church and renewal. You mentioned earlier that you see a renewal soon coming to the Catholic church. Uh, what do you mean by that? And what signs do you see of this renewal? Right, right. Um, well, I, I don’t suppose we can do that without a history lesson. Um, so, you know, um, there was this sense throughout the entire 20th century in the Catholic church that we were kind of losing our ability to articulate ourselves to, uh, the times, right? That, that, you know, the world was speaking one language and the church was speaking another, and we were having a very difficult time translating this. Um, so even though, uh, things in many places looked quite good, you know, the United States, the, uh, Catholic church was ascendant at that time. Number of high profile converts in the 1940s and fifties, you’ve got Bishop Sheen on television. Um, you know, just nailing the, the prime time Nielsen ratings. Um, Ireland had seminaries that were just jam packed, full, um, religious orders, um, had more applicants than they knew what to do with. Um, and, uh, the seeds of the, uh, of the, of the church were really coming about, uh, in a big way, uh, really beginning to blossom in the 1950s, 1960s in the, uh, in the missions in the, uh, African and Asian territories. Um, but there was still this sense that there was a need for renewal on need for renewal. And so that was the context in which, uh, St. Pope, St. John, the 23rd, uh, called the second Vatican council, this idea that, um, and this is very clear in his opening address, this idea that the church had this treasury of wisdom and, the goal was to open this up to the world, um, so that, uh, the message of Christ could be proclaimed in a manner that, uh, they were very fond of this phrase, modern man could understand. Um, and there was also, uh, around this time, the 1960s, um, there was a simultaneous turn, uh, to the world, uh, inside the church. So, um, there was a sense that the church hadn’t learned, uh, much from the world at that time. And so, uh, the church also needed to open up to the world, uh, hopefully as the world would open up to the church with this new language. Um, and so, you know, we look at the time of the 1960s in the Catholic church, uh, especially in the early part of the decade, there was a lot of optimism, a lot of optimism that, um, with certain amount of adjustment to our mission, uh, the, the power of the gospel could shine forth. Um, now there was, uh, a percentage of the church of, of people involved at the second Vatican council who saw this playing out in a particular way. Um, and this is generally, uh, referred to, at least in, uh, traditional Catholic circles as a modernism or neo modernism. The idea that, um, modernism, what that basically comes down to in this context is the idea that, um, the, the fundamental doctrines and truths of the church can change over time. The idea that my interior experience of the gospel is normative and the idea that we can never come to a final conclusion about what, any point of the doctrine about God, we can never come to the final conclusion. So that’s the, uh, sort of the threefold synthesis of the ideas of evolution of doctrine, of, um, immunitism that our own experience is normative and of agnosticism in, uh, matters of the supernatural. And I think what a lot of these, uh, theologians, priests and bishops were reacting to was sort of the staleness they detected in the theology of the day that the theology of the day was, um, had gone arid, that it had, uh, lost contact with the source of theology. Um, you know, certainly God himself and then, uh, the gospels and the fathers of the church, uh, they’d lost contact with all of that. And theology really wasn’t, uh, moving forward. Now, uh, there was a certain, I think I could say safely, a certain Marxist influence on this, um, on this core of, uh, modern, modernist thinking, theologians, priests and bishops, there was kind of this modernist instinct, uh, it’s like Marxist instinct where they other, these things in terms of, of a power dynamic. And, um, so if you look at kind of the major players of the council, um, the traditionalists, uh, very early on were completely in a procedural way outmaneuvered by the modernists and, um, they were able to kind of take early positions and, uh, the people who didn’t like these kind of modernist ideas, which were often, uh, dressed up in the exact language of orthodoxy. Um, you know, they just, they weren’t able to mount an effective response. You can also talk about this being the first, uh, ecumenical council of the modern media. So, you know, ABC, NBC, CBS, they were able to kind of take early positions and, uh, CBS, um, they were all there. Uh, certainly, uh, European reporters were there, uh, reporters from around the globe were there. Um, and so, uh, they got to frame the question of the second Vatican council more so than did the council fathers. It was the media who got a lot of framing on this. And so there was generated by and large, uh, in the period between 1962 and 1965, an expectation that there were going to be, uh, cataclysmic changes in the Catholic church, more so than just what I think John the 23rd really envisioned, uh, more so than just a change in, uh, practices. But, you know, if you change a liturgical function, then you’re changing the way a community expresses their faith. And if you change it enough, are you actually changing the faith? And so, um, at this time, at the end of the second Vatican council and immediately afterwards, there was a great amount of turmoil in the church. And, um, the, uh, the, the modernist sort of movement within the church, um, they were kind of on the leading edge of things. They had that instinct for, um, you know, maneuvering in institutions that the traditional, maybe even reactionary, uh, part of the church did not. And, um, they, they basically at that time, uh, had the dominant voice in how the second Vatican council was interpreted. And, uh, this was often, this has been referred to, this sort of framing of the issue of the interpretation of the second Vatican council, um, has been referred to by Pope Benedict XVI as, um, the hermeneutic of discontinuity, like, um, the second Vatican council was a second founding of the Catholic church. Um, and there was a lot of this new Pentecost language that was going around at that time. And so, uh, what happened? What was the fruits, the immediate fruits of the second Vatican council? Um, so they changed the form of the Mass in such a way that it had never been changed in the history of the church. An abrupt change in the way that Mass was celebrated. Um, and this was, uh, oftentimes very shocking to the lay faithful, was, uh, shocking to the priests who were asked to implement it. Um, so what we saw in the late 1960s through