Natural Hearing (Aristotle's Physics)
82. Wisely and Slow: Friar Lawrence, Shakespeare, and Seven Places Where the Wise Man Proceeds Slowly
https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/3-natural-hearing/082-wisely-and-slow-friar-lawrence-shakespeare-and-seven-places/

[0:00] So I begin by telling them that there's no one knows for sure, you know, what Shakespeare's religion is, right? Okay. But there's more and more what little bits of evidence that he's, if not a Roman Catholic, very close to them, right? Okay. And these things keep on, you know, showing up, you know, one after another. You know, they found the will of Shakespeare's father, right? And the will Shakespeare's father is in the form of Saint Charles Borromeo.

[0:35] Oh. The one that was imported, you know, from Saint Charles Borromeo for the Catholics' use in England, and you know, it was concealed in the walls of the house, right? Because they had to keep it secret, right? And the daughter only left most of the property, right? You know, was you know, refused to take the communion, right? So she was, you know, being, you know, fined and so on, right?

[0:58] So it's easy to think of her Catholicism. At the end of his life, there. End of his life, there. Shakespeare lived in London, you know, for many years. They were writing the plays, huh? And he was buying property out in what Stratford, right? To retire, right? He never owned property in London, but suddenly at the end of his career in London, he buys the Blackfriars Tower and installs somebody in there, right, to watch for it.

[1:25] And this is the most notorious place in London for Catholics to hide out and have hidden masses. In fact, you know, in those buildings there later on, there was one time they had so many Catholics there for the mass. The tragedy there, the floor collapsed, right? You know, you know. So why is he buying this piece of property, right?

[1:46] Well, he's never bought piece of property in London, right? And he's ready to retire to Stratford, right? In a place that's notorious for its connection with the underground Catholic Church, huh? So they point to all kinds of things, but what they point to in the plays is the way he represents the Catholic priests favorably, right? And the and the Protestant divines kind of bumbling fools, right? His sympathies, right, are with this, huh?

[2:15] Okay. So I'm just looking at, you know, by way of introducing the words of Friar Lawrence, right? Okay. The the Franciscan there in Romeo Juliet, and in particular, I looked at just a couple of lines of his about what stumbling, right? Okay. And they're both in Act Two, Scene What Three, there.

[2:41] Okay. Now, that's a scene where he's first out in the garden, now, and he says something about stumbling there, which I'll look at later on. But then Romeo comes to his cell, right? And Romeo has suddenly changed his allegiance from Rosalind to Juliet, right? And he's in a big group. You get uh, Friar Lawrence to marry them and so on. And he says, "Oh, I stand on sudden haste," he says, Romeo, right?

[3:13] And Friar Lawrence says, "Wisely and slow, they stumble they run fast, huh? Okay. And this is almost like what you have in the Book of Proverbs, chapter 19, verse two, huh? Depending what translation you have, you know, but the other translation is very close to that. Second part of verse, huh? Okay. So,

[3:37] wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast, huh? Of course, ten syllables in the line. You'll notice, huh? Okay. Now, before we look at the the line as a whole, because obviously, wise and slow is to avoid this stumbling of those that run fast, right? Okay. But before we look at the line as a whole, just take this coupling of wise and slow, right?

[4:24] That's interesting. It couples those two, right? Because there's also a slowness of what? Stupidity, right? There's the slowness of stupidity. The slowness of dumbness. Okay.

[4:49] That's not the slowness that goes with wisdom, is it? Okay. But sometimes the two are confused, right? Of course, the famous example is Thomas Aquinas being called by his fellow students who studied in Albert the Great the dumb ox, right? Okay. They're confusing the slowness of Thomas with the slowness of the dumb, right? And so Albert the Great arranges for a debate, you know, for himself and Thomas, and Thomas won, of course.

[5:22] And then he turns to him and says, "This guy you call the dumb ox. I tell you his bellow will be heard around the world." And so even in the 20th century, J. K. Chesterton was so impressed with this anecdote, right, that his biography of Thomas is called the Dumb Ox right He took that. on he saw the importance of that. Now, so he wanted to distinguish those two kinds of slowness, right?

[5:48] Now, there's also another kind of slowness which I would call foolish slowness. And this is the slowness when you are what? Slow to act, right? When you should act, right? Okay. Okay.

[6:13] And of course, a lot of times they they take this in the context of of foresight or prudence, where it's kind of commonplace to say you should deliberate carefully, right? Especially for some things, you know, hard to figure out what to do exactly, right? But once you see what should be done, right, then you shouldn't hesitate to what? To act, right? Huh? Okay.

[6:39] So I was talking about the ancient marriage, you know, people through many years before they ordain you, right? You know, because they want to examine you a bit, credentials and all these other things, huh? Okay. I say sometimes we. Confuse the what? The slowness of wise deliberation, right? With the foolish slowness of someone who hesitates to act when they should act. Okay. Maybe some of this scandal, you know, the church that you know, poor Cardinal Lawdow is down giving his deposition today, right?

[7:16] Court. Oh. Um. He's going to have to come back for another time. But sometimes it's hard to tell, right? Whether someone is slow to act because it's deliberating, right? As they should, because it's not clear what they should do or not do, right? But sometimes, you know, the slowness is what they they have deliberated enough, they should know enough to act, and they don't act when they what should. right. Okay, and you can kind of illustrate that difference there, or the two kinds there, in in Hamlet, right?

