Episode 111: Interview with Jacob W. Wood

We return to Aquinas and the nature of grace in this interview with Jacob W. Wood. Dr. Wood is the author of To Stir a Restless Heart with Catholic University Press (2019) which was just released in paperback. Among many topics, we touch on what it means to bring Aristotelian philosophy into conversation with Christian theology. We have been having a continual conversation about philosophical influences in Christian thought and Dr. Wood warns against an overly simplistic understanding of these influences.

Timestamps:

8:46- Teaching Philosophy and Theology in the Medieval World

21:38- Christian Aristotelianism

32:33- Aquinas’ Interaction

38:38- The Natural Desire for God

Episode Transcription

Charles Kim 0:00

Hello and welcome to a history of Christian theology. My name is Chad Kim. With me this week is Dr. Jacob W. Wood, who's written to stir restless hearts, Thomas Aquinas and Enrico lubok on nature, grace and the desire for God with Catholic University Press. Dr. Wood is a Professor of Theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville. And this conversation, we return to some common themes of the of the last several books that we've reviewed, including Aquinas and grace. Although in this work, Dr. Wood explores those themes in relationship to the desire for God, and especially with the influence of Aristotelian philosophy and its entrance into the medieval conversation in the 13th century. So just as a kind of broad introduction to this interview, and just to tie that some strings together, Dr. Wood will present the the influence of Aristotle on Christian thinking, and how important his ideas were to the development of Western theology. So this is a kind of furthering the conversation that we started with Dr. Bergsma and Dr. Kerry, who talked about the influence of Plato on early Christian thought, and I'm really excited. The next interview that we're going to release is my conversation with Drew Johnson, who's going to add the idea of a Hebraic philosophy, drawing specifically on the biblical texts and the early Christian reception of Hebraic, and Jewish thought and Paul. So that that looks to be like a really good conversation. And, and I hope tying these themes together throughout our podcasts gives it a little bit of a connective tissue. Because these are all questions that are near and dear to my heart as a undergrad philosophy major, and a theologian who's interested in exactly how the great doctrines of the church came to be, as they were and who are theologians were in conversation with and how they understood their task. So I think this is a great addition to that whole conversation, Dr. Wood is very learned very knowledgeable and very clear in his presentation of Aquinas in this conversation, and even gets into a little bit of the insights of anointed to lubok, at the very end of our conversation. So I heard from a few of you who are grateful to hear Tom and Trevor, were back. So happy to get them on, we will have more conversations with them. But yeah, those will be forthcoming in the following semester. So thank you for listening. As always, please do tweet at us, like us on Facebook, Twitter, review us on iTunes that helps other people find the podcast, we really appreciate it. Thanks for listening. And here's my conversation with Dr. Wood. This morning on a history of Christian theology. I have with me, Dr. Jacob wood. Dr. Jacob wood is the Associate Professor of Theology at Franciscan University of Steubenville. And I believe this is the second printing of to stir a restless heart. Is that right? That's right. All right. So we're Catholic University Press graciously provided me a copy of Mr. Restless Heart, Thomas Aquinas and Henri de lubac. On nature, grace of the desire for God, it's now in paperback. Because you know, just one of those hot, fast moving theological texts on dense medieval theological issues. You people just can't get enough of it. I guess.

Jacob W. Wood 3:33

It's it. I'm very humbled that at least some people spent their Corona tide reading through about 500 pages of medieval theology.

Charles Kim 3:45

Yeah, well, it's, I mean, I found it immensely clear and lucid, and carefully argued, very good. I appreciated the, in fact, the historical settings. So it's helpful to just see what's going on. And the various places where Aquinas is teaching. And to sort of get a sense of, okay, this is who he would have been talking to, this is what was going on around him. These are the texts that were influencing him at the time from Aristotle or commentaries on Aristotle, and then Dr. Wood would launch into, you know, what exactly Aquinas was saying, on the topics, nature, grace and the desire for God. So it's a very clear and helpful text in that way, just to kind of get a broad brushstroke at the beginning and then dive into the particular issue. So you know, I mean, as far as difficult texts or texts on difficult issues, it was very lucidly argued so yes, I really appreciate it and appreciate Dr. Wood, taking the time to talk with me this morning.

Jacob W. Wood 4:52

Thanks for having me.

Charles Kim 4:55

All right. So as I've already just stated, and the the A book basically looks at three different topics and how they are related they are, namely nature, primarily human nature of grace, and what that does to our nature and how that helps us attain the attain God, our desire for God, the Pacific vision. So he takes these sort of three major ideas and traces them, well, really starting from Augustine, but then primarily through Peter Lombard, then, as Aristotle makes his way into the medieval universities, he looks a little bit at how Aquinas understands those. So I've asked Dr. Wood to just begin by maybe telling us a little bit about like, why those three topics, what do those mean? And what are we what are we trying to get at when looking at nature, grace and the desire for God?