the mid 1970s was a huge number of priests leaving the ministry, right? Uh, petitioning the Vatican for laicization. We got a huge number of religious brothers and sisters, um, petitioning the Vatican to be released from their vows and to live a secular life. We saw huge changes in the, um, in the way that religious, uh, uh, religious orders lived out their vocations and, um, saw a sharp decline in Mass attendance, a sharp decline in the numbers of, uh, seminarians, and, um, you know, just this general sense that the church was now in crisis. And so, um, you know, it just didn’t seem like anybody was really at the wheel anymore. There was all this chaos and all this confusion. And it was, um, it was into this scene in 1978 that John Paul II walked, um, after Paul VI. Paul VI was not a man who liked making his authority felt. He did not have, um, you know, he just didn’t, he wasn’t a general. He wasn’t a general organizing his forces, um, collecting his troops, uh, and managing all of that. Um, John Paul II seemed to most, I think quite accurately, to be kind of a return to, um, some of the essentials that were, uh, greatly embattled at that time. So you could think of his, uh, reform of the Code of Canon Law that he, uh, completed as, um, as part of that. I think issuing the new Catechism of the Catholic Church, which is, um, regarded widely as just a sound, uh, statement of Catholic principles, um, as that being a source of the renewal. And, um, his, uh, encyclical, uh, especially Veritati Splendor was about, uh, the moral life and Christian moral theology as kind of a answer to the challenges on that world, uh, on, on, uh, on the, the problems in moral theology of that time. Um, and then there was just like this generation of priests who were inspired and edified by the example of John Paul II and his faithfulness to the tradition of the Church, um, that really kind of came, uh, under his wing, um, and that, that sort of generation of priests, which I really see, you know, I mean, I came into the seminary under Pope Benedict, but I really see myself and my priesthood as a part of that, uh, as a part of that hermeneutic of reform, not that hermeneutic of discontinuity, that the Catholic Church is really, uh, instituted by Christ and that the Catholic Church is, um, is the, uh, the true, the true Church. I mean, I’ll make no bones about that as my position. And then, um, me seeing my, myself as a part of that renewal movement trying to correct some of the excesses and some of the errors that came about in the time immediately after the Second Vatican Council, I wonder how long that answer was. I wasn’t timing, but I wish I was. What, uh, alright, I don’t know what your, how familiar you are, how familiar are you, Deacon Eric, with the concept of theosis in the Eastern Church? Yeah, it’s called divinization. How well does that map on to sanctifying grace in the West? Um, well, us Westerners, we, um, we like to have our division, right, uh, in our categories. So when you go to the Council of Trent, that was the, uh, that was the Catholic response to the objections of, uh, Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, and they sort of made the, uh, the Catholic counterargument. Um, so, uh, if we go by the Council of Trent’s definition, you kind of get a whole bundle of closely related theological terms and concepts all relating around the concept of justification. And so that was what the big debate was about, um, at that time. Justification. How does one go from the state of being an enemy of God and a subject of Satan to being a friend of God and an adopted son of God? Um, and that was a term the reformers, I believe, would have used. Um, and they gave this very detailed explanation of how God’s grace works, uh, that God’s grace begins calling the sinner, um, through the proclamation of the Gospel and that, um, the sinner begins to have, uh, faith in the word heard, uh, by the power of the Holy Spirit and that this faith should lead the person who’s in this, uh, state of sin to seek out the sacraments of the Church full initiation and that, um, the completion of this process comes with baptism. Uh, and there are, um, you know, kind of theories on the side about, uh, what happens to those who are unable to complete baptism, you know, an untimely death, we could say. We need not get into that now. They see the sacrament of baptism as the natural conclusion of, uh, that process of conversion and, uh, sort of that moment when we know because of the sacramental symbol that justification has taken place. And so just, uh, baptism would have, uh, the infusion of, uh, the infusion of sanctifying grace. And this is where it gets complicated, right? Because, you know, there was very much influence by the scholastic tradition. And, uh, the notion of concomitance here is very important. Is that, you know, we can distinguish the grace of God in so far as we see its functioning in human beings. But we don’t want to have the idea that, you know, like, I don’t think it’s legitimate to, to make these things, um, I don’t know. I’m not sure what I’m saying. I’m saying I’m not sure there’s an actual difference in kind and the categories that I’m about to lay out here. I’m not sure there’s an actual difference in kind. It might just be, uh, a difference in, uh, mode of operation. Um, so how these things work for us. So there’s, uh, sanctifying grace. Um, what is, what is the word that the council of Trent uses? An entitative habit, which is basically the scholastic way of saying, uh, we know that it’s real and we don’t know what it is. So don’t ask us, um, something, some quality of the soul that makes you pleasing to God and then concomitant with that always makes you feel like you’re in the right place. So, uh, with that, all of these things coming at the exact same time, uh, you’ve got this notion of sanctifying grace comes with the theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity. Faith, the act of, uh, believing in God by means of divine grace, uh, by the command of the will, uh, by the sense of the intellect to divinely reveal truths by the command of the will. Okay, so, um, hope is that bridge between, uh, faith that these things are possible and then it’s hope that sees that these things are possible for me. And then finally, uh, charity where one begins to love God, uh, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength, and your neighbor as yourself. Um, concomitant with those are, uh, the infused moral virtues whereby everything that is human can be, uh, an opportunity, uh, everything that is human becomes redeemed and specifically the virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance all become, um, elevated to the plane of the supernatural. Concomitant with that is