[7:57] Okay, Hamlet is told by the ghost of his father, and that he, the father, was murdered by his own brother, as he was sleeping in the garden, right? He poured poison in his ear, everybody think, okay? And that's why no one, you know, discovered how he died, right? Now, do you believe a ghost? Mm hmm. See, well, there's some caution in the part of of Hamlet because maybe the devil, right, is tempting him to something very vile, right?

[8:30] Maybe the the devil is, you know, assuming the appearance of his father, whatever it is, right? Did you know the devil can assume the appearance of an angel of light? Huh? So you can say there's there's some reason to maybe, you know, you know, if a ghost appears at night and says you killed somebody, start acting that right away, and you know, see? Well, when the actors, acting troupe comes to the what place to the Elsinore there, he suddenly hits upon a bright idea, right?

[9:04] He will get the actors. He'll insert a scene, right? Yeah, so he can insert a scene that they will act out, and it's going to reenact the what murder of his father as what the ghost did to him, right? Okay. And he says, "Well, watch the," he says to his best friend Horatio, right? You know, he can take him to his confidence. Watch the king exactly how he reacts when the scene comes on.

[9:32] See, now if you killed your own brother, right? You know how you did it, but nobody else apparently knows how you did it, right? And all of a sudden the scene comes on exactly, reproducing, you might what? Be so startled you give away yourself away, right? And the king gets so upset he has to get up and leave, right? Okay. Well, now he knows that the king has done it, right?

[9:56] Now deliberation should stop, and he should what? Act. Okay. And he has a chance to kill the king, right? And he doesn't take it. And then he goes to see his mother later on, right? And he thinks that the king must be the guy that's behind the curtains, right? And he stands through, right? And it turns out to be Polonius, right? Which leads to the woman he loves going mad, right?

[10:24] Ophelia, right? Learn leads to what the king trying to have him killed, right? And getting the son Laertes right, to to do this, and so eventually, you know, Ophelia goes mad and dies, and Laertes is killed, of course. His mother is killed, right? The king as well. He himself is is killed, right? Huh? No. All this because he he delayed when it was time to act right.

[10:54] It's after that time his slowness to conclude right. He thinks in the beginning there is something wrong to begin with right. His mother married so quickly after her death, etc. Etc. Right. That's the first thing right. The second thing is the appearance of ghosts right. The third thing is what the play in which we catch the conscience of the king right. Now he's sufficient deliberation right. And that was the wise slowness right.

[11:24] But now it's time to act right. Okay. You see that. Okay. You see McCarthy there in the Inchon landing right. Once he deliberated right, conclude this is the thing to be done is all to go ahead of it right. And of course you know they're dragging their feet in Washington right. If he hadn't moved then it would have been too late because the Chinese I mean the North Koreans are about to reinforce the area.

[11:51] So he had to act right again. The whole thing would have failed. So you see see the you know the slowest to deliberate but when the time comes the man would actually act, right. Okay. So um, your child's running out into the street after all right. You know not slow it around, you know quickly stop them you know okay.

[12:20] So you want to distinguish the slowness of wisdom from the slowness as stupidity or dumbness or the foolish slowness of someone who doesn't act when they have to act right now right. Okay. Putting off going to doctor getting checked up you know as we all do I guess to some extent right. Okay.

[12:42] Now is there though in the great idea of wisdom a connection with slowness huh. Well elsewhere in this great play Romeo and Juliet huh. When Romeo later on this foolish young man is about to take his own life when he thinks Juliet has died right. He runs off to the apothecary to get the you know he's in haste right to get the poison and so on and he shows up there.

[13:13] But Shakespeare's very interesting words he puts in Romeo's mouth huh. Where Romeo is comparing his his reason in a way to the pilot of a ship who runs the ship where. On the rocks right. Okay. And so he says come bitter conduct meaning conductor right. Come unsavory guide.

[13:42] Thou desperate pilot right. Sea captain, right? Thou desperate pilot. Now at once, run on the dashing rocks. They sea-sick weary bark. He takes the poison, right? Falls and too dead. Then she wakes up, right? Okay. Too late, huh? That's what he calls it, huh? Bitter conduct, unsavory guide. That's the opposite of what? The wise, huh? When Thomas explains sapientia,

[14:17] explains it as sapida scientia. Latin word for wisdom, right? Sapientia comes from the word sapor, sapida scientia, which it means literally savory what? Knowledge, right? Okay. So Shakespeare's teaching us the wisdom is by its opposite, right? Come bitter conduct, come unsavory guide. Conduct there is a sense of conductor, huh? So he's calling the foolish guide, right? The foolish conductor, bitter and what? Unsavory, insipid, foolish, insipid. Our wisdom is something sweet and what?

[15:09] Savory, right? Okay. So wisdom is about things to be what? Savory. That's one reason why it goes together with slowness, right? Ultimately, wisdom is a knowledge of what? Of God, right? Okay. Now, as Augustine says, huh? Miserable the man who knows all things, all things else, but doesn't know God. Miserable the man. He says, blessed the man who knows God, even if he knows nothing else. He says, blessed and happy also.

[15:50] He says, the man who knows God and other things, right? But not the more so for knowing other things, but for knowing God alone. So God is what I was saying earlier. There, He's the end of all of our knowledge, right? So you want to savor God, right?

