IIC 173: Aristotle and Aquinas on Proper Self-Love

[00:00:00] Dr. Peter: All you need is love. The Beatles told us that in their 1967 chart-topping hit single, and then they switched it around and told us, love is all you need. And then in the three minutes and 48 seconds that the song lasted, they repeated the message 45 additional times. You know, just trying to get that message across, love is all you need. But John, Paul, George, and Ringo, they are echoing a message that is at least 24 centuries old in the history of philosophy, going all the way back to the ancient Greeks. In this podcast, we are focusing on flourishing, on thriving, on your flourishing, on your thriving, and not just with one or two parts, but across all your parts. And we are asking the deep questions, the important questions. What makes for a good life? The answer comes back to love. Let’s explore this. 

[00:01:06] Dr. Peter: Aristotle emphasizes the love of friendship or philia in Greek, and this is from Julia Annas. She says, “Aristotle gives five marks by which people find friendship. A friend then is one who 1) wishes and does good or apparently good things to a friend for the friend’s sake, 2) wishes the friend to exist and live for his own sake, 3) spends time with his friend, 4) makes the same choices as his friend, and 5) finds the same things pleasant and painful as his friend. But, argues Aristotle, all these marks are found paradigmatically in the good person’s relation to himself.” Aristotle says in Nicomachean Ethics, paragraph 1166, ” Each of these marks seems to belong to the person by virtue of his relationship to himself, and he relates to his friend as he does to himself, for the friend is another self.” So Aristotle’s emphasizing the importance of self friendship, of self love.

[00:02:31] Dr. Peter: And from Dr. Anthony Flood, we have this quote. “Thomas Aquinas identifies love as the source and summit of the life of each human being.” Dr. Flood goes on. “Thomas Aquinas characterizes much of human life in terms of three basic love relations: the love a person has for God, or simply the love of God, the love of self, and the love of neighbor. Love of self derives from a personal substantial unity. It is logically prior to love of neighbor and serves as a template for the latter.” So what Dr. Flood is saying here is that the way we love ourselves is a template for how we love our neighbor. He goes on, “If a person loves himself rightly, he will love others rightly. On the other hand, if he relates to himself through a disordered love, he can neither relate to others rightly nor enter into a deep union with them.” 

[00:03:28] Dr. Peter: So we are connecting the ancient of Aristotle with the medieval of St. Thomas Aquinas with the modern of IFS and Richard Schwartz of today. We’re gonna be bringing in all of these elements together. In episode 171, we discussed Socrates and Plato. Now we are bringing in Aristotle and also St. Thomas Aquinas, who drew so much of his philosophy, and in particular his metaphysics from Aristotle. Today we will be exploring how Aristotle understood the inner life of a human person, the multiplicity and the unity within the person. That unity within is critical for union, and we have this need to love ourselves so that we can love others. For both Aristotle and Aquinas, self-love in its highest form of self friendship leads to good self-governance.

[00:04:25] Dr. Peter: That’s a parallel in IFS terms to self-leadership. “There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship.” That’s from St. Thomas Aquinas, and he goes on, “Friendship is the source of the greatest pleasures, and without friends, even the most agreeable pursuits become tedious.” Anthony Flood says that, “For Aquinas, self-governance issues forth from self-love, or more precisely, it is simply a part of self-love. Actively willing and acquiring goods for oneself forms two of the essential properties of the love of self. Self-governance then becomes the chief means by which a person unites to others in love. In order for self-governance to manifest love rightly and consistently, a person must conform to the divine will.”

[00:05:18] Dr. Peter: Cardinal Schönborn in his commencement address on June 8th, 2002, to Thomas Aquinas College said, “I am convinced that St. Thomas Aquinas made friendship the central point of all his theological works by defining charity, doubtless the epitome of Christianity, as friendship. Friendship starts from looking externally and then looking internally.” And St. Thomas in the Summa said, “A man is not a friend to himself, but something more than a friend.” He said, you’re gonna love yourself one way or another. And this episode, this podcast, is all about you loving yourself in an ordered way so that you are better equipped to love God and your neighbor.