the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, uh, which are, uh, a unique way of the Holy Spirit, uh, and the way that the Holy Spirit is elevated to the plane of the supernatural. So, it’s like, it’s like, we’ve got all of these, you know, concepts about the different ways that hum, uh, God can become present in the human soul, but they all come at the exact same moment when God is present in the human soul. So, that’s why we’re talking about the human soul and the human soul and the human soul and the human soul and the human soul and the human soul and the human soul at the exact same moment and they all come together. So, you know, they were, they were breaking it up at that time, but if you’re just acting these things out, it’s not really important to have all of those different categories. So, um, so yeah, that’s how sanctifying grace and theosis are related to each other. Um, we have a lot of different concepts that we use to explain it, and I don’t even think that those concepts are exhaustive because we, you know, it doesn’t even touch on the question of charisms in the church. It doesn’t even question, touch on some of the questions of sanctifying grace. Um, so yeah, that’s a lot. Sanctifying grace is concomitant with infused theological virtues, infused moral virtues, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the indwelling of the divine trinity, and, uh, charisms given to build the church up all at the same time, and that’s not exhaustive of what God can do in the human soul. The end. This is a question from me. What don’t you know? Plenty. Like, we could start with everything I’ve forgotten from my philosophy classes. All of the Latin I’ve forgotten, um, the details of the rubrics of a solemn high mass as performed by the deacon. I’ve forgotten a lot of that. Uh, yeah, there’s plenty I don’t know. How did you, how did you find this, uh, this Discord channel, the Bridges of Meaning? What brought you onto this? Oh, um, so, uh, you probably, Deacon Riley, have you heard of Paul VanderKley yet? Heard of him. Not familiar. He’s kind of the top lobsonger. He’s kind of the top lobster around here. Um, he, uh, he has his YouTube channel where he discusses all sorts of things that I find interesting. And I, I think I found him via a, a pastor, you know, you know me, I’m a Jordan Peterson fan, uh, or at least admirer. Um, and I found him via this video, uh, a Christian pastor comments on the Jordan Peterson phenomenon or something along those lines. And I thought this is a YouTuber I can get behind. When I saw the way he was reacting. Um, and then just, uh, about a week ago, he, he posted this video that I listened to referencing this Discord server. Uh, and, you know, I, I love being here in Langdon. And I love the people that I’m serving and the priests that I’m serving with. And it’s all great. But, they don’t have the appetite for a philosophical, theological conversation like I do. And so I was, you know, kind of like, ah, I’m a Christian. I can read books and continue engaging in these questions. Um, but finding this little, this little, ah, slice of humanity, who are having these, uh, conversations about, you know, really kind of central debates, and, ah, having them in such a, a winsome and, ah, generous and open manner. I was just like, oh yeah, I’ve been to this. So, I, ah, I just started, you know, popping in. Um, and then the question came up. I, ah, I just kind of jumped in there. And, um, people were like, you should do an Ask Me Anything. Or maybe I was mulling an idea of doing an Ask Me Anything. And a lot of people were like, yeah, do that. Um, and, ah, so here I am now. And, ah, you know, it’s, ah, it’s just been fun, even just lurking on the conversations, just watching the conversations happen. Um, hearing about all this stuff, ah, younger people who are genuinely interested in these things and, ah, aren’t fellow Thomists. That’s very fruitful because, you know, when you’re in the seminary in a building with a hundred other men taking the, ah, exact same classes that you are, you can go ahead and bet that we’re all kind of of the same mind in these things. And so, ah, fruitful dialogue with people of good will coming from a different perspective, ah, I think that’s pretty great. I do want to say really quick too, thank you for doing this. This is exactly what we wanted to use this server for and so Just really appreciate you hosting this and taking all these questions and leading such an interesting conversation Well, you must realize that this is in fact crypto proselytism. So, you know be warned. I Am aware I am very aware I Think there’s something up with my stream on YouTube. Oh, yeah, you got the little white circle. I got the white circle gosh There are in fact people watching on YouTube. I think I’ve got three watching now. Yeah Well, that’s somebody and I want to care about them, you know Yeah, thank you three of you. Yeah, you know, it’s just three people that are all still listening to it on the dashboard Um Jordan you mentioned Jordan Peterson How has he impacted your faith life or vocation if at all? I’m still looking at the stream. I think I’m gonna hot drink I’ve got water here Okay, it looks like the stream is doing a lot better now and I can be happy about that All right, well I see See Carlos M Mentioned that you mentioned that Jordan Peterson is someone to admire. Did Jordan Peterson help you out with your faith and vocation somehow? Um, I mean I think there’s a certain Encouragement that You know and I mean encouragement in like the deep sense of strengthening Certain Strengthening effect that he has on almost everyone who encounters him honestly and I certainly you know, I would get to the Get to the end of a little snippet. I started just with a little clips Jordan Peterson and it was all like you know, I just felt encouraged I felt energetic and and kind of I felt stronger after listening to him talk and it’s like Okay, like you can’t just you know set that aside like that’s a big deal that somebody would would be able to speak on that way so You know I could say that he helped my vocation in so far as he Helped me as a human being You know and I had that very typical Christian response to Jordan Peterson where it’s like, okay, but does he believe in the resurrection? and then you know, but I I knew I Just got a sense of him that he wouldn’t like that, you know question to be asked Blithely so just really, you know trying to understand how he sees the world I just found that What secondarily fruitful for my own faith life because I had to encounter it and I had to learn how to understand his thought and how he viewed the world and and that Yeah, they’re just you know opened up new questions for my own faith and And an appreciation for you know, how much even a secular reading of the Bible You