[16:10] Augustine savors the mystery of the Trinity through all those pages of the De Trinitate, right? Or Thomas savors the mystery of the Trinity through the whole treatise of the Trinity, or the incarnation, right? Through the whole treatise of the incarnation, huh? When you savor something, you go through it fast. No, if you savor a wine, you you fast? No, here. Hmm. Even the kids savoring a piece of hard candy, don't you don't chuck it, right?

[16:40] Hmm. You know, you pull on it, right? See, so if wisdom is about things to be savored, and this is true most of all about God, but even the angels, right? You can savor the angels are really wonderful things, huh? Then wisdom is going to be characterized by what? Slowness, right? Okay. Well, why? Why turn away from that? Think about something else, right?

[17:11] And you know, it's the Adoro te devote, that famous prayer of Thomas Aquinas. In the fourth quatrain, there he's talking about receiving the Eucharist, right? And the bread, he says, O memoriali mortis Domini, right? O memorial of the death of our Lord, huh? Panis vivus, living bread, huh? Vitam praestans homini right? Praesta meae menti de te vivere, bestow upon my mind to live from you, right? Now he goes on, te ili semper what?

[17:46] Dolce sweetly, sapere. He wants to sweetly savor Christ always in the what Eucharist, right? What Christ is, you know, is truth itself, right? It's interesting how Thomas puts those two together, right? Dulce sapere to sweetly savor. Wisdom is the sweetest knowledge, and it's the most savory knowledge there is. But Shakespeare teaches us later on when he has the opposite of the wise, right, and says, "Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavory guide, thou desperate pilot,

[18:27] now at last, run on the dashing rocks, thy sea sick, weary bark. " You see that? So, we want to call attention to that, right? Now, in the context of the whole sentence, though, you want to understand the slowness of the wise man that enables him to avoid this stumbling, right?

[18:50] Now, when you come back to this other side here now, that he stumbled and ran fast. The word "run," of course, is equivocal by reason.

[19:03] Now, the first meaning of the word "run" is the well-known act of the legs, right? How do I define it? So you know what running is, right? Okay. Now, when he says this to Romeo, is he thinking of that first sense?

[19:22] No, although it looks back at first sense, right? Sure. Okay. The second sense is referring to our what action, huh? And you see this, you know, the Latin word "course," which comes from running, right? And we say within the course of human events, right? Okay. So runs the world, right? Okay. So he's warning him about acting in haste, right? And then acting at leisure.

[19:56] But notice this statement is true about writing in the first sense too, right? If I run upstairs or downstairs, you run through a cluttered room or a dark room or something like that, right? You can easily stumble, right? But then it's carried over and applied to action, right?

[20:15] But as you know from the definition of reason, inherent there, the ability for large discourse, right? Looking before and after, Discursus is the Latin word for running, right? So it can be applied then to what the life of the mind, right? Okay, the running of the mind,

[20:47] and so. It's easier for me to see what you mean here, but down here is what I am going to explain now. Okay. Where does the wise man proceed slower than other thinkers, right?

[21:10] So as to avoid the stumbling that everybody else does when they think. Okay. Well, when I started to think this out, in number of places where I think he noticeably does this, it turned out to be seven in number. This is appropriate because seven is a symbol of wisdom. Okay.

[21:38] Now, the first and most obvious place where the wise man proceeds slowly to avoid stumbling is when there are many things to be considered, right? Before a judgment can be made. Okay.

[22:00] So, where many things must be considered before a judgment can be made. So, even in a science like geometry, which is relatively speaking easy for us, right? If one wanted to judge, let's say, the truth of the Pythagorean theorem, well, that's proposition what forty-seven in Book One of Euclid, right? So there is forty-six theorems before that, and most, if not all, of those are presupposed, right, to seeing the Pythagorean theorem, right?

[22:52] So obviously, you have to go what slowly, right? In order to what be able to judge that, right? Okay. Just like in what a difficult course of action, right? Huh? You have to what weigh all the circumstances and so on, the situation, right? You foresee what should be done, right? That's the most obvious place where the wise man is going to be proceeding slowly, right? Okay. Monsignor Dionne there was at the Second Vatican Council there, right?

[23:28] Oh. And he was on that so-called birth control, you know, he called that commission, right? You know, you know. But Monsignor Dionne had enumerated all the different discourses that had to be made before he could make a decision about this, right? And there is some discourses that pertain to the theologian, to the philosopher, and some to the scientist as to what you know what's actually going on in the body and so on.

[23:53] He enumerated a whole series of things, right? See, most people didn't see all the things that had to be considered before you can make a judgment, right? Wow, you know, okay, because you know if we're talking about a particular pill, you know, it might be a pill that regularizes, say, the woman's cycle or something of this sort. It might be another pill that prevents implantation, you know.

[24:15] But you have to have a whole discourse there as to what that is actually doing, right? Yeah, and that's you know quite distinct from the the the discourse of the moral philosopher as to this thing is is moral or not, right? You have to know what one is doing, right? Yeah, okay.

[24:33] But you know it's kind of amazing to see, you know, you see all these steps that people wouldn't see, right? Yeah, that's one place where he's proceeding wisely and slow. Another people are jumping to conclusions, right? Yeah, yeah, without going through all the discourses that are necessary. And

[24:54] now the second place where the wise man proceeds slowly and compared to the men, right? This is where something is difficult to know, okay?