[00:06:19] Dr. Peter: I am Dr. Peter Malinoski, also known as Dr. Peter. I am your host in this Interior Integration for Catholics podcast. It is so good to have you with us. Welcome to you. Welcome to all your parts. I’m a clinical psychologist, a trauma therapist, a podcaster, a writer, the co-founder and president of Souls and Hearts. But most of all, I’m a beloved little son of God, a passionate Catholic who wants to help you to taste and to see the height and depth and breadth and warmth and the light of the love of God, especially God, your father, and also Mary, your mother, your spiritual parents, your primary parents, so that they can help you in turn with your human formation. ‘Cause we’re all about human formation here. And I’m here to help you embrace your identity as a beloved little child of God and Mary with all your heart, with all your parts.

[00:07:10] Dr. Peter: And throughout all of 2025, we are bringing in the insights of Internal Family Systems developed by Richard Schwartz, and we’re using other parts and system models as well. We’re harmonizing them with the truths of the Catholic faith so that you can live out the three great loves and the two great commandments to love God, to love your neighbor, to love yourself. That’s what this is all about, and I bring to you the best of Catholic professionals in the field as my expert guests to share with you what they know about how to make this happen, so that you can love wholeheartedly, that you can love with all your being, with all your parts, to love God, and to share in his joy, to share in his peace with all of your parts.

[00:07:55] Dr. Peter: This is episode 173 of the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast. It releases on September 1st, 2025, and it’s titled Aristotle and Aquinas on Proper Self-Love. We’re getting into the fascinating thought and work of Aristotle, how foundational he was, and especially how he influenced St. Thomas Aquinas. And I am excited to have back for this episode my dear friend and colleague, Dr. Eric Gudan, clinical psychologist in private practice. He’s the founder and director of Integritas Psychological Services. I talked a lot more about him in the intro in episode 171. Dr. Eric Gudan, dear friend, my brother in Christ, it is so good to have you back with us as co-host for this episode. So excited for you to be here. Thank you.

[00:08:47] Dr. Eric Gudan: I am happy to be here, Peter. Thank you.

[00:08:50] Dr. Peter: And Dr. Anthony T. Flood is a professor of philosophy at North Dakota State University. He is the author of two great books, the Root of Friendship and the Metaphysical Foundations of Love. Both with the Catholic University of America press, where he examines the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas on the nature of love and the life of the person. And what makes these books special is that Dr. Flood, he zooms in on the central role that the love of self performs in both integrating one’s own interior life, and also as serving as the basis for appropriately interacting with and loving others. It is a pleasure, it is an honor to have you back and I am so excited that we’re actually getting into the heart of what also most interests you. Like I know that you like Plato. I know that you like Socrates, but I think when we get into Aristotle and Aquinas, this is what really floats your boat. So it’s exciting to have you here with us as well.

[00:09:48] Dr. Anthony Flood: And I appreciate the invitation and I’m happy to be back. And yes, as I’m often told, sometimes I sit when I teach Plato, but I stand when I teach Aquinas.

[00:09:57] Dr. Peter: Well, we are in this episode where we are looking at how Aquinas drew from Aristotle. And so we’re gonna start with Aristotle and the parts of his work, especially in Nicomachean Ethics, about like what helps us to understand the interior life, what helps us to understand self-governance, self-love from an Aristotelian perspective, if we can kind of see what St. Thomas Aquinas was picking up on, especially as it relates to, you know, parts, multiplicity, systems thinking, you know, this capacity to love ourselves. And so yeah, I just kinda want you to take it away and like, help us understand this in a way that, you know, that we can digest. So.

[00:10:45] Dr. Anthony Flood: Okay. I’m always happy to talk about Aristotle. We talked about Plato last time. I think the important first thing to remember when talking about Aristotle is two things. He’s a student of Plato and while he doesn’t agree with Plato on a lot of key points, both metaphysics and otherwise, he characterizes ethics in the same sort of way, that we’re gonna begin with human flourishing. We all want flourishing. And all of our ethical thought is going to be structured around this question, what should we be doing in order to achieve the best possible life? So everything that you see in the Nicomachean Ethics begins with that starting point. And so when he does turn to friendship and those sorts of things of book nine, we’re still in that context of, what is a thick, robust, flourishing human life?

