Today in class many of you had questions about degrees of magisterial authority, and what Church Council are all about. This is not the topic of our current course, but in a way these questions could arise in every course, so we should try to work through them. We can get a good start in […]
Having learned what the Church teaches about the Trinity, now we turn back to St. Thomas Aquinas for help understanding that teaching. Aquinas will offer us a theoretical model for thinking about the Trinity, and our task will be to test his model against both the magisterium and Scripture. A good model should not only […]
With this class we shoot forward about a thousand years in our story, from Nicaea to Florence. There is no way to sum up a thousand years of history, but this 20-minute lecture will give you essential background for reading the text of this ill-fated ecumenical event. The central topic is, of course, the filioque. The […]
Now that we have spent a while with the Gospel of John, we are ready to turn to the Church’s magisterial meditation on God’s revelation. We begin Arius, an Alexandrian priest who thought it impious to say that the Son of God is co-eternal with the Father. Our reading includes two small texts from Arius […]
Until recently, we have focused on how philosophy can prepare the way for revelation. Now we have turned to revelation itself, and principally the Gospel of John, on our way to a consideration of the Trinity. In this lecture, I offer a general introduction to John’s Gospel that should complement what we have been doing […]
This will be our last class on the Compendium for a number of weeks. Last class we spoke about why the word “intelligent” or “intellect” can be said of God, and this time we follow it up with intellect’s inevitable companion: will. Because there was a lot of confusion about the notion of “intellect,” and […]
After all this build-up, we finally get to say something that feels very basic: God is intelligent. But by now we have learned how careful we have to be when we apply a name to God. Watch Aquinas go through the three steps: first, we find a perfection in creatures that seems applicable to God […]
In this reading we broach the very difficult question of whether we can talk about God at all. Given that we have three more years of Theology ahead of us in the curriculum, one hopes so. And yet the Church’s own councils have spoken of God as “ineffable” and “incomprehensible”; the Fourth Lateran Council declared […]
Last class we began to think about the infinity of God’s perfection. This time we round out our meditation by considering what perfections are found in God, and how. I’ve created a short audio recording covering all three chapters, but I hope it will be helpful. Click here to download or listen straight from this website […]
When we covered these chapters in class, I was tired and unclear. Students were heroic and energetic, eagerly pursuing the new realms of hamster deities and pop-tart cats, but the first two sections were a bit like a ship without a captain. Several of you asked me to record something about the two meanings of […]