[25:20] Now, when you study the second book of wisdom, as you may someday, Aristotle says there is two reasons why something is difficult to know, why it's difficult to know the truth. Sometimes the difficulty, he says, is in the thing itself, because the thing itself is hardly understandable, hardly is.

[25:44] This is the difficulty in understanding matter, the first matter. That's the difficulty in understanding what motion. That's a difficulty in understanding time. These things hardly what are? They're hardly actual, right? Okay.

[26:06] The other cause of difficulty, he says, is not in the thing, but it's in the weakness of our mind, and that's the difficulty in knowing the angels or a fortiori knowing what God, right? You know, so Scripture says God dwells in light inaccessible. God is most knowable, but not to us, because the weakness of our mind, right?

[26:34] So when there is a special difficulty due to the thing itself or the weakness of our mind. The wise men will proceed more slowly, right? Than Others, huh? So take the definition of motion, huh? For example, Aristotle spends a lot of time arriving at the definition of motion. It's a very difficult thing to understand what motion is. Now you turn to Rene Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, so-called, and he quotes the definition of motion in kind of a garbled version.

[27:09] He says, "Who understands that?" He says, "You know," and he just dismisses it, right? Yeah. Okay. Well, he doesn't proceed wisely and what? Slow, right? And something is difficult to understand as motion. The same thing can be said about matter or about what? Time. The moderns don't do that. And if you don't understand motion, the definition of motion, you don't understand motion distinctly. And secondly, you don't understand nature because nature is defined by motion.

[27:44] And eventually, don't understand the argument for the unmoved mover, right? You see And and John Locke you know, he he he follows Descartes in this regard he disagrees with Descartes and other things he follows him. and says motion can't be defined, right?

[28:03] Eventually, the modernist of saying nothing can be defined. Yeah. Okay. But notice, they're proceeding. They're stumbling over motion. They're running fast then they should be proceeding wisely and slow because this is something very difficult to understand itself, right? Okay.

[28:30] Of course, it's even more the chief difficulty. that Aristotle goes on to say goes on to say, and Plato had said before him, is in the weakness of our mind. So, when you're trying to understand God, right, or even an angel, the mind has to conceive wisely and slowly, right? Especially trying to understand the Trinity, say, or the Incarnation, these deepest mysteries of the faith. And so you can see how Augustine there in the work on the Trinity, the way he goes so slowly, right?

[28:59] But so thorough, right? As John McArthur should say, you know, saying with Brother Mark, you go through everything that that that Augustine marshals there from Scripture. I mean, almost every relevant passage, you know, and and you're completely convinced, you know, that that's uh that's what the what the the what the Bible's teaching, right? The Trinity, right? But to try to understand the Trinity, right? You have to proceed very slowly.

[29:23] And I love this phrase Phrase of Augustine there where he speaks of some, you know, who have an immature and perverse love of reason. And those are the ones who are what running fast over the mystery of the Trinity and making all kinds of what mistakes, huh? So, in great minds

[29:51] like Aristotle or Thomas or Augustine, Plato, they're aware of these two difficulties in knowing, right? And therefore, they proceed wisely and slow compared to other minds, huh? That have shown all these things incredibly and stumble, huh? And make all kinds of mistakes about the Trinity of the Incarnation, or about motion or time, you name it, huh?

[30:29] Where's the third place, huh? Where the wise men proceed slowly? Well, it's where there is a beginning, small in size. But great in its power.

[31:00] Take example the axiom about being and non-being, right? Or perhaps you can, speak of two axioms about being and non-being. It's impossible to be and not be, and it's necessary to be or not be, right? Sometimes I quote Hamlet, you know, "To be or not to be, that is the question." It's a question because you can't both be and not be, and you must either be or not be.

[31:29] Aristotle spends a great deal, Book Four, right, of the Metaphysics, of the fourth book of Wisdom, there, defending those axioms, right, against attacks that have been made upon them, right? Who would spend so much time, right, on that? But he saw the importance of that, right? Although small in size, it extends, but to all the rest of our knowledge, huh?

[32:08] Aristotle and Thomas often say that even to make a small mistake in the beginning is a great one in the end, and they compare it to a man who takes the wrong road at a fork in the road, right? There's very little distance here between the two, but the further you go, right, the further you are from where you should be, right? So

[32:36] notice the what? What the wise man does there? If you make even a small mistake in the beginning, it's going to be multiplied because of its power, right? And everything that comes afterwards, So you're going to be stumbling constantly all the way through the thinking because you didn't understand the beginning, right? And I suspect that's one of the primary reasons why Thomas got the reputation to be the dumb ox.

[33:06] He was proceeding wisely and slowly in those things that everything else depends upon, and once he got those things down, then he was able to what? Go forward in a kind of unstoppable way, right? Edgar Allan Poe has a beautiful comparison of great minds and little minds in the famous story, the Purloined letter. Do you know that one? It's one of these detective stories. It's kind of a marvelous little story, you know, about a man has stolen a letter that's very incriminating, and the government's trying to get it back, and they have you know all kinds of agents, you know, trying to, you know, he's out in the rooms or quarters, you know, honeycomb in the room, you know, and going into the fabric of

[33:51] the chair and everything, looking for. Whereas he concealed this letter, right? And of course, he's very clever. He concealed it, and I won't tell you the details of it because you have to get the story, but it's very clever. But anyway, in that marvelous story, Poe makes a comparison between bodies and great and small minds, right? He says that the small mind is like a small body.