Jacob W. Wood 5:51

Thank you, I'll try to be I'll try to be as succinct as I can. But like I say, in the book, these have been hot topics for about 700 years and in the history of the church's theological tradition. So because they really sit at the nexus of so many other questions. When we're talking about human nature, we're talking about what it is to be human, what it is, you know, to experience life on this earth, as a human being and everything that that entails. And so it sits at the nexus of all these questions that we ask about how we relate to God, how we think about God, how we talk about God, how we yearn for God? And, you know, then then these questions also sit at the nexus of the question of grace. So how does, how does God relate to us? How are we raised up into friendship with God? How are we healed from the sin which keeps us away from God? And the desire for God going all the way back to Augustine really pokes at all those questions. Because for Augustine, as far back, you know, as the confessions, confessions, book, one, you know, Lord, you've made us for ourselves, yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you that the experience of being a human being before God on this earth is really constituted by that question of the desire for God. And so over the course of the theological tradition, you know, there's been a lot of speculation as to where that desire leads, how it leads us to God, right? And this gets bound up with the question of, you know, what does it mean, to live individually on this earth before God? It branches out into the political question of what does it mean to be a human society on this earth before God? And so the way that one sorts out these questions and the way that people have sorted out these questions in the history of the theological tradition, I mean, it gets you into faith and reason. It gets you into sin and grace, it gets you into church and state. It really sits, like I said, at the at the central nexus of a whole bunch of very important questions, and also very controversial questions. So you can see why it would, it would it would give fodder for some healthy and at times, unhealthy theological debates for so many hundreds of years without ever really losing steam. Yeah.

Charles Kim 8:16

Yeah, very good. Well, so there we go. So nature, Grace, the desire for God. So my next question as a way to think about earlier thinkers in your study, so you go through Peter Lombard, and then the commentaries on on Aristotle, I'm going to I'm going to mix up Aquinas Aristotle and have a center other Aveiro is so many a names.

Jacob W. Wood 8:43

There's a few. Yeah.

Charles Kim 8:46

Could you say something about the sort of the means of teaching philosophy and theology in the mid medieval world? One thing people might not be familiar with is the importance of Peter Lombard sentences, and then the commentary on those sentences. So why why is this so critical for medieval thinkers?

Jacob W. Wood 9:04

Sure. So I actually want to back it up just a little bit before Piro on card and say, because all of medieval theology is really, it really exists for the purpose of communion with God and fostering communion with God in the world, especially through sacred scripture, and through the sacraments. And so the teaching of the ology is kind of situated on that almost monastic trajectory between the contemplation of the Word of God and communion with Jesus Christ, who is the word of God. And so all the way back as far as the beginning of the 12th century, in the School of Lown, you have a pattern of theological education developing, where you begin by reading the Word of God you begin by reading Sacred Scripture and reflecting on it, then bringing in the traditions to bear on whatever biblical text you're reading, allowing theological questions to kind of bubble up and bubble over from that reading, and then trying to resolve those questions. Now the point of doing all of that was all of that was ultimately ordered, not towards an end in itself, like an academic in itself, but to the preaching of the Word of God, and the salvation of souls. And so whereas, you know, the, the particulars of that could change and develop as you move out of the cathedral schools into the university, that same basic shape held. And it's summarized in the famous trio of Alexio, disputed SEO and credit cards to reading or lecture on, on a on a particular text, disputation, where you try to resolve questions that arise over that text, and then the preaching of the Word of God, to which the discussion and the reading and the disputation of that text was always ordered. So Peter Lombard sentences arose out of the practice of dispute, Tatsuo and because as people had been doing this for several decades, I mean, they raised eat, they eat, sometimes you keep bumping into the same kinds of questions over and over again, and you raise a lot of them. So folks started to write them down. And they would write down the answers. And so you know, from these disputations would arrive, arrive, or excuse me, arise these written products, which we call Sumi supportable Summa, as you know, so. And Peter lumbars book of sentences was one of those. The thing about Pierre Lambert's book of sentences, though, is that it was so well done. It was so comprehensive, it was so insightful that it kind of came to a place of prominence of its own authority just for being such a well done tech No, not that it resolved every question. Oftentimes, it raises more questions than it resolves. But neither did say Agustin resolve every question that he ever asked, and he became the center of the Western theological tradition and arguably still is. So in the beginning of the 13th century, as the influence of Peter Lombard sentences began to pick up steam. Folks would, were already beginning to write commentaries on the text of Peter Lombard sentences, and admittedly, there was a little tension here, there were people who got frustrated with the idea that people were commenting on the text of the sentences instead of Sacred Scripture. But the idea behind the sentences commentary was always that it led back to Sacred Scripture. So Bonaventure, in his sentence is commentary, you know, has this beautifully Aristotelian way of putting it he says, the sentences are sub alternated to Scripture. So in, in, in, in 13th, century, Aristotelian ism, that process of sub alternation or that idea, excuse me of sub alternation, is you know, when one science receives its principles from a higher science, you know, so like physics receives its principles from math and engineering, from physics, and so on and so forth. And so one of interest is that the sentences are subordinated to Scripture, the idea basically being that the sentences should eventually erase themselves as you've disputed the questions on scripture, okay, when you once you've resolved them, you should move into the preaching of the Word of God.

But in the in the, over the course of the 13th century, these sentences commentaries really did take on a life of their own. And you can see them if you if you dive into them. And I would recommend any student of medieval theology, spend time with the sentences, commentaries, you can see how that would take place. Well, one person writes a commentary on the sentences, the next guy comes along to write a commentary on the sentences. And he's got the other guy's commentary on the sentences. So now he's got all those questions and the next guy come on, eventually, you develop multi layer. So by the end of the 13th century, the sentences commentaries they couldn't, they couldn't hardly usually get through an entire one. Because what you would say on each question, you've now have to deal with so much material and I think that that's something that any doctoral student in theology today can relate to, you pick a theological question and even just to deal with the literature that's bubbled up in the last 1020 30 years, feels like a lot. And it's the same thing in 13th century Paris. The difference is that, you know, there, like I said, their academic endeavors were really fundamentally rooted in the spiritual project of searching out communion with God in the world, through their academic labors, contemplating Jesus Christ, the wisdom of God. And I'd like to say that that's one way in which they can challenge us today is to always take these questions back to our spiritual lives and back to the evangelizing mission of the church.

