Wisdom (Metaphysics 2006, Colorado)
28. Bad as Non-Being, Faith and the Road to Knowing
https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/028-bad-as-non-being-faith-and-the-road-to-knowing/

[0:00] now, huh? And leave for Monday. Geometry. The third part of the third part, okay, which begins with this discussion of something exemplified in geometry. But what he's going to get into now is the before and after, in a way, of the knowability and the truth and falsity of act and ability, huh? Okay. And that will be the third part, huh? Of the

[0:39] third part of the ninth book, huh? It's not about good and bad. It's about the knowability of it, right? They say both these considerations about

[0:53] good and knowable, right, and true, they're all dealing to some extent with the perfection of being. And maybe I'll give another little footnote here about this here. When Thomas looks at the fifth book of Wisdom, huh? There's a plethora of words in there, right? More than two or three, huh? Well, Thomas likes to follow the logical rule of two or three

[1:28] to make this fifth book understandable, right? So does he divide the fifth book into two or three? Three, yeah, yeah. And he sees the fifth book as the beginning, right? Of wisdom as an episteme, although it's also useful for the axioms, huh? And as he knows from his master Aristotle, in every episteme you have a subject, and you have properties of that subject, then you have the causes, right?

[2:17] So what does he do? Thomas sees that Aristotle gives first the names of what? Causes. He gives second the names of the subject or parts of the subject, and third he gives names that pertain to the properties. Okay. Now, I think he begins with the names of causes, partly because that's been very much developed before in the first book and the second book, and so on. And so there you have the words like beginning is the first word, then cause and element, and then nature and so on, and then finding necessary, which is tied up with cause.

[3:11] And then you get the names of the subject, huh? The name one and the name being and the name substance mainly, and then more particular names. Now the third part begins with the name perfect. And the name perfect and whole are the main words there, but then there are words that are tied up with those, huh?

[3:33] Now if you go back to the text in the beginning of the De Veritate, where Thomas distinguishes the transcendental, huh? Being and and one are among the first transcendental, s

[4:04] and those are among the names of the subject, huh? Okay. And sometimes you'll see Aristotle and Thomas and Albert the Great and so on. When they take the name one, they include not only undivided being, but they include distinct from other things. So you kind of run unum and aliquid together and so on, okay?

[4:34] And the name thing there comes up with the word substance and so on, which has one of its meanings what it is. So the name is one in being and thing or substance as names of the subject. Those transcendental are more the subject of wisdom. But now with the names perfect and whole, those are the beginning. The word perfect is the beginning of the names about the what properties, right?

[5:10] Now as you see here in this ninth book, the you have two perfections of being. It's knowability, it's being true, and it's being what good, right? And in a way, it's a unusual kind of property because the transcendental are to some extent the same thing, right? But in our consideration here of good and bad, you could say that both act and ability are good.

[5:50] Act is better than ability, but ability, being an ability for act, is good, right? What's bad? It's not being. It's the non-being is something you're able to have and should have and you should have, right? So being as such is good. Act more so than ability, but both are good. So it's a property of being to be good. Someone says, "Well, I know all kinds of bad things out there.

[6:28] " Ah, yeah, but the root of badness is what a lack, right? And a what lack is a non-being. It's like you're seeing a property. That's also maybe a property of being to be knowable, but act more so than ability, and that's why ability is knowable through act, as he said in the beginning of the before and afters, right? Okay, that's interesting.

[7:02] That's interesting too when you say that. God is I am who am, right? And so everything else, insofar as it is, is like God.

[7:19] God is completely good, right? So other things, insofar as they are like God, are good, right? But they're like God insofar as they are. So being as such is always good.

[7:41] What's bad, per se, is Thomas in that text, is a non-being, not non-being absolutely, but the non-being that is a lack, the non-being that is subject that is able to have something, and we should have it, and so on. But the man who who has that lack includes

[8:05] that man as such is not bad, right? He's bad bad, as Thomas says, because he's bad because there happens to him this lack, okay?

[8:21] So the mind is not bad, right? What's bad is the ignorance, huh? Or the mistake that involves ignorance. But mistaken mind is not good, but the mind itself is good. But we speak of mistaken mind as bad in some way because to be mistaken is something that happens to that mind, okay?