[34:14] It's easily set in motion, but it's easily what Stopped, like a ping pong ball or something, right? The great mind is like a what? You know, a large body that's difficult to set in motion, right? But once it starts to go in motion, it's very hard to what Stop, yeah. Well, that's because the great mind, in the beginning, right, and those things, everything else depends upon. It is what very careful to understand them, right?

[34:46] The first course we had, really, at Laval in logic, in the good old days when the wise were in control. We read Albert the Great's work on the Isagoge of Porphyry, right? It? Was about 200 pages, right? Now, the Isagoge of Porphyry is an extremely important work. In fact, it got its name, the Isagoge, because it's an Isagoge introduction, it's a Greek word, introduction to Aristotle's categories.

[35:18] That someone asked for help with, but as they began to understand the Isagoge, they saw it as an introduction to a whole philosophy. And when

[35:30] Porphyry in his little proemium there at the beginning, you know, he says to understand genus, difference, species, property, accident, genus, diaphora, eidos and so on, idion symbebekos It's useful, he says, to the man he's addressing. Not only to understand Aristotle's categories, but it's necessary for understanding definition, for understanding division, for understanding demonstration. The whole philosophy, in a sense, right? Okay. And here's Albert the Great, you know, you know, it's 200 pages or so, right?

[36:09] Really aimed at what elaborating on that, right? Okay. You see Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Summa Contra Gentiles reasoning from the Isagoge to no name being said univocally of God and creatures So, I mean, even at the end of all our knowledge in theology, he's still drawing upon the beginning, right? Huh.

[36:36] So, if you, you know, I talk to my colleagues and most people, you know, and some of you haven't heard of Isogogia. So I've studied it, right? You know, this is this is this is. modern philosophers don't know, right? So,

[36:59] you know, something like the Trinity, though, in theology, is the beginning, right, of the whole of our faith, you might say. In some sense, the the mystery of the Trinity is is logically before the mystery of the Incarnation. Although we usually meet the Incarnation first, right? But you can see kind of in the Gospel of Saint John there that the way he's explaining something with the mystery of the Trinity first before he explains the Incarnation, right?

[37:26] So in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was towards God, and the Word was God, and so on. And then later on, he talks about the Word was made flesh, so we get the Word Incarnation, right? So if you make a mistake about the what the Trinity, that's going to affect everything else in the faith. And that's why Augustine says in the great work here the De Trinitate which I regard as his greatest work myself, but. But he says,

[37:52] nowhere is it more dangerous, he said, to make a mistake than here, and nowhere is it more fruitful to see something, right? And he's in marvelous the way. He speaks there. Nowhere is it more dangerous to make a mistake, and nowhere is it more fruitful to see something of the truth. It would seem that probably profoundly, to say the least, wise thing to do would be to make the study of logic almost a type of avocation or hobby for all of one's life.

[38:34] It takes most of us. most of our lives I understand everything he's organizing from the very start although I'm known as being a magician you know It's like a constant, you know

[38:48] helpful, mother companion for. something so utterly profoundly important. Almost like I don't want to use the term disproportionate, but for lack of a better term, to spend on that. so profoundly But I, would say that with great thinkers I've had like De Koninck and Monsignor, you know, they would come back to these fundamental things, you know, from time to time, and consider them again, you know, and you see more, right?

[39:15] And I, you know, hear Dionne once a year and see something, and I come back a year later or something like that, and and he'd see something more about it, you know, and he was always, you know, understanding those beginnings more.

[39:35] Now, another thing, where there is knowledge over the road, where there is knowledge over. a road. Now, most people don't realize that in a way, all of our knowledge is along a road. All of our knowledge is along the road from the senses into reason, somewhere along that road. But the knowledge of reason, our reasoned out knowledge, is especially over a road. Logic is about the common road of reasoned out knowledge, and then each reasoned out knowledge has, to some extent, its own private road that it follows.

[40:28] So where there is knowledge over a road, Aristotle in the second book of Wisdom said, you can't at the same time get that knowledge over a road and get a knowledge of the road. Okay, and it's not easy, since you're either one. But you first of all has to have a knowledge of the road to follow. Before he can follow that road, okay. Or before you can follow it well, anyway.

[40:59] So, what you see in the great Aristotle, but he says before him in Plato that they realize Plato, that they realize that our knowledge is over a road; it follows a road, and that you have to know the road before you can really acquire this knowledge. So, in the Timaeus, which is in some ways the last work, perhaps of Plato, we're not sure, but the last work we have, maybe Timaeus does most of the talking, and Socrates does the listening, but the you know, applause, the applause and the agreement, and Timaeus gives this marvelous premium to his discourse on the universe and how he's going to speak about it and so on, and insists upon knowing the road, right?

[41:47] He turns to Socrates, but you, he says, you have paideia, ton oudon, huh? You have this education in roads, right? You can follow what I'm talking about, and Socrates, you know, says what a great premium this is, right? If you turn from the Greek of that to the Greek of Aristotle's premium of Nicomachean Ethics, you'd see how close they are, you know, in the words. So, in these two central philosophers, these chief philosophers, as Thomas calls them, Albert, Plato, and Aristotle, they see the importance of stopping and trying to know the road, right?