Charles Kim 14:50

Yeah, yeah, no, that's it's very helpful. Yeah, that yeah, they when you put put that tripartite like to dispute talk to piety, Katsuo thought all that You know, that definitely makes sense. And it's helpful to remember that that's ultimately what all of this is geared towards. And I guess one of the things about the introduction of Aristotle into the universities and why there was some hubbub about that is because it felt like maybe, maybe everybody, everything was being relegated just to just be taught to write. So if you have, and people were just kind of doing philosophy, and they weren't doing theology, they weren't ultimately sub alternating it back to Scripture, or they weren't taking the next step of going into private Katsuo or evangelizing they weren't trying to make the next move. It was the dispute, it seems almost like under the influence of certain writers and commentators on Aristotle that maybe, you know, it was just just to be taught to for this to be thought to sake,

Jacob W. Wood 15:47

yeah, you do end up seeing that, especially at the end of the 13th century, as you know, instead of the sentences commentary, the quad, a liberal question becomes the sort of preferred method of doing theology by the end of the 1200s. You know, frankly, the sentences, commentaries and got so complicated by that point, it was just easier to resolve things in a disputed question. But actually going back to the beginning of the 13th century, and this is something I deal with a little bit at the beginning of the book, you, you have the introduction of more Aristotelian learning into the university, and almost immediately a problem arises. Now the problem at the beginning of the 13th century is not what Aristotle was saying, per se. It's the fact that people are so fascinated by this new material, most of which is philosophical, that they just spent too much time do, you know, studying it, that they started to neglect their other duties. So the parish priests were neglecting preaching, the monks were neglecting their Lectio Divina. And so whereas sometimes you get this sense, in the, in today's academic literature, that the church was like, really closed off to Aristotle, because it was somehow, you know, Aristotelian learning was threatening, you know, Christian beliefs. That's just not true. It was more of the case that folks were just so overly interested in this stuff that they were spending all their time studying it and neglecting their other duties. That's not to say that there weren't times at which philosophical ideas were found to be that were that were coming into coming into vogue were found to be difficult to reconcile with Christian theology. So there's tension as the 13th century rolls on about Abba Sena and divine illumination. In the 1230s and 40s. There's tension about Aveiro ways and the relationship between the soul and the body or the eternal or the question of the eternity of the world and 1260s and 70s, ultimately, leading to the condemnation and condemnation of Paul 70. itself. 77. Okay, but really, you know, by and large, Christian thinkers were very, very passionately open to the incorporation of all this new learning that was being made available to them at the beginning of the 13th century. So one of the things I point out in the book is that, you know, we hear so much about in medieval theology about the so called condemnations of Aristotle, 1210 1215, and 1231. But if you read them carefully, right, the earlier ones have this kind of pastoral rationale behind them, we want to, we want to bring it back and focus our attention on moving from the Word of God to the preaching of the Word of God. And actually, the last one isn't really a condemnation at all. It's part of a an administrative and bureaucratic process of opening up the universities to the study of air. So So one of the things that I that I show in the book is that, in that period from 1231, onward, because the University of Paris had been closed from 1229 to 1231, it would have been foolish for them to really restrict the study of Aristotle, they wouldn't have had any students, students were going other places, to study to study these works that they wanted to study, they were actually opening up in a really major way to the study of all of these different texts. And you and if you actually sit down and read the texts from the 1230s and 40s, you see that that's exactly what they're doing. They're wrestling with the questions being raised by these philosophical texts. But now in a way that doesn't distract from the evangelizing mission that theology is supposed to be ordered to, but in a way that they're attempting to to direct this now towards that mission.

Charles Kim 19:36

Yeah, we had my friend Ben winter, who talks who wrote on Bonaventure for his dissertation, and he talks a lot about what you were just describing in terms of it's not the Bonaventure was anti Aristotle, it's or philosophy altogether, it's just that he always wanted it geared towards the proper ends as you were just saying the proper ends of preaching the Word and and communion with God. And so he was, you know, and which was, which was interesting again, like, you know, my primary focus has been earlier than this. But I learned a lot from Ben. So I suggest listeners, go check out that episode if you want to lean more on Bonaventure, because we're about to lead back towards Aristotle here before or excuse me, Aquinas, before long. And again, my apologies for mixing up the eight names. But one thing this made me maybe think about a little bit. So we've been talking a lot about the influence of Aristotle here. And it's not that there was no Aristotle, prior to the early 13th centuries, it was just that more and more texts were becoming available. But one, one phrase that's become popular in theological circles recently is Christian Platonism. And it sort of made a kind of, there's kind of a revival of interest in the influence of Plato, which, you know, I think, is beneficial in a lot of ways. I would say I, you know, we had Hans bear smile on, he talked a lot about Christian Platonism, Philip Carey, was on the show, and he has his sort of his criticisms of elements of Christian Platonism. But could we talk about a Christian Aristotelianism? of it is, is it should or, you know, wherever we want to put the emphasis, you know, or an Aristotelian Christianity or something? I don't know. However, you want to deal with those back and forth, like so, you know, so for the 13th century? Is it more Aristotle than it is Plato? And to what extent are any of these kinds of, you know, mixes and matches helpful with philosophers? And the term Christianity?