know, I listened to his Bible series How much secular reading of the Bible was was actually kind of helpful for me. I had never Considered Abraham as a heroic archetype, right? So that was interesting Yeah, yeah and anyway, I think he speaks well on you know, certainly natural law theory is a big part of my my Understanding of the world and of the faith the idea that God’s God’s plan for humanity can be understood by observation and And serious thought You don’t need the Bible to be able to perform a good deed basically and I guess one thing that I really found fascinating about him is You know the moral law is is is very often Presented as a series of don’ts right? You know, you got the ten commandments Yeah, it’s it’s always it’s often phrased in terms of It’s always it’s often phrased in terms of a negative moral norm rather than a positive moral norm and And you know, that’s that’s not the entirety of the the moral life now, I think the way this was handled in Christianity at least traditionally was You know you just acted out the imitation of Christ and you just acted these things out You know, we had this tradition of you know helping the poor tradition of What it means to be a good priest to be a good be good be a good lay person all these things we just acted out kind of unconsciously and What some of the why that works And why this virtue is helpful and that virtue is helpful. He was able to start Putting those we could say positive moral norms into words So it’s not only thou shalt not but You know, it’s not only you know, it’s you know, it’s not only you know So it’s not only thou shalt not but you know thou shalt hold your shoulders back and embrace the world thou shalt Tell the truth or at least stop saying things, you know to be untruth untrue You know his 12 rules Being able to to act those things Out I just found that very interesting and you know if if I had the time I would you know, like Create the grand synthesis of that we could say Piazgetian approach to ethics to try and synthetize that into the mystic tradition and and Become unstoppable culturally that would be great Do you can hear the opportunity to sit down with Peterson? What are some of the things you’d ask him? I’ve been I’ve been sitting on this one for a while and I’m glad you asked so you look at his method his method for deciding once true and it’s basically an internal steel manning exercise right that he will just He’ll take an idea and he’ll just attack it from as many different angles as As he possibly can and he’ll he’ll do this for you know, like a month or two which is Just a lot of work And then and then if he can’t find anything wrong about the idea then he’ll accept it is true So my question from him would be doesn’t that is That a complete epistemology and I would argue that that it cannot possibly be a complete epistemology because There’s a there’s a buried Presupposition in there that I think it has to be articulated Man is the measure of all things and so if he If you follow that line of thinking consistently Ultimately you become the arbiter of truth versus falsehood and obviously, you know We’re thrust into action and and we have to make judgments for ourselves Because I just don’t think man is the measure of all things If you make man the measure of all things, I you just contract the universe into Into man and that’s a a satanic inversion and I don’t want that How is that how is that epistemology different than The epistemology of the universe is a How is that how is that epistemology different than then Luther’s understanding of Reason and told the gravity where we we can know truth, but we just can’t know if it’s true or not Obviously dr. Peterson operates in his his pragmatic His pragmatic universe so you’ll say well you can know if it’s true if it lines up with Everything basically You know that which is true is what produces lasting good results to try and you know, he’ll use way more words than that to explain it You know III What I see about his method is is it’s that’s a good method right like he has hopped on that horse and he has ridden it a very long way and He has been able to come up with truths that are Speaking to people in a way that they need to be spoken to using that method. So I don’t want to say that That that steel manning Process that he goes through is is illegitimate what I think it’s not is it’s not a complete epistemology For the reasons I’ve given I’ve kind of lost track of the question now, maybe I should stop talking Can you speak a bit about it just that’s just faith for me right there I believe Jesus when he says We will come to him and make our dwelling with him I’d said the book of Revelation. I don’t have the exact quotation That’s just a matter of faith and and I think Honestly, St. Augustine articulated that mystery much better in the Confessions Like if you want the answer to that question you got to ask him not me it’s basically I’m coming down to below We’ll find a choice passage here For those that aren’t watching the YouTube For those that aren’t watching the YouTube I just hope I took out the confessions of st. Augustine How shall I call upon my God my God and my Lord When by the very act of calling upon him, I would be calling him into myself Is there any place within me into which my God might come? How should the God who made heaven and earth come into me is There any room in me for you Lord my God? Even heaven and earth which you have made and in which you have made me can even they contain you Since nothing that exists would exist without you. Does it follow that whatever exists? Does in some way contain you But if this is so how can I who am one of these existing things Ask you to come into me when I would not exist at all unless you were already in me Not yet. Am I in hell after all but even if I were you would be there too For if I descend to the other world underworld you are there No, my god, I would not exist. I would not be at all. Were you not in me? Or should I say rather that I should not exist if I were not in you from whom all things Through whom all things in whom are all things Yes, Lord. That is the truth. That is indeed the truth To what place can I invite you then since I am in you or where? Could you come from in order to come into me? To what place outside of heaven and earth could I travel so that my god could come to me there the god who said I fill heaven and earth So you want to understand the indwelling of the Trinity there it is It’s as simple as that as simple as the ghosting confessions. Yep. Yep Those words sum it up perfectly there need be no more discussion But for the sake of discussion Can you just rather than trying to define it? Can you just speak a little bit more about? Maybe the effects of the indwelling of the Trinity or try to try to