[8:49] So what is as such is good. And so the fact that Thomas sees truly, I think, that to be good and to be what noble, to be true, are perfections, he sees those transcendental more as what properties. And in this treatise here on ability and act, in a way you're seeing that they are properties of what is, and we see today a little bit of how they're properties of what is, and it's really

[9:30] what is not that is bad, right? And so I mentioned the words of Augustine there, you know, where he says, you know, sin is nothing, and the man who sins becomes nothing, right? And that's not said as precisely as it should or could be said, but Augustine is trying to emphasize that basically the bad is something what kind of non-being, right? It's not strictly speaking nothing; it's it's be lack, right?

[9:55] To speak precisely, but Augustine sees the truth here. I think he's just trying to emphasize, you know, that it's really a kind of non-being. But if being as such could be bad, right? And being as such is like God, who's all good. You've got a real what contradiction.

[10:16] But if the bad is is non-being, and God is I am who am, the truth all things harmonize. Could you say something about how exactly the a vice or an error is is allowed? It seems like the ignorance, the error, is something on top of ignorance. ignorance. Yeah, yeah. It almost seems like more lack, and lack of virtue seems like yeah. Well, you know, just as a kind of starting point here, when our Lord, for example, says to the Sadducees, right, the Sadducees in the uh I think it's the twenty-second chapter of Matthew, you know, which is one of the chapters Thomas says that is leading up to why you want to put him to death.

[10:59] And the twenty-second chapter is a little bit like why they want to put Socrates to death. And in fact, our Lord does examine the the Pharisees, whose son is Christ, you know, and he gets them into apparent contradiction, and they can't see the way out. So this is what Socrates did, right? This is only part of the reason why why they wanted to get rid of him, right?

[11:21] There's chapter 21, and chapter 23, they talk about other reasons and so on. So, but anyway, also that 22, the Sadducees come to Christ, right? And the Sadducees do not believe in the against the immortality of the soul. They don't believe in angels. They don't believe in the resurrection, right? And so,

[11:43] our they're trying to give a kind of impossible situation. If it's a resurrection, and so they tell the story of the man who married the woman, had no children. His brother married her, had no children. Seven brothers married her, so they all had her as a wife, right? Now the resurrection, right? Whose wife will she? be?

[12:05] Well, our Lord says, "You err." He's using the Greek word for that, right? Okay. He says, "You err, not knowing the power of God and the Scriptures." Okay. Well, he seems to be saying that you're mistaken, right?

[12:31] And they're mistaken about what? First of all, the resurrection, right? But they're being mistaken about the resurrection, as if this is something impossible, right? Proceeds from their ignorance of the power of God,

[12:47] and also from their ignorance of the Scriptures that would teach them this, right? And they also are ignorant of the state of man after the resurrection, right? Where you neither marry nor are given in marriage, huh? But you're like the angels, huh? You're like the angels in your way of life, huh? So our Lord seems to be saying that the mistake comes from what? Ignorance, right? And you could say that in every mistake or error, there's involved some ignorance.

[13:32] And this is a general truth. That you know the two contraries, one tends to be somewhat bad, and that's because it involves some kind of what lack, right? So I say virtue and vice. Well, virtue and vice are contraries; huh? You're not having it lack, but virtue and vice, one of these habits is lacking something it should have—that order and measure of reason.

[14:08] So that behind the the bad contrary, right? It's not just a lack, right? Something, something. It's a real habit, right? Vice is a real habit. It's a habit that lacks the order and measure of reason, and that's why it's a bad habit. But the root of the badness is the lack. That's the first meaning of it. Okay. So is it good as habit?

[14:39] Um. If you abstract from from that lack, there, yeah, what's left there, yeah? But what's bad is that it lacks, just like you know you say premarital sex, right? You know, well, the same act before and after marriage, right? Yeah. So the act in itself is no different before and after, if you abstract from the fact that before rather than after. Does this make then? Then you can say, in some way, the vice is better than the lack of virtue simply, or vice simply, because.

[15:16] it's not my act. Well, you could say that it is not all bad. It's not per se bad. And there's an objection, you know, about God infusing a soul into illegitimate child. Let's say, and you know the objection is, well, God is cooperating with the sinner, right? The adulteress, let's say, and Thomas says, no, he's cooperating with nature, isn't?