Jacob W. Wood 21:38

Wow, such a big question, I'm gonna do my best here. So let's, let's start by making some distinctions. So we can start with the question of, to what extent are people reading the texts of Plato versus getting platonic thought, mediated through other thinkers. So the texts of Plato themselves are not, are not always circulating, as widely as say, the texts of Aristotle are coming to circulate. So when we talk about a Christian Platonism, we're in a 13th century, we're usually talking about a sort of general platonic outlook on the world, on God, and on the spiritual life. But that's mediated through folks like Augustine, you know, he looms large for all of these discussions. The the Neo, the Christian Neoplatonic tradition, so texts like pseudo Dionysius, which were extremely authoritative for theologians, in by the, by the time of the mid 20th century, and then on through into the 13th century, we're looking at, you know, various forms of Arabic, Neo Platonism. And even at that, by the time you start talking about Arabic, Neo Platonism, and what you're really talking about just philosophy, right, and, you know, people will say, like, all philosophy is footnotes to Plato. And in some respects, that's true. I mean, these these traditions take on a life of their own as as thinking about the same questions continues down through the ages. And then when you talk about the same thing is true when you talk about Aristotelianism. You know, we can talk about the reading of the texts of Aristotle. So and those are becoming more and more available over the course of the 13th century, although you know, that that process continues down all the way into the work of say, William Murray, Becca in the in the 1260s. In particular, he's generating a lot of texts that Aquinas is using, so but that's very late and Aquinas his career, we can talk about Aristotelian in the Christian tradition. And there's different avenues that this takes to get into the 13th century. So people don't always realize that a lot, a fair bit of Christian Aristotelianism found its way into the 13th century through the work of John dam machine. Because damn machines relying on Maximus, the confessor, Maximus, the Confessor has got a fair bit of Aristotelian thought that he's that he's working with. And so there's like this back door to Aristotelianism, through Dan machine in in the 12th century, which is why it will it's in part why when Aristotle really, you know, drops in the beginning towards the beginning of the 13th century, the seedbeds already been prepared a little bit through through the work of Dan machine. But the reflections on that, and then we can talk about, you know, the the Arabic Aristotelian 's who are, you know, I called them Neo Arabic Neo Platanus before, but or Aristotle also looms large in the Arabic tradition as well. So you have that tension between more Neoplatonic texts like the Libra houses, and then more Aristotelian texts, like you find in the work of avocent are very pleased when they're especially when they're commenting directly on the text of Aristotle. So the whole question of Christian Platonism versus Christian Aristotelian ism is this complex coming to terms with in the 13th century with all of these different sources is. And so it's hard to say well, one person's completeness and one person's interested. I mean, we can talk about Bonaventure, for whom Plato is extremely important, and he does reference Plato directly, because Bonaventure thought a lot about formal causality, and the relationship between the divine ideas and creation, right in the divine ideas, in a way, pointing specifically to the wisdom of God and to Jesus Christ as the word of God is ultimately the formal exemplar cause of all of creation.

That sounds really platonic. On the other hand, we have to remember that Bonaventure went through the entire standard course of study at the university and of Paris, and was very well versed in 13th century Aristotelianism. Or we can talk about somebody like Thomas Aquinas, you know, who's the focus of the book, where, obviously, Aquinas is wrestling with an appropriating a number of different Aristotelian ideas. But on the other hand, not to the exclusion of things that, you know, he's getting from Augustine, pseudo Dionysius, et cetera. And in many ways, when you look at nature, grace and the desire for God, these three topics that I'm dealing with, I would say that it's hard to pin Aquinas down on always just politeness or he's just Aristotelian. Because ultimately, I think what he's trying to do is integrate what he's receiving, from this, these from his encounter with Aristotelian texts into the Augustinian tradition, where Plato had been so very, so very influential. And so one of the things I talked about at towards the beginning of the book is when you look at the conversation that Aquinas is really jumping into, that's what it's a conversation about, we have this kind of Christian Platonism, through Augustine, looking at purgation and spiritual sense, and the question of the desire for God and how it leads us, ultimately to the beatific vision. And there's, you know, the way that Augustine thinks about nature, which is just how God made us. So God made us with grace, grace, then when he said, You talked when, when Augustine is talking about what's natural, he's thinking, well, it's natural for us to have grace, because that was God's intention for us when He made us. And now we're going to put that intention with an Aristotelian understanding of nature, which is teleological, which looks at our powers and looks at the ends towards which they're ordered and tries to deduce from them, or rather induce the nature that the ends towards which our nature is ordered. And so going back to Philip, the chancellor in the 1230s, and then carry on forward to Aquinas and the 1250s. And then all throughout Aquinas his career, we're really trying to figure out is there a way that we can integrate these two approaches to what it means to be a human person? And then how do we sort out the entire nexus of questions that arises when we try to do that, about the gratuity of grace, the integrity of human nature? In itself, you know, the question of natural goodness versus supernatural goodness, the question of, to what extent sin corrupts natural goodness or doesn't grow up natural goodness, all these kinds of questions are in play for the 13th century thinkers, and they're kind of trying to sort them out as time goes on.