describe it in other ways Right, so You know our our buddy Irenaeus he’s very helpful here He talks he gives us famous definition The glory of God is man made fully alive and the life of man is vision of God a lot of people omit that second part, but I think that’s actually a Lot of Like that’s a good bit like don’t admit that part the the glory The life of man is the vision of God and so you could think of What do we mean by the vision of God Obviously we don’t want to have a Crippled A crippled Caramel sense of that like our eyeballs are going to a detect photons of God What is the vision of God well first the first vision of God Would be in the face of Jesus Christ himself the logos made incarnate You could see how faith in him How faith in him that Supernatural yearning to understand Who this man is Could be the beginning of the vision of God just that the the coming to faith in Christ Because if Christ is the faith of the father is the face of the father Then coming to believe in Christ well that would be a type of vision of Christ which is why the church’s teaching is that Faith is the root and source of all justification And when that faith Comes into your life begin to have this vision of God And the more and more you’re enraptured in this vision of God This vision of the heart this you know This obscure brilliance that we can’t see through The more and more real it becomes in your life So we would say certainly that a valid baptism then Would always come With the indwelling of the Holy Spirit so that sacramental seal on the process The seal on the process that would be going on already in an adult convert And that sacramental seal on the process Of the Holy Spirit And you know I have to see that that indwelling of God within your own soul Like there’s a reason why it comes with faith That that’s when your soul begins to Become in direct contact With the divine life of God Because you know what does it mean to have faith well, you know, it’s got to mean that you’re having faith in something And We’re having faith in the word that God has spoken And what is the word that God has spoken? But his own self understanding Right That Jesus being the face of the father Is revealing to us God in its fullness and how can that be anything other than Uh a participation in our our mind into God’s own self understanding And so that’s why Saint Thomas Aquinas would say that faith the Virtue of faith and the act of faith would bring The soul into contact with God himself Because we become participants in God’s own inner life by way of knowledge And this is completed by You know hope We begin to become convinced that not only are these wonderful things we believe by faith true But that God who is good and who is calling us Will bring these things he has the power to bring these things into fruition And so we can begin to hope that the promises Of eternal life in the new testament Can be made real in us And this all completes itself with the act of charity Where by the power of the divine life within us We can come to love God as he ought to be loved So where so one more one more point, please please Where our soul is able to make an act of love worthy of God Because God has elevated us in order to be able to make that act of love And so I think I think there’s there’s a good reason why The tradition of the church and in many ways indebted to Saint Thomas Aquinas Puts the infused theological virtues As concomitant with the indwelling of the divine trinity the indwelling of the holy spirit and That little exercise with the three theological virtues. We just walked through is is is the the tiniest slice Of what the christian life is supposed to be Okay, so through Through the indwelling Or we receive the indwelling through a part a participation of the idea of the idea of God of Does that make does that make sense? Right, um, and that was my point when I started talking about this triton scene doctrine of graces is i’m not sure That all of these things Have a distinction of reality. I’d want to think about that whether or not all these things Are actually distinct or if they’re distinctions in just That we make of the modes of operation of God um, and i’m i’m very very much aware of my uh My distinctions and my definitions because there’s uh, one particular fellow who’s uh, going to be baptized orthodox who who um, I had a conversation with him and and he’s uh Indivisibly concerned about rationalism, right and and how a theological system could degenerate into an ideology Founded on rationalism which goes back to satanic pride ultimately um So I just want to be very much aware of the goal of the theologian After he’s made a distinction Is to be able to keep that all within the synthetic whole so that’s where that question of whether or not There are real differences between the different categories of grace That i’m talking about or if that’s all unitary on the part of god and distinct in how it manifests itself in humanity Which seems like the more likely explanation to me That was a roller coaster, yeah Um But i’m gonna i’m gonna double down on this a little bit here so it seems to be that through through participation through the The perpetuity sacrifice on calvary we have the we have the indwelling of the logos through sac our sacramental life and indwelling of the holy spirit How does the father indwell? What is that? Is that even worth making a distinction about Um, you can’t you can’t so um This brings me back to the the biblical Way of speaking about these things And the way that the fathers of the church when they were hacking out the particulars of trinitarian theology began to understand how it was that the different persons of the trinity are spoken of in the scriptures And so what that comes down to is the doctrine of appropriation But before we get to the doctrine of appropriation, uh, there’s a there’s a A point that’s important to keep in mind is that Distinctions between the persons of the trinity are only present In the inner life of the trinity That’s very important because we have a thoughtful and curious Unitarian here on the on the server he’s he’s not He’s not currently on but but there’s been a lot of uh, unitarian arguments, uh here and Be interested in hearing more of his side Um, so you’re calling someone out there for a second fall into the mass Yeah, well everybody knows i’m talking about sam adams. So, uh, there’s not there’s not much he puts himself out there So he can be called out She had this idea that the distinctions between the persons only apply to the inner life of the trinity But that uh, so so that means that whenever The persons of the trinity are interacting with Creation it would always be in a unitary manner and this is also implied by the notion That there’s one divine essence Constituted by