[15:50] So as a natural act, right? It's not defective; it's producing a child, right, or a body that is able to be infused with our understanding soul, right? So now God's not cooperating as such with the sinner, with a natural act, which is by nature ordered to receiving the understanding soul.

[16:21] But it's kind of interesting when, like, this mistake there when you have someone like say Sartre, right? Where Sartre is trying to see man's dignity as consisting in his liberty, his freedom,

[16:45] and he almost defines man by this. Well, we can discuss that sometime, but when you ask what is the freedom of man, he says freedom is what none being. Okay, now in making the same kind of mistake that Plato makes, but to make him seem a little plausible, I say to the students, go into the restaurant, right? And they give you a menu. Now, if you are truly free to choose steak rather than chicken, or chicken rather than steak, and so on,

[17:22] then before you choose, is your will determined to choose steak? No, then you would be not free. So what makes you free? He's saying is that lack of determination, that none being, right? Okay, he likes to emphasize it like Augustine. So man is the one by whom none being came into the world, but he's seeing the excellence of man in his freedom and his freedom in none being.

[17:58] You know, Aristotle would really poke many holes in this thing. But you know, he says existentialism in his sense is not atheistic in the sense that we would exhaust ourselves by trying to prove that God does not exist. He says it's atheistic in the sense that it makes no difference to us whether he is or is not. It seems kind of you know very arbitrary, huh? You can you know understand maybe more someone being in some kind of doubt about whether God is or not, but to say you know it makes no difference to us whether he is or is not, we're we're free, you know.

[18:43] But he's seeing his freedom and his revolt from God in terms of none being. yeah? He doesn't realize that he is him. Well, what's he confusing? He's confusing the lack of choice before you choose with the ability to choose. Just as Plato was confusing the lack of form before matter receives a form with its ability to receive a form, and you could say the ability to choose wants to choose.

[19:14] That's the fulfillment. That's the purpose of this. But the lack of choice doesn't want the choice; it wants own destruction, right? So you could make a proportional argument against him, like the argument

[19:31] that is given. Against Plato, right? Just like I say to students sometimes, I can't teach you something you already know. Got to be ignorant before I can teach you. Maybe you have to know that too, but you got to be ignorant. So it's your ignorance that makes you teachable. And they say yes, because those who know already can't teach God anything because He knows everything, right? Now, is it really ignorance that makes you teachable?

[20:03] No, you're you're confusing. This is the fallacy of the accidental. You're confusing your ability to know with your ignorance, huh? Now, knowing, like form, is something godlike, good and desirable, and therefore the ability to know wants to know. It desires to know. Does ignorance desire to know? It desires its own destruction, and if knowing is good, then ignorance must be something bad, as opposed to it. But the ability to know must be good because it's oriented to knowing.

[20:41] So you could argue against a similar mistake, right? Plato's confusion of lack of form with matter, and this confusion here between ignorance and the ability to know, and Sartre's confusion between the lack of choice before you choose and the very ability to choose, right? And it's the ability to choose that is your freedom, not the lack of choice that is your freedom. But Aristotle says, in the book on Sensu et Sensato even the wise are deceived by the accidental.

[21:25] It's interesting that that people like Sartre dare to revolt against God that they're trying to make non-being the source of their revolt because that's what we have, so to speak, from ourselves, right?

[21:40] And so what I don't have from God, my non-being, I try to make my, you know, maybe to rise up against him. Kind of stupid, but anyway, it sees many. So we'll stop here. Fair enough. And then. Now, remencing or. Sister was mentioning they're gonna move us. Taking off, it'll take off eventually.

[22:12] Again, from wisdom being a knowledge of the first causes, he's going to proceed in a different line. See, you're going to, you know, put the center of the circle, the center to understanding wisdom is that's a knowledge of causes of the first causes. And then in book four, as we mentioned before, he reasons from its being about the first causes to its being about being as being and the one and the many, and he reasons from that to speaking about the axioms.