Charles Kim 28:18

Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's immensely helpful. And as someone who again, specializes a little bit earlier, we well, this came up with Ben Hi gherkin, who wrote on Maximus the Confessor, but but are even stoic ideas that were influential on Maximus. And so it's also sort of interesting to just think about, you know, trying to use one of these labels Platanus, Aristotelian stoic? Usually, they, they didn't want to be called epicurean of any sort. But even even though some of but, but you know, that's kind of like what's in the firmament, I guess one could say, or what sort of in the water in the air of the, like, patristic period is all of these ideas are kind of All Mixed Up mixed together. And it's even hard to sort out, you know, where exactly is it coming from? And I think your question or point about, you know, what exactly are they referencing is not even as it's not even necessary to, like, point out exactly what they read, just because a lot of these ideas become merged. And they're being used at various ways by various people.

Jacob W. Wood 29:26

Yeah, absolutely. So it's a, it's a complex tradition. And I think, you know, we, we tend in our minds, it's always easy to frame something in a simple dichotomy. So it's, it's Platanus or it's Aristotelian, it's Franciscan or it's Dominican. And one of the things that I learned as I was doing the research for this book is how important it is to just take a big eraser. Erase all those dichotomies from our mind and just try as best we can to piece together the conversation that they were actually having. Now it's true if you go into the end of the 13th century. So after Aquinas is dead in 1274, you'll get the 12, late 12, the mid to late 1270s, and the 1280s, some of these dichotomies do start to kind of firm up, because people intentionally start to identify with one or another approach to theology, Franciscan or Dominican, Augustinian or Aristotelian. And these distinctions start to firm up. So you think of somebody like Godfrey of Fontana, who was pretty intentionally Aristotelian, versus somebody like Henry of Ghent, who was pretty intentionally Augustinian. So you, you start to see these distinctions after Aquinas is dead, but we have a habit. And I say, we like scholars have a habit of reading those kinds of dichotomies back into the middle of the 13th century where they don't belong. So one of the one of the things I point out in the book is that if you go if you want to just look at Aquinas on his own terms in his own life, and you look at his commentary on the sentences when he becomes a student at the University of Paris, a bachelor the sentences, what I found, and I found it more and more subsequently, is that when Aquinas was commenting on the sentences, he was basically using on aventures commentary on the sentences as an index to what was going on at Paris. Because if you if you really think about Aquinas his life, he turns up in Paris and tall 52. And he's expected to lecture on the sentences, and he had never, ever heard a complete commentary on the sentences before his life. And just let that sink in. Because we talked a little bit earlier about how this conversation about the sentences had picked up steam already by Aquinas. This time, there were many layers to the Parisian conversation, so he's just supposed to jump in. And if you know, he, maybe he's only heard lectures on a couple of books. So Bonaventure, had been in Paris for so many years, he knew the whole tradition, Aquinas is basically using him as as a handy index, to get to jump into this conversation that he was not necessarily ever fully part of before. And that means that there's just just this tremendous cross pollination between Christian Platonism and Christian Aristotelian ism. If we want to use those terms between Franciscan theology and Dominican theology, if we want to use that distinction. It's really one conversation throughout a lot of acquaintances life, that only becomes bifurcated, you know, around the time of the end of his career and after his death.

Charles Kim 32:33

Right. Well, yeah, that's, that's very helpful, um, you know, move, just kind of moving on, we don't have to spend much time on this. My one of my questions, one of the things I was thinking about, as I was reading through this, just is the influence of Muslim and Jewish commentaries on Aristotle. And as a kind of interesting interfaith dialogue, you could say, except for sort of interfaith dialogue around Aristotle, I guess. But it just sort of was interesting how, how that, just that fact, like, some people might think, you know, Medieval Period, close minded, Dark Ages, whatever. But it's always important to remember that, you know, it was it was through Islam, and through other Jewish commentaries in Spain, that we have a really good idea of what Aristotle's thinking, and Aquinas is reading some of these people as well, to get a better handle on what, what he thinks Aristotle is doing before he makes his move towards the Thea, you know, the illogical moves on them. So, anything you want to sort of speak to on that? I guess I don't want to make too much of it. But it was just, it was just interesting.

Jacob W. Wood 33:46

Well, I think that actually, you know, what Aquinas is doing really challenges us challenges us, in our own contemporary cultural moment today. If you look at the beginning of the Summa contra gente lays, and Aquinas is talking about how you go about half carrying on a theological discussion with somebody, right? And he says, well, any theological discussion has to take place on the basis of shared principles. So if you're, if you're talking to somebody of, you know, another Christian, Christian community, well, you you share principles based upon the Old and New Testament. So you can have arguments based upon the whole of Sacred Scripture. If you're talking to a member of the Jewish people, well, you share a common faith in the Old Testament. So you can have a theological argument based upon the text of the Old Testament. And then Aquinas says, Well, what if you're talking to somebody who doesn't share belief in a common text with you? And he says, well, such a person nevertheless shares a common nature with you. Right? We're all human beings, and we all have within ourselves a human intellect, and that human intellect is illumined by God with the first principles of speculative reasoning. And so we all wherever we take our thought, subsequently, we all have a similar starting point, we have the first principles of speculative reasoning in our minds, and we have an encounter with the creation that God has made in our bodies. And so on that basis of having the same nature, having minds that are illumined with the same principles, and being at work and being reflected in the same world, we can have a common conversation. And it's on that basis that Aquinas says In the beginning of the Summa contra scintillates, that we should, we can even begin our discussions with people that don't share any faith with us at all. And so that provided the kind of outlook provided Aquinas with a strong reason to just go ahead and read and engage with him to devour learning from wherever he could find it, from whom ever he could find it. There's a real humanism, of learning that that engenders. But I think that challenges us today, because with the identity politics that have taken over so much of our cultural and now it's becoming more and more taking over our academic discourse, I don't think that as a culture, we believe that anymore, right? That there are common principles of reasoning in our nature, that there are common experiences in the world, that allow us to have a common conversation with people of different groups, different cultures, and different experiences. We're kind of locked now, or we're getting locked in these power struggles between different ideological groups. And Aquinas challenges us to remember that we're all we're all we're all members of the same human nature. And we can all have a, we can all have a shared conversation based upon that nature. And that's a message I think, that our culture and our world really needs to hear. Are you looking