the three persons and an essence well, what’s an essence? Um, you could say that an essence is a Is it See usually when we use essence it always comes with the notion of a limitation, right? And so the way we use essences to describe Things we can actually know well on this earth it always comes with the notion of Limitation so we have to subtract that notion when we apply it to god. So there’s that and an essence is is really And an essence is is really Sort of a principle For how something can act right? So, you know, you’ve got your dog your dog will act according to its doggy essence, you know When it’ll You know keep on barking at something and you’re like, no you don’t need to bark at that. It’s like but i’m a dog I bark that’s how I do I haven’t barked at anybody recently Um And so that’s because i’m acting according to my human essence, okay So if there’s only one essence in god then any action vis-a-vis creation has to be unitary. So there’s that So why is it that the scriptures? would assign the work of pentecost To The work of pentecost to To the holy spirit Well the reason that the different Persons of the trinity are spoken of In this way in the bible is so that we can come to understand What’s actually? going on Inside the inner life of the trinity inside the inner life of god so god Through the scriptures speaks to us this way so we can know something about the holy spirit And speaks of the son in the way that speaks of himself in the trinity In creation at so we can understand who the son is within the The what is it? the interior economy of god and you know they Talk about god as the father as the creator as Providential those are very commonly assigned to the father And then oftentimes in scripture simply as god To highlight how he operates within the inner life of the trinity and so We call that the doctrine of appropriation of how the different Ways that the scripture Talks about the different persons Isn’t a reflection of how they’re acting in reality because all three are always acting together at once but They’re appropriated to this or that person of the trinity In order so that we could come to understand who god is in himself And to do so in an adult manner, right You know because uh We’re all jacob wrestling with god and he doesn’t desire for us to be Merely passive recipients of truth as if we were just a hard drive that he had to upload data into He wanted the church as a whole and every individual believer to wrestle with these questions, you know, like Why are you speaking in this way through your prophets? The answer is because I need you to wrestle with me I need you to grapple with these questions and come to understand it and at the end of the grappling You still end up with a disjointed hip You realize I I can’t finish this. I can’t finish this So how would that be lived out in the christian life, um, and that would be some deep mystical territory right there whether or not god acting through you and divinizing you Brings your interior identity more in line with this or that person of the trinity that is that is a mystery or or or um if you can begin To act in such a way that you are an icon of one person of the trinity more than another it’s like I don’t have much to say about that. That would be um That would be something and You know Praise god, uh if I come to see him in the beatific vision um part of the manifestation of his goodness would be how he’s operated in his saints and Seeing that would just be more Reason for me to rejoice in the splendor and the goodness of god I Love the way you brought the scriptures into it. I’m really making driving home the The point in a real lived way I really appreciate that Deacon eric i’m gonna ask one more question. I got another obligation. I gotta settle off to so i’ll let you handle it after that Okay um But you were speaking of god’s essence the orthodox make a distinction between god’s essence and god’s energies I believe thomas talks about that Would you be able to Speak a little bit about that Okay, i’m looking at dave w’s question right now. That’s exactly what i’m looking at. Yeah, what do you think about the Okay, so I gotta go back to a book I read very much influenced by Eastern before you get too off. I want to say goodbye to everybody. This was awesome. Thank you so much um Deacon eric if you do this again, let me know. Yeah. Yeah, we we might have more uh Questions than answers at the end of this which means that we’re doing a good job Yeah, that is excellent. This is much better than the the debates that I have over reddit Much more civilized, um, so i’ve got a book in front of me right now. This is uh, the wellspring of worship by Jean corbon he was a french priest who became a maronite Uh a maronite right catholic and was greatly influenced by the eastern tradition of the church And so i’m just i’m gonna he’s got a glossary here Energy Uh this word which says more than action or operation it has to do with life-giving power In our context it is particularly it is the life-giving power of the living god and more particularly that of the holy spirit There’s appropriation When the energy of man is brought into play by the spirit and linked into the energy of god, there’s a synergy See below The liturgy is essentially a synergy of the spirit and the church Okay A life-giving power of the living god, um So what is the connection between the life-giving power of the living god and the life-giving power of the living god? Well if we’re going to say that There’s a connection between the life-giving power of the living god We’d certainly we would have to ascribe that as coming to us, right? Because none of us are life itself. We receive So certainly that distinction between essence and energy Uh doesn’t have to be maintained on that account So the question is is to what degree? Do the orthodox thinkers in particular and the east in general? see that energy as being A function of the imminent life of the trinity, right? Because you could very well say well, hey life-giving power that in the interior economy of god has to be from the father and that That proceeds to the son And in the western understanding through the father and the son into the holy spirit Um, so that would be the question I need answered is to what degree do the uh Um Do the persons of the trinity participate in energy because if you’re going to say that it’s applies also to the imminent trinity Then yes, you would want to make a distinction there so Oh, who is ad maiorum gloriam Dei, uh, that was my friend deacon riley who was talking and so So, yeah, he’s another deacon Let’s just imagine he’s a franciscan monk Yeah, he’s not that uh fond of brown 61 new images since 5 0 8 pm Yeah Facts and logic deacon eric destroys the orthodox tradition Yeah, anyway, um, so I saw