[00:11:39] Dr. Peter: Excellent, excellent. And that’s something that is as relevant today as it was 2,400 years ago. Right. So that’s something that we are certainly interested in at Souls and Hearts, because, yeah, this is all about thriving, it’s all about flourishing. It’s all about, you know, embracing the best life, the life that God would have us experience. And so, yeah, we’re not just gonna go off of our own experience and make it up. We’re gonna go to our tradition. So super excited about what Aristotle has to say about this and where Aquinas goes with it.

[00:12:14] Dr. Anthony Flood: Okay. Well, do you want me to just jump right in to what I want to say?

[00:12:19] Dr. Peter: Oh yeah. I want to hear.

[00:12:22] Dr. Anthony Flood: Just want to structure things as well here.

[00:12:24] Dr. Peter: I wanna hear what you have to say because I have, like I told you this in the last episode, I have so much respect for you. Like I said, this book, the Metaphysical Foundations of Love, just blew me away. And obviously that book is much more about Aquinas and so brings in more Aristotle and we were talking about Plato and Socrates last time. So, just really fascinated about these concepts around what does it mean to relate with ourselves in a way that leads to flourishing.

[00:12:53] Dr. Anthony Flood: Okay. Aristotle, earlier in the Nicomachean Ethics, he’s already talked about flourishing and happiness as the goal to which all of our actions are directed, and therefore we need to determine a rational plan for how to pursue that. But one of the other structuring elements, before even turning to the self, is that what it means to be a human being means to be in relation to others in some way or another. So he defines human beings as social animals or political animals is it sometimes translated. And Aquinas just says, all right, let’s split the difference. Let’s just call human beings social and political creatures, or social and political animals.

[00:13:37] Dr. Peter: So is Aquinas getting away from Boethius’ definition of the person as an individual substance of a rational nature? Because that doesn’t involve a lot of relationality in the way that I hear it.

[00:13:47] Dr. Anthony Flood: So yeah. So that would be, okay. That’s a very good question. So the technical difference there would be human nature for Aquinas and Aristotle would be, we are social and political animals, or social and political rational animals, because Aristotle sees these as two sides of the same coin. Boethius wants to address the question of what is it that makes an individual a person? Well, you know, what is the difference between this individual cup and me as an individual human being? And for Boethius, not just a question of, we have different natures. That one’s a cup and one’s a human being. There’s something else going on. When we talk about persons over and above nature, even if it’s human nature. And where Boethius is going, not to get too abstract, he’s trying to do it in terms of the divine Trinity of three persons in one divine substance. How’s that gonna work? But when it then gets applied to human beings, what the word person is going for, is what is it that makes us unique and unrepeatable, or incommunicable to use Aquinas’s word, even relative to other human beings? 

[00:15:07] Dr. Eric Gudan: It depends on his focus.

[00:15:08] Dr. Anthony Flood: You can think of it in terms of a simple value thing. This cup as cup is valuable, but if I were to break this cup, a new cup with the same sort of dimensions would serve that purpose. Right? Cups are inherently replaceable, so any individual that has the nature of cupness is gonna serve my needs. That’s not the case with human beings. Each human person is unique. So each person has a uniqueness and value somehow, over and against the nature. So somehow there’s a difference there.

[00:15:42] Dr. Anthony Flood: So to put that together, when Aquinas takes up Boethius’ definition of a person as an individual substance of a rational nature, what he’s saying is, for we human beings, we have the rational nature. And then when it becomes concretized as a distinct individual, it begins to take on a life of its own, if you will, to where there’s a unique personality. And that’s also why we can then use that definition of person for angels, God, anything with a rational nature. It doesn’t have to be a human being.

[00:16:14] Dr. Peter: Okay. All right. So getting into like this self-governance, self-love, tell us about what did Aquinas see in Aristotle that he said, I have to really zoom in on this. I have to bring this into the understanding of a human person from a Catholic perspective.

[00:16:35] Dr. Anthony Flood: I think what he sees in terms of the larger tradition, but Aristotle in particular, this idea of flourishing as the starting point. But more particularly when Aristotle talks about friendship, he talks about friendship, not only as absolutely essential to flourishing, that’s why he’s talking about it. But when he gets into friendship, he talks about the friend as another self. This is Aristotle now, the way that you relate to yourself somehow in friendship, that gets transferred exteriorly to another person, to where you begin relating to that person, in the same way that you relate to yourself, which is different from how we relate to every other thing in our life, right? So I relate to the cup. This cup’s gonna get a lot of mileage today. I relate to this cup in a variety of ways, but at no point do I treat it like an extension of myself in any way whatsoever, right? I just don’t, it’s something to be used. It might be, if we’re talking about a work of art, it might be something to be admired. I mean there’s all sorts of different ways we relate to things, but never do we relate to another thing as another self except in friendship. And so Aristotle really thinks that reveals something about only the nature of what a friendship is gonna be, but what it means to be the self who’s entering into that relation with a friend.