Charles Kim 36:58

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Jacob W. Wood 38:38

Yeah. So I think I want to answer this question. I want to bring it back to the book and talk about the natural desire for God. Because there's, in my own, in my own thinking about this question and reading about this question and praying about this question. I've been through a lot of different stages in my own thinking. When I first came at the question, it was through reading, reading the work of de lubok, Augustinian ism and modern theology, mystery, the supernatural. And when you first encountered the lubok, it's, it's intoxicating. He is such a good writer. And he knows the Christian tradition so well. And he writes with such rhetorical forcefulness that you kind of get caught up in you get caught up in the argument and so when I first came at the question, it was like yes, I see exactly what he's saying. You know, we've got this desire for the beatific vision and what's what's with all these homeless, who are who are trying to distract us from that and creating a secular world and then as I went through graduate school, and I got more familiar with the domestic tradition, I flip flop the other way. And I was like, I was thinking to myself yeah, wait, what's what these blue blocky and is trying to destroy the gratuity of nature and all the all the all the important insights that Aquinas is brought to bear on our understanding of human nature, the integrity of human nature. And then that branches out into other questions like the integrity of human reason, the integrity of human societies apart from the church. So there's that whole Church State angle as well. But then again, there was a third stage for me, which was when I was writing this book, and I set myself this challenge of saying, okay, you know, at the, at the beginning of Lawrence fine gold's book, he says, Well, there's all these different texts of Aquinas on the natural desire for God. And they're really difficult to reconcile, because they seem to say, at times, contradictory things. And nobody had yet at that point, taken up the challenge of trying to figure out historically why that was. And so find gold does an unparalleled job at going through the atomistic commentators and looking at how many hundreds of years of Thomas have tried to sort out those questions. And but I wanted to set for myself the challenge of figuring out why those texts of Aquinas historically Why did they lie the way that they do at different points in his career? Why do they say the things that they say? Why do they make the moves they make? And why do they, at times seem to contradict themselves? And so I, what I wanted to do was tell the story of Aquinas as a human thinker. And so here's another thing. When I, when I began the study of Aquinas, for myself, I would say that, as much as I was historically attuned, I still had within me the seeds of that very common attitude. You know, Song two's, Tomas, Sam pair, locally tour for Molly tear, right? It's like Thomas, Thomas always speaks formally, he has this, this perfect insight into Christian wisdom that just pours forth onto every page. And he just says the same thing over and over again, you know, maybe a little bit more in depth here in depth there. But he kind of always speaks like somebody who's got it all put together. But what I encountered in the writing of this book was Thomas, the humble saint, who was trying to think these questions out over the course of his career, and to actually, you know, had he and I went through a similar experience that the one that he did, in the beginning of his career, he was thinking in a very much Aristotelian way, about human nature, that we have a natural desire, that our human powers are ordered towards this natural knowledge and natural love of God. But that over the course of Aquinas his career, he became more and more Augustinian. And he tried to use this Aristotelian learning to explain the Augustinian Latin Christian experience of the world.

And so for myself, I kind of went on that journey with Aquinas, and I ended in the same place that I think Aquinas ended, which is when he came to see that our natural desire for God isn't just for naturally achievable goods, but it also isn't like a straight shot to the Beatific Vision, like the lubok would, would would would kind of leave you with the impression that he was saying, it's something altogether different. Aquinas basically says that Augustine is desire for happiness, if you want to evaluate that, in Aristotelian terms, isn't as natural desire for the fulfillment of our potency, or potential insofar as as possible. So, if God were to take us and just kind of leave us as human creatures with that, we would take it as far as we could, the natural knowledge of God, and the natural love of God. And that gives us a way to start thinking about what is human nature in itself? What can human nature achieve in itself? And what can human society achieve in itself? It gives us a way to think about the integrity of nature, but that it God chooses to give us grace that transforms our desire because it makes more things possible for us in a concrete sense. It makes the theological virtues possible for us and it makes the beatific vision possible for us. So that same desire, which is seeking for the for the fulfillment of our potential insofar as possible, carries us now under the influence of grace transformed all the way to the beatific vision. And I think that in that way, Aquinas describes with really penetrating philosophical insight. What Agustin encountered and you know, all the way back as far as the confession is that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. And we're born with this desire that can only be fulfilled by God, but we're not born knowing where that desire is ultimately fulfilled.