something earlier up in the chat here that just piqued my interest Uh Where are you at where are you at andreas? Yeah, it was andreas. Um Andreas said That she doesn’t like tomas and Well, do you like me Uh, is she still on oh she’s muted she might have something important going on I hope Oh She yeah good is she she is she a he he’s a he it’s a very small picture guys He I stand corrected I’ve never Uh Great now i’m getting it all messed up i’m gonna have to get the future of the omnipotent yet vovv’s fratres Yes, mea culpa mea culpa mea maxima copa So mr andreas, uh Get a haircut no, um, well, what is the source of your antithope towards? Um, uh tomas and um You can go ahead and just hop on the voice chat here If you’re if you’re willing and able Um There’s just a lot of dead time here right now, sorry to the youtube channel who can’t see the chat Oh Boy, you know you you misgender one person and all of a sudden everybody’s on your back everybody’s on your back Oh boy Oh, you poor you you’re all alone and everybody’s laughing at you in the chat, you know But it’s uh, it’s virtual laughter, which doesn’t cut quite so deep Um, it was an honest mistake, yeah I’m more interested that andreas said something interesting. Oh snap Several people are typing Apparently it was more than one mistake. Yeah No, it is playful Yeah, it’s definitely playful laughter dave w it’s not the cruel laughter of children i’m i’m okay Andreas is miced up now. Okay Hello hello So I don’t have anything more to say than I said already in the chat Okay, um, I didn’t get to uh, uh catch the uh What your your trouble with you thomas’s and like I understand, you know, I it It was tongue-in-cheek. I don’t have any problem with thomas per se but I think So thomas six thought is generally Located too much in the left side of the brain Um, yeah, and you know, uh, we I had that conversation with uh with mr. Thompson and um, You know, I I was glad to be in the 95th percentile of openness to experience. Uh, so I could Uh hear that without immediately taking it as a criticism. Um Yeah, uh, you know it really brings me back to the end of st. Thomas Aquinas’s life About three months before he died. He just stopped writing and um his secretary Uh, who was he was, you know, obviously kind of his right hand man He was in the middle of the the summa theologiae too. So he never um He never uh finished that um, and what he said was Everything that I have written is as so much strong as so much straw, you know Um Yeah, and like, you know thomas aquinas knew himself, uh, he knew that he was a good theologian and that he was um, Defending the truth and um, but even he understood at the end of his life that the words Have to end at some point before the unethical mystery And I say I think thomas definitely getting themselves in trouble when they forget the example of their master is uh That’s That’s when theology gets stale you know when you cease to go back to the sources when you Cease to meditate on scripture and when you turn theology into word games And there is Boy, you know like i’ll just go ahead and call out a jesuit here, uh francisco soares. He was a 16th century jesuit and um Like his metaphysical writings are so dry arid And you don’t get the sense of that bubbling prayer life That That st. Thomas Aquinas had and I think I think the real condemnation, uh, you know, so he’s a 16th century Colastic, I think the real condemnation is that nobody ever wanted him to preach that he was unable to pull himself out of his Abstractions to be able to preach a decent homily to the to the people, you know, um, and thomas aquinas’s, um, You know what sermons we have of him and what um What conferences he gave? You know, it was always simplified. It was always You know, these are the basic truths. These are the fundamental elements of who god is Uh, he could he could speak on different levels. Um, Which is why? You know, there’s just a lot more thomas today than there are soaresians So so yeah, i’m i’m definitely You know Being aware of those critiques of thomas and Not trying to get too big for my britches I hope the non-native american speakers understand that one Yeah, I understand it In the days around that Thomas there was some controversy over whether or not the university system should be secularized so to speak and one of the worries was that this uh robust philosophy and and mode of knowing rather than Service to theology would be in service to The flesh so to speak What are your thoughts on that? What are your thoughts on that? I’d never heard that before so that’s a new thought. Um, so this was back in the 13th century Or was that Around the same front of insurer, which I think would have been around the same age. Yeah streaming Okay, I think we’re back in business on youtube Alrighty, um so secularization of the university system Leading to It sounds like a degeneration of the science of theology in general, um Sounds like by your description. That’s what bonaventure now. I’m wondering what he meant by secularization of the Of the university system because you know secularization in the 13th century has to mean something Very different from secularization in the 20th century So I uh, I I guess I just I don’t have a whole lot to say on that, uh, because I don’t know what Uh st bonif bonaventure was uh, referring to so Um, i’d be interested though. I’ve never heard that that’s uh, it’s another thing that I don’t know Well without referencing uh particular personalities in our own lives there’s a There’s a temptation Or a propensity to become so enamored with the vision of something Which using vervecchian language would be highly perspectival And as we work that vision through it’d be propositional Um, and um, it could give Uh power to apologetics And all of these things represent an appeal to the intellect And I guess um a question That looms over that is is is it appeals to the intellect sufficient? Or the primary mode as an appeal to the will um Uh, do we not risk leaning too heavily into the The the abstract or the intellect should and then at the risk of um drifting away from the participatory or the procedural modes And and I guess this broadly speaks to you know, uh Of A feminine versus masculine expression of the church and i’m not interested in in taking up questions about should women be priests but The the the visual articulation of the majesty is is predominantly a masculine appeal, I think And just to rejoin her to that the more powerful we become Um In our masculine aspect or our powers of comprehension those same powers can be corrupted or abused Be less in service to theology but more in service to Politics or commerce or whatever so I I totally appreciate the majesty of your appeal it’s it’s Baffling to me as to why it’s uh it somehow Was abandoned or lost in