[22:45] Then you have the great turnaround, right? Okay, but in book two, he reasons from wisdom being about the first causes to its its belonging to wisdom to consider how man is towards knowing truth. This is this is proceeding now along another line, and I call the first three the primary. What What wisdom is about primarily? It's about the axioms. It's about being as being, and it's about the causes, the first causes.

[23:22] But in a secondary way, it's about how man is towards knowing truth and other things like you'll meet in book two. So this this is proceeding from the same beginning that was established in the proemium. Reasoning about the first causes, but reasoning along a different line. Of course, our mind can do that, right? But I would call these things a secondary things that wisdom is about. Just like you could say, you know, look at the premium.

[23:52] You could say, in the premium, you learn what wisdom is about. Not to whom does it belong to consider what wisdom is? Yeah, yeah, but is that what wisdom is primarily about? What wisdom is?

[24:06] No, but it's something that the wise man does take up, right? But he's primarily interested in causes, being as being, the axioms, right? But there's a whole series of things that wisdom is about in a secondary way.

[24:24] Then there's a a third line, huh? Two. The which is the second line. Aristotle will begin the second book by considering how man is towards knowing truth, and after he gets through with that consideration, then he gives the reason why that consideration belongs to wisdom, huh? And and giving the reason why it does in the subplot of the nine books of wisdom, he shows that there are first causes and each kind of cause, right.

[25:10] But that's kind of the subplot, because that's brought in to say, because the reason why wisdom considers how man is towards knowing truth, the ultimate part of that reason is that the first causes are most true, and therefore the consideration of truth belongs most to all the wise men. But that assumes that there are first causes to be known,

[25:39] and all we've seen from the first book, the second bird killed with this stone, is that there are four kinds of causes, right? We've got some confirmation that there are four kinds of causes, but is there a first cause in each of these kinds of causes? He's going to show that, but it's only gradually. You know what we were saying before: how guessing comes before knowing, right?

[26:14] And you can ask the question then: now, does guessing can guessing lead to knowing? Well, I usually say, well, reasonable guesses can lead to knowing. Wild guesses, I suppose, lead you to error, right? Okay, but a reasonable guess is apt to have some part of the truth, then, just like a probable opinion, is apt to have some part of the truth, although not the whole truth, right?

[26:46] So, if it's a probable opinion, say that sexual pleasure is the best thing in life, right? This is false, but there's some part of the truth, right? The best thing in life is something pleasant, but it's something higher than this, huh? So that opinion is not what

[27:10] entirely mistaken, right? As a child, I suppose I thought the candy was the best thing in life, right? Candy is something pleasant, so that, you know I haven't completely missed the boat, right? You see, and you know how Aristotle takes up happiness and pleasure there at the end and so on. So

[27:31] we're apt to see a part of the truth before we see what the whole truth. That's a kind of another footnote to this idea that we guess before we know, right? But it corresponds to the fact also that the reasonable guesses, at least, are apt to hit a part of the truth, not the whole truth. We gradually put together. But you see, you learn first that wisdom is about causes and about the first causes, but

[28:03] it kind of makes a little more concrete, and then you learn. That there are perhaps only four kinds of causes, right? That's a little advance, right? And the mind says, "Now, okay, the first cause must be in one or more than one of these four kinds, and that's an advance towards the first cause, isn't it? "

[28:24] But then, in the second book, he shows that there are first causes, right? Okay. But some might say, "Okay, if there are no first causes, there could be no knowledge of first causes. " But is reverse true? Is a if there are first causes, there's a knowledge of the first causes. I mean, in our part, that doesn't follow, does it? No. You could say, if there are no first causes, then there is no knowledge of first causes, right?

[28:58] So part of showing that wisdom is about the first causes is that there are first causes, right? Because there couldn't be any knowledge, but that's not the whole thing, right? Obviously, right?

[29:14] And it's only graduates you begin to see how, given that there are first causes, our mind could what come to know them in some way, by looking before and after, right? Because causes before the effect, first cause before the other causes, right? We know that our reason looks before and after, and it has some ability to see the before and after, right? But what kind of before and after would it have to see in order to get to the first causes?

[29:52] Maybe not till the ninth book that you begin to realize something of how our mind is going to look before everything else and see that the first cause is pure act, and then things that will be true about the first cause, because it's pure act, man. You know, all the five attributes of the divine substance could be shown from the fact that God's pure act. There are other ways of showing them too, and we we multiply these ways to feed our mind more, right?