Charles Kim 44:52

Yeah. Yeah, that's very that's what Yeah, very good. Very well said. Um, so I'll, you know, as I was, as I was learning to think with Aquinas throughout your work, it was interesting to hear your description of Thomas's ability to be concerned with one one, what one might call philosophical errors, or theological errors, and trying to get the making system makes sense. So without, you know, with avoiding pitfalls on either side, and I think it's attributed to Erasmus, but you know, sometimes people will say that medieval theology is angels dancing on the head of trying to figure out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, like I said, I think I've heard that that's actually Erasmus, who was the first one to say that, and it's a joke, of course. But, you know, but when I like I said, as I as I was, as I was sort of following you along, explaining Aquinas, I kept thinking of it as a craftsman fine tuning is understanding. So could you say something about just about what it's like to learn to think with Aquinas about these questions of nature, grace and the desire for God and how He kind of works through sort of his particular problematic philosophical errors, and then maybe theological errors. And even that dichotomy between philosophy and theology was sort of interesting, because it's all within the mind and thinking of one man like so, you know, in some sense, we could call it philosophical. And some sense, we call it the illogical, but actually, you know, that that's just one way a sort of shorthand, because he was still trying to just make one coherent argument, and really one coherent, ultimately one coherent understanding of God.

Jacob W. Wood 46:35

Yeah, so I think the first thing I want to say is that, just in that very endeavor, Aquinas offers us something today that we sorely need in theology, I think theology today has become extremely apophatic. And it look apparatus ism is great, and it has its place. And it's important because we always have to remember that we, you know, God is always more not what we say that he is what we say. Right? He always, he always stands beyond our own formulations. But you can take that too far, in a direction that basically suggests that we're never going to say anything true about God, that the contemplation of God, whereas it may make us love more, doesn't make us know more. And I think across the board in the 13th century, and in Aquinas, especially, we see something different. We see, we see a profound reflection on the fact that Christ is the wisdom of God, and the power of God. And that one of the gifts that God offers us, especially through you know, the holy gift to the Holy Spirit, is the gift of wisdom. Now, Aquinas is careful to distinguish the wisdom that we gain through theological study from the infused gift of wisdom. But it's still wisdom that we gain in theological study, it's still a deeper and more penetrating understanding of things that are true about God, about God's action in the world, and about God's action in our very own lives. So I think what Aquinas was doing what the medievals were doing in general, was trying in many ways to just get a better understanding of God, and about his action in the world and of his action in our lives. And in the reason that they expended so much academic energy on this, is because they thought that at the end of the day, there was a payout from that. And it wasn't just that they learned to love God better, but that they learn to know God better too. Because the better you know, someone, the more you can love them. So I think that what you see in Aquinas is somebody who works on these questions so carefully, and so, so delicately. Because he believes that what he's doing is bringing him closer to God. And He offers us in that a model of growing closer to God, your theological study. And so seen in that light, you're absolutely right, you know, Aquinas, he, he thinks about these, which seemed to us almost my new issues very carefully, but I love the image, you brought up a Craftsman, you know, think of somebody crafting a marble statue. Right? It's a huge, massive work, and yet, they have to spend a lot of time chiseling away a little bit over here, a little bit over there. Otherwise, it doesn't look as beautiful. Otherwise, it doesn't image what it's supposed to image as well. And I think that Aquinas is doing something just like that with a natural desire for God. He's honing it, he is chipping away at it over the course of his career, because he thinks that thinking about this is going to lead him closer to Christ who is the wisdom of God. Now in Aquinas his own life, you know, it wasn't just like he started with a general idea though and moved into some, you know, and just gradually made it more specific. There were there were some big turning point. It's in his life. And in that we see Aquinas, the saint who's has intellectual humility, who's not afraid to say, occasionally, hey, I was wrong, or, Hey, I missed something, and to make some big changes in his thought, either. So in the book identify, you know, there's there's several stages I couldn't, I couldn't go through all of them here on the podcast today. But I'll just make some generalizations. So the first one I mentioned at the beginning of his career, which looks very, very Aristotelian, when he talks about how we have this natural desire, we have a natural desire that moves to the natural knowledge of God. And we have what he calls a natural appetite, a passive openness to the beatific vision. By the Summa contra Gentiles glaze he's talking about he's he's connecting up the dots between that natural desire and that natural appetite, saying the natural desire is a desire for the fulfillment of our passive potential insofar as possible.