[00:18:04] Dr. Eric Gudan: That type of thing, person who would do that.

[00:18:06] Dr. Anthony Flood: And I think that’s what Aquinas really picks up on is, we can actually use the nature of friendship to learn about the nature of our interior life. And I’m gonna draw a distinction that maybe gets into the weeds, but you tell me. So the whole tradition is very good at talking about the objective nature of what it means to be a human being. So we have a soul and we have a body, and we have an intellect, and we have a will and we have emotions. In other words, sort of think of it as a philosophical, scientific understanding of a human person looked at from without.

[00:18:44] Dr. Anthony Flood: So the human being’s on the examination table. And we can figure out the nature of what it is to be human by examining this thing in the same way that we can figure out the nature of a cat or a dog, or, you know, we observe it, we do this, we do that. Well, what there’s less of is a turning within and sort of unpacking, what’s it mean to exist as a living human being? What’s it mean to exist subjectively? What’s it like to have an interior life? What does that look like?

[00:19:17] Dr. Eric Gudan: So isn’t this similar to the distinction you were making about the Boethius’ definition and the Aristotelian understanding. Like the individual, which is kind of separated and distinct, where we’re looking on its own, the person or the cat, whatever, analyzed on its own. And then what the actual experience embodied, what it is in living, must be for us in society, a political animal, political rational animal.

[00:19:43] Dr. Peter: And this reminds me too, it’s kinda like what we did with Plato, right? We looked at those five cities and the way they were governed, that’s an external representation that somehow reflects the internal experience, right? So it’s the same kind of thing, I think was what you’re saying.

[00:19:57] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yeah. And so this idea of an individual substance of a rational nature as what a person is, well, now the next step is what does that look like from the inside? What does it mean to exist as a human person? Not from somebody else looking at you, but you looking at yourself, right? So looking at it from within. Now, what you don’t find in the older tradition, including Aquinas, is what I call philosophical selfies. I mean, you don’t have philosophers who like to take pictures of themselves and talk about, so there’s this odd sort of penetrating analyses of human nature and human experience. But the philosopher never wants to talk about himself because it’s almost as if, well, there’s a little something uncouth about that. There’s just something, we don’t wanna dwell on ourselves, so we don’t wanna inject ourselves into the conversation with these analytical discussions. But at the same time, if you’re talking about the very nature of the self, particularly from this first person perspective, you have to talk about yourself. So how do you do it? Well, here’s where I think Aquinas is clever. And I fully admit there are other scholars of Aquinas who would disagree with me on this, but I think the texts of Aquinas support what I’m going to say, and I’m not the only one who says it.

[00:21:25] Dr. Anthony Flood: Aquinas uses friendship, particularly his first sketch by Aristotle. He uses friendship as a way to talk about his own self or the self from a first person singular perspective. And how does he do that? Well, he does it this way. He says friendship with another person, when a friend becomes another self, that’s an effect, that’s a consequence of the way that you first relate to yourself, interiorly. In other words, the cause of friendship is you and the other person. And the actual friendship is the effect of that, is that which is produced by it. And in terms of the terminology that I use and that Aquinas uses, the way that you love yourself becomes the cause of the effect of friendship when you’re loving another. Okay, well, that means we can actually talk about the nature of friendship, not having to be talking about ourselves. We can just talk about the objective nature of friendship in a very dry, analytical way. But then Aquinas makes this move, he says, but notice all of the essential properties of friendship, those are found in a deeper, more fundamental way in how you relate to yourself. And so I think it’s his way of getting around the philosophical selfie problem. He doesn’t need to sit there talking about himself. He can be talking about what it’s like to experience a friend and then say, oh, by the way, everything that’s relevant and noteworthy about that, that’s found in you and how you relate to yourself. And then when he turns to the spiritual life, he’ll say, and that’s how you experience God. I mean, there’s gonna be ways of God manifesting with a divine friendship. So I think that’s the key part of Aristotle is he is going to use it as a framework, as a point of departure, that the properties of friendship are actually a nice way of talking about the properties of self-love and how you relate to yourself and what it is to live subjectively from within as a human person.