[42:24] But most men they just what jump into the things that the knowledge is about because they're more interesting, right? Than to talk about the road, they don't take the time to really what know the road, huh?

[42:43] In a sense, you could say that the the distinction and the order of all the roads in our looking knowledge was really worked out explicitly by Monsignor Dionne right? That's the law there, And it was implicit, you know, in Aristotle and Thomas, huh? And I'm sure they knew it in a sense, huh? But Dion kind of worked out explicitly, right? Just like in Isagoge Isagoge is is really dependent upon Aristotle, but he's drawing things that Aristotle touches upon in those places.

[43:14] We've been brought together, right? Which has been helpful to us, right? So, it's in Dion who's doing this all together," but saw explicitly the distinction and the order of all the roads in our knowledge, huh? When I was first up there, Dion was lecturing on Thomas's commentary on Boethius and the Trinitate, where Boethius is distinguishing following Aristotle, right? The three parts of looking philosophy, but then distinguishes the road of each, right?

[43:49] And he'll say, "Natural philosopher, natural philosophy proceeds via debilitare, and mathematics proceeds via plenibilitare, and wisdom proceeds via intellectualitare." Thomas has a whole article on what it means, right, to say that it proceeds this way and so on, right? So you see, Thomas, you know, you know, stopping and being very careful to know what the road is, right? And you see that in the Summa Contra Gentiles, right?

[44:23] You know, following Boethius and Aristotle, how careful he is to talk about the road. And remember when I first read Gilson I was in high school, you know, and Gilson's kind of introduction to philosophy, and his introduction to philosophy is following the order of the Summa Contra Gentiles

[44:48] Well, Thomas in Summa Contra Gentiles says the order of philosophy and theology is the reverse. God is the first thing you study in theology, and everything else you study in creation, God, God is the last thing you study in philosophy. He belongs to the last part, of the last studies So it's just the reverse. So Gilson is proposing, right? You know, to teach philosophy in exactly reverse order, it would just be taught, right?

[45:16] I mean, it's a gross, a gross misreading, you know, a gross, this application, you know, of the Summa Contra Gentiles right. So most people don't even stop and consider that philosophy is knowledge, like over a road, right? You could say, a philosopher can do one of three things really. He can follow a road, or he can wander.

[45:52] And if he follows a road, he can follow the right road, or he can follow the wrong road, right? Now, in my experience, with most philosophers, they either follow the wrong road or they wander. I don't know which is worse. But when the mind wanders, you have a disordered movement of the reason, and a disordered movement of the reason is going to lead to some kind of error.

[46:20] As I tell the students, you know, when a machine, Coke machine, isn't working, they hang up a sign that says "out of order." So when your mind is wandering, it's out of order, and therefore it's apt to function badly, which means it's happening to make a mistake. And it's interesting that the Latin word for error

[46:43] comes from the Latin word to wander, huh? Like you have in the knight errant, a wandering knight, huh? And the Greek word for error, planet, comes from the Greek word to wander. That's where you get the word planet. There's a planet who seem to wander around the sky. And when Christ is speaking there in the Gospel, there are the Sadducees, huh, who are trying to attack the idea of resurrection, so on, right?

[47:10] And they have the example of the man who married a wife and had no children, but then his brother married her, and he had no children, and went to the seven brothers, right? And now, resurrection, whose wife was she? Be? You know, he's trying to give this ridiculous situation, right? And Christ says, "Well,

[47:32] you what? Wander, yeah, yeah. Plan. But the Greek words from the word for planasthe, right? Okay. Understanding neither the power of God nor understanding the Scriptures, right? And then he goes on to explain, "he's not going to marry or be married, right? You know, to death do us, part. Okay. Um

[47:57] I just mentioned that text because in the Greek, there it's the word from that word, to wander right You know err into mistake, right? Understanding neither the power of God nor understanding Scripture.

[48:14] But then you have people, you know, like Descartes, who want to follow a rule, but they want to follow the rule of mathematics everywhere. Okay, and this is a serious mistake now, because that rule doesn't fit everything. He has been also doing the same, and so. on. So when there's knowledge of a road, the true wise man will stop and consider what the road should be. Right, and he'll be very careful, because everything else is going to depend upon that.

[48:48] You don't see that same slowness, huh Most people aren't even aware of the fact that Bossy is on a road. Now, fifth place, of course, is where there is the

[49:13] general and particular knowledge. Now, often I make this point when I'm teaching the beginning of the so-called Physics of Aristotle, the eight books of Natural Hearing. Aristotle is saying that we ought to consider things in general before in particular, right? And the reason he gives, if you recall, is that we naturally know things in a confused or indistinct way before we know them like distinctly, right? And to note something in general, right, is indistinct compared to knowing it in particular.

[50:02] So knowing that those two little disturbers were animals doesn't distinguish between a cat and a dog, right? But to know that they were cats is more distinct, right? So when you go from the general to particular, you're going from the confused to the distinct. But in the eight books of Natural Hearing, Aristotle is going to stay in the general. Well, then I ask them sometimes, does this mean he's not going to go from the confused to the distinct in the eight books of Natural Hearing?