the course of history Yeah, oh boy there’s a lot there um, we’re talking about left brain versus right brain, um, you know, I think that’s I think The best balance for that left brain versus right brain Is to return to the example of the fathers of the church Um, and even the example of of st. Paul You know when he’s writing that letter to the corinthians He’s he’s trying to correct correct in many cases Unchrist like behavior, you know Uh distorting the image of god within us And he uses theological arguments to do so so that his theology always resolves itself in the task of saving souls And giving glory to god And that was you know, you can see with the fathers of the church The way they developed theology was always with that pastoral edge That we Must um You know this this theology is in service of god and in service in the people Of the people right and you could see how You know for as much good as a university system would do that kind of cuts you off necessarily from um That pastoral experience that that mission experience that might be a better way of saying it that that missionary Living out the missionary mandate of christ um if you’re kind of stuck in this ivory tower and uh You don’t get out of it then your theological Um Your theological Efforts are are going to ultimately be unstuck for reality, you know And I think that’s a lot of what happened You know when I found most fascinating about thomas equinas’s, you know, he writes these just masterful works and then Nobody cared Uh in his time, you know people kind of appreciated the summa te loge, but they were not um It didn’t have the same Standing as it does now centuries later and you could really point to sort of an over Logicalization of uh theology in the 14th 15th 16th centuries where it really did uh scholasticism of the time really did get Disconnected from its sources and it’s like well, that’s a danger of having a university at all And and you know the causes of that I think are twofold First um Whenever there’s uh a great thing there’s always going to be mediocre imitations, you know people who want to Hitch their start of that same wagon and and jet off um and then secondly, um You know the whole concept of a hierarchical university system uh That means that everybody’s kind of got to make a name for themselves You know everybody’s got to have their thesis and the original intent of the thesis was to show that You could do theology properly and that uh you were competent to teach people but at a certain point, you know just getting that um That phd after your name, you know, it’s like that becomes a human temptation a human ambition So I guess that’s my thoughts on the university system I think the best theologians always have that Missionary aspect in their heart, um, probably especially from Their meditation on scriptures and just really understanding how radical the call of discipleship is for the entire church um Rather than being those folk who are you know writing articles That nobody’s going to read in 10 years. Um and That are just completely separated from what’s going on in the life of uh Christians of our day So, yeah, I mean university systems, you know, um Like anything they could be for good or they could be used for evil. I uh You know, that’s just life in a valley of tears as far as i’m concerned Uh, so I did have a question from our youtube, uh Our youtube chat talking about bishop baron, so i’m just going to uh Just going to speak my mind about uh Uh youtube you’re great until you’re not So he’s just asking what do I think of bishop baron? Um, he’s obviously kind of like the head honcho of uh internet evangelization and um You know, I look at his work And I honestly honestly And I honestly, uh, I I think he has probably brought brought souls closer to god and uh source closer to jesus christ and uh You know, that’s a uh an unambiguously good thing um You’ll probably notice that there’s some uh differences, uh between us Uh certainly in our way of presenting and uh the types of people we quote Bishop baron seems to have a lot more facility with 20th century theologians And uh, I I know some 20th century theology, but i’m not an expert and he obviously has read a lot of those people more um, and he seems to be a little bit more in the spirit of uh A movement in the mid 20th century called the nouvelle the loge. Um the new theology and um I think some of those theologians, uh have problems particularly if they make an explicit, uh, oh adreas, that’s your jam. Okay I think There’s one problem that’s common among those thinkers that I think leads to major problems down the line That would make an unwarranted, uh They would Collapse the distinction between the natural end of man and the supernatural end of man. Um, and I’ve got this via Uh, dr taylor marshall. He’s got a uh a podcast maybe I could link to that later um You know, if you think i’m a tomas like dr taylor marshall, he’s super tomas, you know, he’s like a Uh fully automatic tomas. Um So that’s that’s certainly his perspective and uh Uh, when you make a distinction between the natural end of man and the supernatural end of man it It ends up collapsing the distinction between the natural and the supernatural themselves um, and that causes all sorts of problems and What can often end up happening is that the natural ends up consuming? and subsuming Everything in the supernatural realm or you can end up in a kind of unpleasant agnosticism or not Gnosticism gnosticism uh functional agnosticism Which i’m not about at all. So You know, that’s more a commentary on uh The nouvelle teller, I think bishop baron probably isn’t too greatly, uh infected by that especially with his insistence that uh god is not one being among many but is uh, the the foundation of being like if he’s hitting that point hard, uh, then um Like what do I have to worry about right? That’s obviously a distinction between the natural the supernatural. So um So yeah, that’s uh Me and bishop baron, you know, I if I got a chance to speak with him I’m sure to be a great conversation because as far as i’m concerned both of us are in for team jesus and for uh team catholicism so Yeah teams that’s what we have now Well I’m still here. I might have another 20 minutes or so, but um If nobody has questions, i’m not just gonna start speaking whatever’s on my mind All right, well you’re all beautiful people Uh, oh andreas is now typing Now you oh I was on me you put me on the spot. I just wanted to say that I would um go to run Go to bed now Okay, okay, it’s late go get some sleep So Well, um Our Is typing might be another goodbye though Well My youtube stream is definitely acting up. I’m going to take that as a sign from the holy spirit that it’s uh I’m going to take that as a sign That’s time to end this so goodbye youtube