[00:23:41] Dr. Eric Gudan: And Tony, you describing it seems like it’s more than just simply a template. So self-love, for friendship, is not simply the template or a pattern, but it’s also the dynamism. It’s the impelling force by which you’re able to do this. Correct? Because you’re saying, yeah.

[00:23:59] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yeah. So, for Aquinas, the more you love yourself properly, the more your love is going to want to move, in a sense, out of yourself, toward another. So the more inclined you’ll be to enter into friendships, the more that you love yourself properly. That also is true in reverse. The more that you fail to love yourself properly, the more that you have wicked self-love, the more that turns into a increasing selfishness and pride where you’ll have little interior reason to seek friendship. Because friendship is always going to involve some sort of self-giving, some sort of setting aside of your immediate interest for the sake of the other. And the more selfish you are, the more you’re going to have a natural, deterrent to engaging in that. It’s why self-love is so important, that all of us are going to have it. It’s just a matter of which way do we go with it? Do we cultivate it properly do we let it go in the other direction?

[00:25:05] Dr. Eric Gudan: Yeah, how that is conducted and carried forth. I have a association of thought here, but I wonder if it’s taking us afield, about the self-love and even dysphoria, depression, and just when we are so discouraged and feel bad and there’s a pattern that is created of a lower degree of energy. And one of the best pieces of advice you can encourage somebody who’s feeling really sorrowful, it’s like, it’s really good to be around people who care about you. You need to get outta your dark room and out engaging with people. But when we are in that state of frustration and unhappiness, it takes a lot to overcome the inertia of us being upset with how we feel, where we are, to engage with, to be a friend, and to allow others to be friends to us.

[00:25:50] Dr. Anthony Flood: Right. And that would be the other element of friendship. So I keep talking about it from sort of the lover’s perspective of the beloved, if you wanna think about that, that for Aristotle, the friend, the beloved is the other self. But then that turns around, right? Because in a friendship, you are also the beloved. You’re also the other self of the lover in that case. And by lover and beloved, I don’t mean necessarily romantic relationships, just that’s the way Aristotle and Aquinas talk about any friendship, you have a lover and a beloved.

[00:26:25] Dr. Peter: So yeah, subject and object and then the reversal. And that seems to be getting to this question around the importance of, and this is one of the things that really struck me in your book, the Metaphysical Foundations of Love, is this need for an inner unity, in order to be able to establish a union with the other. And that’s something that we’re really interested in, even this whole podcast is called Interior Integration, right, for Catholics, right? So we’re really interested in the importance of that unity. And that was just shocking to me. In fact, there are some folks that translate unity as sort of integration or interior integration. So I’m just really curious about like, what does that mean? If you could take us into that direction a bit.

[00:27:10] Dr. Anthony Flood: So, for Aquinas, anything that exists, it has unity. He actually identifies it as one of those grand transcendental properties that everything has. So we generally think of when you hear the Catholic tradition on transcendentals, it’s gonna be truth, beauty, and goodness that, oh, all being is true, all being true, good and beautiful. But every classical list also has unity as one of the key transcendentals, usually listed first. 

[00:27:38] Dr. Eric Gudan: The one.

[00:27:38] Dr. Anthony Flood: Meaning that in order to exist at all, you have to exist as an individual that’s integrated enough to where you don’t fall apart and cease to exist. You have to have a baseline unity. It’s absolutely essential to what it means to exist for anything, both for us and for the cup, bringing the cup back. Now, the difference between me and the cup is that the cup does not have an inner life. And you know, maybe that’s controversial. 

[00:28:12] Dr. Eric Gudan: That’s funny.