[50:32] Because he's going to stay in the general and not go in particular. Well. There's more than one way of going from the confused to the distinct, which he mentions even in that first chapter, right? When I go from the name of something to the definition of it, I'm going from the confused to the distinct, right? When I go from a whole to the parts of that whole, distinguishing the parts of that whole, I'm going from the confused to the distinct, right?

[51:08] Okay. So there's a movement from the confused to the distinct on the level just to the general, and there's a movement of another kind, the confused to distinct, when you descend from the general to particular. Okay. And sometimes I take an example from geometry, but it's a very clear example. Euclid moves from triangle both to a definition of triangle, right? And he moves from triangle to equilateral, isosceles, and scalene triangles.

[51:46] And both of those are movements from the confused to the distinct. But when he goes from triangle to the equilateral triangle, of isosceles and scalene, he's going from the general to particular. When he goes from triangle to the definition of triangle, he's staying in the level of the general. He's not descending to a particular kind of triangle, but he's still going from the confused to the distinct.

[52:11] So two different movements, right, from the confused to the distinct. And then I ask the question now: of those two different movements, which movement should be made first?

[52:24] Confused to the distinct. They're both going from the confused to the distinct. But should I move from triangle to equilateral, isosceles, and scalene, or should I move from triangle to the definition of triangle first? Yeah. Should I move from quadrilateral to square, oblong, rhombus, rhomboid, trapezium, or should I move from quadrilateral to the definition of quadrilateral first? Definition. Yeah. And there's a reason for doing that, right?

[52:54] If I don't understand distinctly what a quadrilateral is, I can't see the basis for the division into square and oblong and so on, right? Yeah. Unless I see distinctly what a triangle is, that's a plane figure contained by three straight lines. I can't see the basis for the division into equilateral, isosceles, and scalene, that either all three are equal, or just two, or none, right? You see.

[53:25] Now, from my experience, what most thinkers do is that they would jump from a confused knowledge of the general down to trying to get a distinct knowledge of the particular. What the wise man does, like Aristotle. he will go from a confused to a distinct knowledge on the level of the general, and then you will descend, right? Okay. And at that point, he seems to be, you know, proceed more slowly than people, right?

[53:57] Because already down the level of particular, right? Now I notice that, like when we talk about, say, in ethics, and you talk about human virtue, a very important subject, right? Human virtue. Most of the ethics is taken up with discussion of the human virtues, courage and moderation and justice and foresight and art and so on, right?

[54:25] But they're trying to understand human virtue before they understand distinctly virtue in general. And that's the reason why they often stumble, right, on these things, huh? Or they want to talk about the goods of man and which are better, right? Which is a very important thing to do, right? They don't understand good in general. They don't understand better in general. In general, what is better? I ask my students.

[55:01] What do you mean? Well, in general, what is better? Can use the word better in in all kinds of particular contexts, right? Say, but in general, what do you what does it mean to say that this is better than that? What can you say about better in general?

[55:19] Well, the the main thing I develop at that point is that the the end is always better than what is for the sake of the end. Okay. And I show that by induction, and I show it by syllogism that the end is always better what is for the sake of the end. Okay. Then we go into the apology, right? And you find that Socrates and the Athenians all disagree about which goods of human life are better.

[55:45] Socrates thinks the goods of the soul are much better than the goods of the body and exterior goods. While the Athenians are madly pursuing the goods of the body and exterior goods, as if they were the main and best goods, right? Which are better? Say.

[56:02] And now you start to reason from what the end is always better than what is for the sake of the end. And my first show is that the outside goods are for the sake of the what? Inside goods, right? Which is fairly easy to show by induction. And if the end is always better than what is for the sake of the end, then the inside goods are better.

[56:24] Okay. If they knew the body was for the sake of the soul, you could argue the same way, right? But usually I take up what the end of man is before this, so that you can reason from that. That the end of man is the act of reason, and so on. So the same way with virtue, right? They don't understand what virtue is in general. You know.

[56:49] My friend has in his kitchen there a plaque that says "Much virtue in herbs, and in men." What's this general meaning of virtue? Most people don't know it. They can't explain that, right? Christ used that same likeness there. You know, you are the salt of the earth, right? The salt loses its, you know, flavor and strength, right? It to be cast out and trodden under foot, right?

[57:14] Yeah. So we talk about you know the virtue of a knife. Aristotle talks about the virtue of money. Wealth is the virtue of money. He didn't say the virtue of the man. Now he said the virtue of money. But, you have to understand what virtue is in general, right? And virtue in general is as broad in meaning as a thing's own act. It's the quality of a thing that makes that thing good in its own act, right?

[57:43] So the knife's own act is to cut. The virtue of the knife would be sharpness, right? The vice of the knife. So you get a general understanding, right? And most people don't have that. They're jumping all the way down into human virtue or some particular human virtue. They don't understand human virtue in general, distinctly. They're talking about chastity or some other virtue, right? In particular, right? And they unfortunately don't understand virtue in general, right?

[58:22] So the wise men, right, where there's a general and particular knowledge, the wise men will go from the confused to the distinct, not at first by going from the general to particular, but on the staying level of the general, he'll go from the confused to the distinct, huh? And then he'll descend, just like Euclid, right, will define triangle in general, right, before he descends to particular kinds.

[58:57] He'll define quadrilateral in general before he descends to defining square and the other ones in particular. That's very much the place where I see the wise men proceeding slowly, right?