[30:20] But pure act can be used for to show he's simple, to show that he's perfect, to show he's unchanging, and so on. So people forget this thing I just spoke of that we what see a part of the truth, right?

[30:45] And part of seeing, you know, that there is such a thing as wisdom is that there are kinds of causes, and there are first causes, but that's not the whole thing. There's got to be

[30:58] some way of our knowing them. And you know, just only gradually we see how this becomes possible, right? And if he didn't follow the road that he's going, he'd never come to see these. Usually, when I'm talking about the you know human faith, now if a student comes to me and say, "Berquist, I've heard this Pythagorean theorem. You know, I'd like to know that it is so."

[31:30] I say, "Well, I know the road. I know the road. I mean, Euclid told me the road. I mean, now I know the road, or at least one road, to knowing that. Now he can believe me, right? And then go down the road that I point out, or that Euclid points out, or he could say, "I want to know that this is the road to the Pythagorean theorem before I go down it.

[31:54] I'm not going to go down the road just and waste all my time with that." And I would say, "Well, my dear friend, you won't know that this is the road to the Pythagorean theorem until you go down it. Yeah,

[32:08] is it? And so if he's unwilling to believe me that this is the road, he will never know that the Pythagorean theorem. But if he believes me and goes down that road and is intelligent enough to go down that road and see the proofs as they go along, then when he arrives at the Pythagorean theorem, he'll say, 'Ah, now I know. I don't believe you, Mr. Berquist.

[32:30] I believed you up until this point, but now I know that, right? And but I compare it, you know, going back to the original road, and you say there's a fork in the road, and I want to go to Boston, assuming it's the right way to go there. And I ask you, you know, somebody asked me, is that which which road to Boston? I said that's the road to Boston, right?

[32:50] Well, I'm not going to go down that road until I know it's the road to Boston. Well, okay. You're never going to find out, right? You're going to have to be trying this road, this road, this road, you know, and you're going to waste an awful lot of time going down every road that's around, right? And it'd be only by chance that you get on the right road.

[33:08] But if you believe me, Dwayne Burquist, that this is in fact the road to Boston, and you go down it, and lo and behold, there's Boston at the end. Now you no longer believe Burquist, but you know that this is the road to Boston, huh? And we get to Boston much faster believing, but you got to have a little savvy about whom to believe and whom not to believe.

[33:32] What's what's the dialogue where Plato most explicitly teaches whom to believe or how to judge somebody? Protagoras. Yeah, yeah. And Protagoras begins with a young man, you know, knocking on the door, and on Socrates introduces me to Protagoras. Protagoras is around, you know. And Socrates says, "Well, it's kind of early in the morning, you know." And then they get talking, and Socrates says, "Now, what do you know about this Protagoras?

[33:59] You know, well, he's f well all he, all he has now is the fame of Protagoras, right? Okay, and he wants to, in a sense, follow him, right? But really, the fame of man, or maybe his position. is the fame of man. Is the first criterion we have, okay? And so Protagoras is much more famous than Socrates, huh? Okay. Now you could, you know, stop and say is fame a reason for, you know, believing somebody, right?

[34:31] Well, that's all you got to go on at first, right? You could make some distinctions and say fame in your own time is not as good a criterion as fame over a thousand years, and in Samuel Johnson's circle they said it takes a hundred years to tell whether a poet's worth reading. If he's still being read a hundred years after he's dead, that's prima facie evidence that there's something in him, right?

[34:58] But Aristotle is still being read, huh? And even this crazy academic situation we have, you know, Aristotle is still being read by a lot of people, and Plato's still being read by a lot of people, right? And the apology is probably the most frequently read thing in the introduction of philosophy. So fame over you know a thousand years or two thousand years is it for Plato more than two thousand years is a much greater criterion than fame in your own time, okay?

[35:27] Protagoras has fame in his own time, right? Okay. But you want to hear the young man wants to hear Protagoras, don't want to hear Socrates. So Socrates takes him to the house there, and I engage in a conversation with Protagoras, right? And the first thing is are they going to give a speech? Are going to go by short question and answer? And Protagoras wants to give speeches, and Socrates wants to proceed by short questions and answer.