[00:28:12] Dr. Anthony Flood: But let’s just presuppose for the sake of argument, the cup has no inner life. Well, that means its unity is purely material, if you will. Right? I mean, the unity that it has, it can be looked at and it can be examined. It’s pretty obvious. And it’s also very obvious when it loses that unity, it ceases to be. For human beings, you could think of it, we almost have a twofold unity. It’s one, but we have, yes, the unity of the body. But we also have an interior unity. We have a unity of our interior life and all the different parts that make us who we are, the intellect, the will, the passions, our various appetites, desires. We have all of that, but they can be more or less unified. So our interior life isn’t always a perfect unity. And for Aquinas, the virtues are going to serve as the interior principle of integration that’s going to enable us to achieve as much interior unity as possible, if that makes sense. 

[00:29:23] Dr. Peter: That makes sense.

[00:29:23] Dr. Anthony Flood: So he says, Adam and Eve, they had interior integration and unity. They were unified in their interior life, but due to the effects of original sin, that automatic unity of the interior life is lost. And so we exist as creatures who have this interior life that’s not perfectly integrated, not perfectly unified. And the ethical life for Aquinas in part is developing these virtues and cultivating these virtues that serve to put it all back together again.

[00:30:01] Dr. Eric Gudan: So the internal discord.

[00:30:02] Dr. Anthony Flood: So that’s just in terms of us. Now in terms of friendship, then in friendship, we’re seeking a union with another person. And Aquinas puts it very pithily this way. That unity is the principle of union. So when we start talking about what it means to have a union, that presupposes a unity already. So union follows from unity. So what that means in practice is you can’t have a friendship, you can’t have a union of love unless you have two distinct beings, two distinct unities who are coming together to try to form something new.

[00:30:42] Dr. Peter: So would that mean that for someone who is, let’s say, fragmented inside by trauma, right? Because one of the defining features of trauma is an internal fragmentation. You have a disconnection, dissociation. So this is maybe a hard question for some of our listeners, our viewers, but would it be harder than to have a union with someone who’s really traumatized and who’s suffering the sort of the disunifying effects of that, the fragmenting effects of that?

[00:31:13] Dr. Anthony Flood: I think the answer is yes, but I think it’s a lot easier if you were already in union with the person prior to the trauma, because there’s an anchor there. The relationship was already in place to where you, as the lover in this case, are able to see that this trauma is not defining who this person is on a more fundamental level. It probably does come down to, some people are more apt to be able to handle those situations versus others in terms of how do you relate to others. But that would be my quick answer.

[00:31:50] Dr. Peter: It’d be a quick answer.

[00:31:52] Dr. Anthony Flood: The prior relationship would make a big, a prior healthy relationship would make a big difference.

[00:31:55] Dr. Peter: I think it’s important to stay also, and you can correct me if I’m wrong as I’m thinking about this, but it is still possible to love somebody who you might not be able to have much of a union with. I’m like thinking of an infant, for example, right? Like the capacity for union with an infant is, I’m imagining limited in the way that we’re describing it.

[00:32:16] Dr. Anthony Flood: Right. So, yeah. Again, when we’re talking about a union of love, we can distinguish between a union of friendship in the ordinary sense of the term and a friendship of love. Obviously you have a union of love with an infant, particularly your infant. And I would say that the infant even reciprocates in an infantile way, by definition there. But there’s obviously not a union of the interior lives that happens with what we would think of as a mature friendship, because there is no interior life to come into contact with. But I think all of our deep love relations where we’re seeking union with another person, I think the inner dynamism of that love is toward the best possible union with that person’s interior life as possible.

[00:33:15] Dr. Peter: Okay.

[00:33:15] Dr. Anthony Flood: Again, when you measure situations where there’s some sort of impediment, some sort of blockage to that person’s interior life, well, that’s still measured against what the ideal would be, what the trajectory of love is, which is, well, I still want to have as much of a shared interior life with this person as possible, and I’m going to take whatever limitations into account make those necessary adjustments. But you still want that same union, through love.

[00:33:45] Dr. Peter: And so that’s how God would relate to us, right? It’s not just about our moment right here. Right. You were gonna say something though, Eric, I’m curious what you wanted to tee up there.

[00:33:53] Dr. Eric Gudan: Well, it’s the same thing. It’s the degree of unity limits the union. But there’s more than one agent present. And so I was gonna do the mother child dyad. And the union that’s there is, I mean, there are more perfect unions, but there can still be a union which is there. And our union with God is limited by our fragmentation. But God has really got the whole unity thing down. And so he’s really interiorly integrated. And I was wondering when you were bringing up the trauma and other principles of lack of unity. Is virtue the means by which, and the description of individuals living out a greater and better unity? Tony, would you accept that type of definition? Would you wanna refine that?