[59:16] Now the last two ones that I put together at the end here, because they touch upon words, right? The wise man will proceed slowly where there is a word

[59:34] equivocal by reason. Now, if you look at the fifth book of wisdom, for example, the whole of the fifth book of wisdom, fifth book of metaphysics, as we call it, the whole of that book is devoted to distinguishing the central senses of the words equivocal by reason that are used in wisdom, right? And they're also the words used in the what axioms. They're also the words used everywhere because of their commonality, huh?

[1:00:15] Aristotle be very careful to distinguish the central meanings of these words and to see the order of those meanings, huh? There's nobody else that does that in the history of us, except maybe Thomas, but he's it's been done for him by Aristotle, right? It's kind of amazing when you see Thomas there in the fourth book of Natural Hearing, and Aristotle distinguishes eight meanings of the word in there, right?

[1:00:44] Eight central meanings, but he doesn't order them like he does. In the fifth book of the wisdom, right? So Thomas says, "Well, let's order them," and he orders them in the way he's been taught by Aristotle in the fifth book, right? And it's marvelous to order. We had to do that one time, remember the eight meanings of in, right? Now who but Thomas would do that? Everybody else would be using the word in without what?

[1:01:10] Thinking it up. Without yeah, that word's going to come up everywhere. Didn't Albert do it? Huh? Didn't Albert? do. Well, Albert might do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The only wise man, right? I'm teaching love and friendship, you know, and students come to me. What does it mean to fall in love? Well, that's why I'm thinking of the senses of in, right? You know, the sixth sense of in is what I've got you in my power, right?

[1:01:37] So to fall in love is to come under the power of love. Oh, yeah, that's profound, you know. But just because I learned the senses of the word in, right? When I was, you know, first teaching logic, you know, and I was struck by this phrase in English to think out something, right? And seemed to me like a very good thing. Philosophers don't want to just think; they want to think out things, right?

[1:02:00] You know, what does it mean to think out something, right? Well, then I recalled the eight meanings of in, right? I can understand the meanings of in. You can understand the meanings of out, and I distinguished eventually the seven meanings of thinking out. You know, but see, getting a lot of mileage out of what Aristotle and Thomas and all the care they took to what distinguish and order the senses of the words used everywhere, especially in wisdom and the axioms.

[1:02:30] I notice, huh? As the father of logic said, the most common mistake in thinking is a mistake from mixing up the senses of a word. And we're not apt to be deceived by a word equivocal by chance, huh? Roger Maris hit 61 home runs with a bat. The bat is a flying rodent. If we had 61 home runs with a flying rodent, nobody would be deceived by that, right?

[1:02:56] Because both of those things are sensible, right? When you have a whole series of meanings, one of which is very sensible, and you get to meanings that are very far removed from it, right? Then it's easy to get these all mixed up.

[1:03:10] Okay, so men are constantly making this stumbling all the time here, right? The fallacy of equivocation, as it's called sometimes, huh? They're always falling into the mistake for mixing up senses of the word.

[1:03:29] But you know, even apart from avoiding that constant stumbling that they're doing, you know, I was taking the examples from my students there. You know, the student who says.

[1:03:44] Nature doesn't act for an end because if nature acted for an end, all things would come to an end. But all things have not come to an end. Therefore, nature is acting. for an end My wife said that'd be like arguing, you know, that happiness is the end of life. the end of life is death. Therefore, happiness is death, right? See, I mean, people actually are making mistakes all the time.

[1:04:08] So, where there is a word, equivocal by reason. In fact, even the the you saw that with the word "run," right? That's equivocal, right? By reason, stumble is equivocal by reason, here, right? Reason is equivocal by reason, right?

[1:04:39] Reason gives reasons. Different meanings of the word "reason" there, right? But they're connected, huh? So most people, everybody uses words equivocal by reason. You can't avoid them because the most common words like in and out, and being and one, and part and whole, and end, limit, everything—all these words are equivocal by reason, and you can't avoid using them. So everybody's using words equivocal by reason without ever having what clearly distinguished the central meanings of these words and seen their their order, right?

[1:05:19] So they're constantly subject to stumbling over those words. Now, the seventh place, huh? That can be seen wise and slow. You can say it's being wise and slow. What else is stopping all these words here, right? Right. I had to stop and wise and slow first, right? Then I look at the whole thing right now, right? So where there are words of a wise man, like fire alarms here, right?

[1:05:51] Okay. Where there are these words of a wise man, he's being wise, right? That means he's a cautious old thing. Was it Thomas and the bishop

[1:06:23] or something? You know, they somebody supposed to have said Thomas sees an elephant going by. Thomas from out of the window looked, you know, and they all started laughing at him, right? You know, he said, "I'd rather believe he says there's an elephant going by than that one of my fellows would be lying."

[1:06:46] Now Thomas, you know Thomas says you should read the words of Aristotle. He says you should read the words of Aristotle carefully, frequently, and with reverence.

[1:07:05] And the same thing he would say about reading the words of Augustine, right? You read the words of Augustine carefully, frequently, and with reverence. If you don't, you're not teachable by that wise man. And a fortiori you should read the words of Christ, right?

[1:07:28] Wisely, huh? I mean, carefully, right? Frequently and with reverence, huh? As Thomas says, there, you know, in the commentary on Matthew, but you know, one never completely unfolds all the meaning in what the words of Christ, right, huh? You know?