But then, as you move forward in his career, that synthesis starts to break down. And the way it starts to break down is through Aquinas is thinking about the relationship between the intellect and the will. Because of, you know, that that initial synthesis, I mean, it's beautiful when you see it in the zoom of countries and tillers, Aquinas gives like this entire entire system of how God illumines the agent, intellect, the agent, intellect illumines, the potential intellect, the potential intellect, arrives at the judgment of under under has a natural desire for knowledge. And it arrives at judgments through that natural through the fulfillment of that natural desire for knowledge, those judgments are the final cause of the motion in the will. And then the will commands the other powers in the soul. As these beautiful system top to bottom, he's got it all worked out, until he starts reading some of these new translations of Aristotle that are coming out from William of Merdeka. And in Mirvac, his translation of the day on Ma, it talks about how the the dependable object, the object itself moves the will. And that the will can be moved either when that object is presented to it by the intellect, or when that object is presented to it by the senses. And so now that beautiful system, that beautiful intellectualist system starts to break down. And then I talked about in the book, how there's a controversy over Oh, Aquinas develops a new way of approaching the motion of the world. But there's a controversy over that at the University of Paris, and he has to shift again and 1270 after the condemnation of intellectual determinism. And now he start saying that actually, the relationship between the intellect and the will is a little bit different, that God actually moves the will directly by a kind of instinct, us is the word of an inner prompting, he moves the will. And so Aquinas now again, you know, he through humility has to kind of rework a lot of his system, to deal with this complex fact that God both illumines the intellect, and moves the will. And then he does these things simultaneously. So now we start saying that the, the intellect is not so much the final cause of the wills motion, but the formal cause, but that the will itself is moved directly by God. And then our natural desire is prompted directly by God through the will. And so Aquinas, kind of, if you look at Aquinas, the human beings searching for wisdom, trying to grow closer to Christ, you see him over the course of his career engaging in this journey, which has all the pieces of the spiritual life, sometimes we feel like in our spiritual lives, we are, we're like, we're on the right track. And we're just kind of doing we're doing we're growing kind of gradually closer to God. But you know, fundamentally, we feel like we're on the right track. Sometimes there are these moments in our spiritual lives when things get a little unsettled. And we have to start on a new course. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Like maybe it's a vocational call, or maybe it's a cold into some New Apostolic labor, or maybe it's just something changes in our lives. And sometimes there are moments of, you know, that really kind of are discontinuous and upset what we're used to and call us to things that we're not comfortable with. And I see that all working out who all I see all of that kind of in play, and Aquinas is intellectual journey. First, you know, he begins with this kind of very Aristotelian synthesis. Then things start, you know, he feels like Okay, here it is. He's got the synthesis all in place in the Zuma country and telophase then it gets a little unsettled, we blended the 1260s with, you know, the new translation of the day on AMA, and then after the condemnation of intellectual determinism and 1270, which by the way, is almost at the end and the height of his career he has to rework again. And so, but Aquinas, the theologian is also Aquinas the same they're the same man. And so in humility, he continues to on Take this task and to grow closer to God by growing in theological wisdom.

Charles Kim 55:07

Well, that's yeah, that I think I could end on that. And I think you've said it really well. We're bumping up on time here. So I'll let you if there's anything else that you'd like to add, we did not get to spend too much time on on the heated loopback. But it's, of course, a very large book. So it's hard to have a conversation that touches on everything. So I don't know if there's anything that you'd like to add about, about Henri de lubac. Or if you we could just call it a day right here. I like to say, I think there's probably a lot to chew on from this conversation. Sure. So I'd like

Jacob W. Wood 55:43

to throw out something if I may, about Dubuc because I think I think the lubok two is a very is a figure that we can spend a lot of time with who, who really approached the study of theology in a similar way to Aquinas, de lubok, saw the study of theology very much as I think, a spiritual endeavor, and approached it from within the faith of the church from within, you know, growth and growing closer to Christ. When we approach the resource, mole figures, it's very common you hear okay, so they're going back to eyeball the father's and liturgy. And they're trying to overcome deviations that arose over the course of the theater, especially the early modern period in theology to kind of like leapfrog back over those to the original sources. And that's true for any number of resources among theologians. But it's not entirely true for delu, Bach, dilute Bach stands out among the resource among theologians, because he tried to work with the whole of the theological tradition. And, and so a lot of his recovery isn't restricted to the Bible, the fathers of the liturgy, but it involves the medievals, and it involves long lost early moderns, as well. And so I think what the lubok is trying to do is very similar to what Aquinas is trying to do, and having this holistic approach to using everything that's available to pursue a deeper understanding of the wisdom of God. And so, instead of seeing sort of Thomism, and resource mode theology as these political adversaries, I think, if we take, Aquinas is an delue, box, general outlook on theology to heart, what that challenges us to do is to do theology, with Christian charity for its every side in the theological debate, so that through a kind of generous consideration of all the available sources, we ourselves will grow in wisdom, and we ourselves will grow in charity in the study of theology. And so I don't, I don't think delue Bach, if he were with us on on on this plane of existence right now, I don't think he would want us to be rigid loop Hawkins, any more than Aquinas would want us to be rigid tonus. I think that both of them would want us to continue the work in our own lives that they pursued throughout the course of their own lives. And that was really the Animus behind the composition of this book. For me, we've got the Neo term Thomas versus the lubok, Ian's, and sometimes it looks like a theological war. But I wanted to go back to see how Aquinas chaired charitably, synthetically, and spiritually worked through the tradition as he received it to achieve some kind of reconciliation in his own life. I wanted to look at how delu Bach, in many ways did something similar, and I wanted to propose a potential resolution to the nature Grace debate that would push us here today, to draw upon the fruits especially of Aquinas and synthesis, so that we can move past the loggerheads that we so often arrive at in theology so that we can get back on track with the point of theology, which is so that we can grow closer to God through through growing in his theological wisdom, and also so that the church can preach the mission can fulfill its mission by preaching the good news of Jesus Christ, the wisdom of God in the world.

Charles Kim 59:29

My guest today has been Jacob wood, and he wrote to stir a restless heart, Thomas Aquinas, de lubok on nature, grace and the desire for God is now in paperback. So compared to many of the books that I review on this podcast, this one is actually more affordable. So I recommend to anyone to go out and learn with Aquinas and to Luboc and especially with Dr. Wood, about a little bit more about our own nature, God's grace and helping us to see him and And I've appreciated hearing your passion and and hearing your own sort of your own animus, your own desire for God as it was shaped and formed in the reading with these great luminaries. So thank you Dr. Wood. Thank you. This has been a history of Christian theology. My name is Chad Kim and I interviewed Dr. Wood on to start a restless heart. Please rate us review us on iTunes and get to like us on Facebook. And we're happy to hear from you. Thanks for listening.

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