[35:59] Well, now you've got a second criterion which is better, right? And that is that Socrates seems to be taking a road to find something out. It's better than giving speeches where you can't examine a man and pin him down and so on, right? So I wrote my doctoral thesis on a comparison of Descartes and Aristotle and the three roads in our knowledge, right? And seeing that Descartes doesn't know the roads to follow, I'm not going to believe him as much as Aristotle seems to know the road to follow.

[36:38] Now the the third criterion, right, is whether the man does or does not contradict himself, right? But that comes a little further. And of course later on you see another criterion there because Protagoras says, you know, Socrates wants him to give these short answers, and Protagoras wants to be more expansive in answers, you know, so he can't be pinned down by Socrates and so on, and and Protagoras says, "If I always fight with the weapons of my opponent," he says, "everywhere in the name of Protagoras has spread throughout Greece, you know, and so on."

[37:14] Well, he's a bit of a sophist, right? He's always taking a sophist, right? You know, if I can beat the guy with short answers, I will. If I can beat him with a speech, I will. You know, but beat him, I will, one way or another. And if I had, you know, always fought with what you want to use, you know, you want to use a knife, I want to use a gun or something, you know, I never would have become famous, and my name never would have spread throughout Greece.

[37:37] So you're getting criterion that are stronger, right? Now, to my slow students, I I use a very obvious example. I said, suppose you come to college and you ask the biology professor how many chambers does a frog's heart have, and he says four chambers. You ask a a student how many chambers does a frog's heart have, and he says, "What three is it? That's three, isn't it?

[38:02] Maybe two. That was that was three. That's let's take it three, okay? Now whom do you believe? The student or the professor of biology, the PhD?

[38:12] Yeah, because of the position, you believe the professor, right? Okay, but then you say, now, how did you arrive at this conclusion? The student says, "Well, I came from a frog and examined its heart. He said he had a three-chambered heart. I came from another one. He said he had a three-chambered heart, and so on. " And you go to the professor and you say, "Now, how did you arrive at this?

[38:29] " He says, "Well, I took a deck of cards and a frog, and out came the, you know, the four four hearts. " Oh, okay. That's that's a very good point. See, but now you would believe the student, right? Even though he doesn't have the position of the, you know, a reputation, he seems to know how to proceed to find out. See, they still don't know that he's examined the the frog well and so on, you know.

[38:53] But you say, yeah, he doesn't know how to proceed, right? You know, it's not obvious that in most cases, huh? But once you realize that Socrates is using the road that will lead to truth, or more aptly, the truth, and that Protagoras is not, you're going to trust Socrates more, right? Now we never are told in the dialogue. We never hear about the the young man anymore, right?

[39:22] But did he see now, right? It'd be better to follow Socrates than the famous Protagoras, huh? You know, you know, we talked a lot about Warren Marie would say that some famous, you know, professor is coming to town to give a lecture like that, and to mention this to the students and so on. And oh, by the way, Protagoras will be in town. Maybe teach

[39:51] them a little bit about, know a little bit about Protagoras, you know, so they can see the see the Warren saying, huh? So, I think the best way to you know see kind of the reasonableness of human faith. In in geometry or in philosophy, nature and or in wisdom, is that idea of the road, right? And the idea of the road

[40:18] is that if you believe the man and go down the road, as as he indicates, and you get to where you want to get, you get.

[40:27] Then your belief is replaced by knowing. I don't believe Euclid that anymore, right? I know that the Pythagorean theorem is now true, and so it's not as if belief is a substitute for knowing. Belief is a way of coming to know faster than you could, you know, trying every road, you know, whichever one is there.

[40:55] It's a faster way of coming to know and replace belief by knowing. I mean, here, if you've gone through the ninth book and understood a little bit of of the ninth book, you could see, hey, a consideration of act and ability is a road to knowing that the first cause is pure act and not matter.

[41:26] But unless you had gone through the ninth book, like we've done a little bit here, you wouldn't know that the ninth book is the road, a good part of the road, to knowing that the first cause is pure act and not

[41:45] matter, right? Have you tried just any road? I mean, Kant's got a road; he's not going anywhere. Descartes got a road; Locke's got a road, right? But whom do you believe, right?