[00:34:41] Dr. Anthony Flood: I think I could accept that definition. Just put it in terms of Aquinas. Every virtue, and again, just, I always wanna clarify that for the classical tradition, virtues are any quality that enhances your life in some positive way. So there are dozens and dozens of virtues. They don’t make you a smaller person, they make you a bigger person. They enhance your existence, right? So every virtue in particular, though, pertains typically to at least one aspect of human nature, one power, one appetite, one inclination, and perfects that so that it works in the best possible way by itself, and then in concert with the other parts, through the other virtues. And so, for instance, temperance is going to be the virtue that cultivates our, what Aquinas calls our concupiscible appetite, which is really just our desire for food, drink, or sex. That inclination in us for food, drink, and sex.

[00:35:47] Dr. Anthony Flood: Well, the general virtue of temperance is going to be that quality which enhances that to work in the best possible way so that it doesn’t dominate everything else about your interior life, but it cultivates it so to work with reason and the will and these other powers so that you have the net best effect. So all of those virtues are ultimately going to serve in the long run to reorient our powers in the best possible, our powers, but we could use the word parts. Parts in the best possible way to work together.

[00:36:26] Dr. Eric Gudan: Capacity to work for flourishing rather than certain impediments or taking on a more of a too extreme of a rule or being too burdened, for example. To use more of parts language approach.

[00:36:37] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yep.

[00:36:39] Dr. Peter: So I like this definition of virtue because I think sometimes the pursuit of virtue can focus in on the exercise of the will. You know, in other words, like somehow I can will myself into a better place, by the sheer force of will, like, for example. I’ve, you know, run across folks that have been attempting to work with their inner fragmentation primarily through the will. And it can devolve into a kind of self-improvement project that actually doesn’t work. So what is the role for Aquinas for other people in this? In other words, so much of, I think what helps people recover from trauma is to tolerate being loved, you know, to tolerate being accepted by another person, to tolerate entering into a friendship slowly, if you will, for example, with a therapist.

[00:37:35] Dr. Peter: Because I guess my concern is that it can be, and there have been in Catholic circles, virtues based therapies that, I’m not sure that they work very well with trauma. You know, they could also kind of neglect things that are going on outside of our conscious awareness. So I’m just kinda curious about, you know, for people that are struggling with these kinds of questions, you know, how might we understand that through a Thomistic lens? And is there room for relationality in this kind of recovery, within the virtues paradigm that Aquinas offers us?

[00:38:06] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yes, I’m gonna make a boring point and then hopefully make a better point.

[00:38:12] Dr. Eric Gudan: Uh oh.

[00:38:13] Dr. Anthony Flood: Interestingly, for Aquinas, there were views prior to Aquinas that said all of the virtues, other than practical wisdom of the moral virtues, are located in the will. They’re all virtues of the will. And Aquinas nuances that because he says, well, that’s not the case. He says that things like temperance, that’s actually seated, that’s actually located in that power having to do with desire for food, drink and sex. Courage is actually housed or homed in those desires having to do with fear and daring and the things that, that courage pertains to. He says now they’re all under the sway of the will, that the will is doing the key part in terms of decision making and such, but they’re not actually. I know I’m pointing to my head, that would be, but you know, we generally do that, intellect and will we somehow put it on our head somewhere. The will’s here, but these virtues might be, you know, in these other parts, in a, you know, metaphorical sense.

[00:39:14] Dr. Anthony Flood: So I think that does go, to speak to the point that, you know, it’s never going to be as simple as you can, just will your way out of the problem in the same way that I can will, that my arm is raised and I know we have this, you’ll often hear, and I think Aquinas does say this, this phrase that, well, how do you become a saint? Well, you just will it. And it’s just like, well, yes, there’s a substantial sense in which that’s true, but there’s also a substantial sense in which that’s gonna mislead us completely in the what Aquinas thinks is going on there. I think when he intimates that, he’s saying, you need to get that part of yourself out of the way that, you know, to go back. Well, I don’t know if we were recording when this, I was talking about when Jesus talks about denying yourself, that you have to ask the question, well, who’s doing the denying? If I’m denying myself who’s denying that self? It can’t be the self being denied. It has to be someone else, something else. And the tradition generally just looks at that in terms of a true self that you really are, and this sort of illusory self, almost demonic self, this apparent self that you characterize independent of God that doesn’t really exist.