[42:10] If you follow the road, of Aristotle, you'll see, hey, this road leads where I want to go. The first cause is what was beautiful about that. I mean, to me, that's very striking. The thing that Aristotle touched upon, but I was touching upon, that you can by reason show, like Aristotle does in the Proemium that the goal of our knowledge is to know the cause, to know why things are so, and therefore ultimately to know the first cause.

[42:43] And you can know from the criteria there, if you understand them, the Proemium that the knowledge of the best thing must be the best knowledge, and therefore the first cause should be the best thing, right? And that way, everything will fit together, which is a sign of the truth. But if you make the first cause not the best thing.

[43:11] Then you've got two last ends for a man, and they're not the same. You're going in different directions, right? Being torn, see something wrong with that? When you read through the ninth book, you say, "Hey, it's very reasonable. " What he says that act is before ability in time, simply, and that act is more perfect than ability, and therefore you're heading both towards the first cause and the best thing there is.

[43:43] Now you see it. Now you see it. This is the road. So, did God give to Solomon, or look at our first reading, Mass? Did He give to Solomon something like we saw in the what is this lectio about? Being able to see what that is as a lack, he must have something to be able to make that judgment. Yeah, the question Solomon is that he fell away, didn't he?

[44:16] In his older age, woman, you know. Funny, this is one text of Albert talking about woman, you know, and not talking the favorable things about them. He ends up the the thing with remark, and if I told everything about woman, he says, the whole world would be stupefied.

[44:45] But he did fall away. He said, "I guess you know, you know, Mortimer Adler became a Catholic at the end of his life, right? " And apparently, he was convinced, you know, for some time, but he had some irregularity in his life that kept him from coming in, you know, and which he's maybe finding at the end, you know. Kind of interesting, though.

[45:09] Can you just see about Mortimer Adler that he thought he'd learn more from Aristotle and from Thomas than all the rest, right? And some of these, you know, Catholic, you know, priests and Catholic philosophers. You can't really mean that, no. Yes, I do.

[45:29] He's a Jew, you know, Jewish. I mean, not a Catholic at the time, anyway. Yes, I do. I say you're Catholic, but you know, it's like they had the blow up there at St. John's University in New York, and Smith there was it used to be a very famous there. He had already taught in Columbia, but you know, it sounds more free to teach Aristotle and Thomas there than was already the Catholic college, and it's kind of funny when you got a Catholic here being told by an uncatholic or, you know.

[46:09] At least you read Thomas. Or my cousin Dale told me a funny thing from I think it was University of Kansas someplace. But this Catholic was studying philosophy, but kind of specializing in Arabic philosophy. And a lot of the Arabs make use of the metaphysics. So he had to consult the metaphysics on having difficulty understanding the metaphysics. His background for his his work in in Arabic philosophy.

[46:37] So he went to his teacher, who was not a Catholic, right? And you know, looking for help, you know, in understanding the metaphysics. And he said, "Thomas's commentary." This is funny. An uncatholic telling a Catholic, you know. To throw to Thomas. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you can multiply those examples, right? And you

[47:00] see, I think what happens is that a lot of Catholics think that if they read Thomas, people say, "Well, he doesn't think, you know. He just, you know, maluses Thomas and like that, right? " So they've got to, you know, set aside Thomas and do something else to show that they think about what they read, right? And it's just partly that you don't want to be considered out of it, right, or something, you know.

[47:25] And it's a little bit like the scriptural scholars, I suppose. They got to get into what scriptural scholars are generally saying, and then and then they read what the church is saying about scripture, and then they they'll be you know accepted, you know, more in the the the world.

[47:43] But I think again, as they say, the simplest way I think to see the importance of human belief is is the road. And you follow Aristotle down the road he has, and they come back in ethics the road he has here, and say, "Hey, you get somewhere, you know." And this is the road to take, and not just because Aristotle said it now, but I find out that did get I did get somewhere.

[48:13] So my roll words run out. Like the mechanical man, you heard that story where he got down where he's kind of courting the woman, you know, and beautiful words coming out, and all of a sudden, boop, his roll words hit. You gotta go back. He's on video there. He's saying beautiful things until his roll.