[00:40:32] Dr. Peter: Like the old man that St. Paul talks about.

[00:40:35] Dr. Anthony Flood: Right, new versus the old. When we talk about, well, you just will it, well, yeah, you will it in a sense, that it’s a theological point of you’re saying that this relies on God and you just have to open yourself to the grace. That’s what that’s saying. But in terms of what we’re talking about, no. You’re not just gonna be able to will yourself out of, you know, it doesn’t even need to be trauma. It can just be, if I have the vice of gluttony, where I’m eating and eating a lot and, you know, this might not be merely hypothetical. I can’t just will it, right? I can’t just say, alright, I’m done doing that, at least in the same direct way that I can will to raise my hand. There is clearly a difference. That I have freedom, later philosophers Dietrich Von Hilderbrand will call this an indirect sort of cooperative freedom. But it’s that idea that yeah, we have control, but it’s nuanced and it’s filtered through all of these other sort of impediments that keep it from being just direct. Okay. So to the second point, if I’m still there, and I probably lost the nuance of that. All right. I’m gonna have to ask you to repeat that then. It has do with allowing yourself to be loved?

[00:41:54] Dr. Peter: Well, so we were talking about, you know, is there room for. So I’m thinking about this as a clinician and what helps clients in the consulting room when they’re struggling with inner fragmentation. You know, when they’re struggling and if you say to them, you have to grow in virtue. That can land really flat and hard because it can imply that I just need to try harder. I just need to exercise my will. And from a clinician’s perspective, it can seem like we’re reducing everything down to one faculty.

[00:42:29] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yeah.

[00:42:29] Dr. Peter: And you know, and that seems different than our Lord’s command to love him wholeheartedly. Like with all of our being, all of our mind, all of our soul. Like it seems like it’s bigger than just the will when we are attempting to love ourselves or when we’re attempting to govern ourselves in a way that leads to flourishing.

[00:42:48] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yeah. And now let’s go all the way back to Aristotle then. In book three of the Nicomachean Ethics. Book one, he’s talked about happiness and what it is in a general sense. Book two, he begins to identify, well, maybe this is book two and book three. He’s gonna identify the virtues as those things that we need to cultivate in order to get there. And the middle chunks of the Nicomachean Ethics are, he’s going through all of these particular virtues, but before then, he goes through the process and he talks about if a virtue is a good quality, what do we really mean by that? Well, he says it’s a good habit. It’s a way of habituating and disposing yourself to not only act in a certain way, but it’s really, it’s a disposition to feel a certain way and to view yourself in a certain way. It’s a larger concept than I think that’s sometimes characterized. So this disposition, in order to be molded, has to begin with yes, the decision to do it. And here’s where I think that act of the will is important. You need to say, I want this. Because if you don’t want this, in Aristotle’s terms, this virtue in any way, you’re not gonna get it. You have to, you have to want it, right?

[00:44:13] Dr. Eric Gudan: Step one.

[00:44:14] Dr. Anthony Flood: But by choosing that, that doesn’t mean you get it. Now, that’s the first step, right? I mean, that’s page 1. The rest of the book is how I went about getting this, and that’s where Aristotle talks about practice and habituation. And it just takes time. Now for him, he’s not really thinking of it in terms of prior trauma and how I’ve worked through that, but it actually goes to the point sort of in a more robust sense. He’s saying just the very nature of being human, all of us are in a position where it’s going to require a large amount of time to get to where we wanna be. And so it’s a process. So it’s always going to be a process because all of these things need to be integrated over time. And yes, if we get to that point where we have the good habit, where we’re habituated, then it will become like second nature as he calls it. And it’ll seem like we’ve had it all along at that point, but that’s the end of the story. Right? And so we’re still in the beginning.

[00:45:15] Dr. Anthony Flood: If you add trauma into the mix, it’s still going to be a case where this is going to be a long process. But for the Catholic tradition, but I think even Aristotle, this idea that we are social animals first and foremost, that everything we do, at least the vast majority of what we do stands in relation to other people. So we’re not just doing this alone. And in the Politics which follows the Nicomachean Ethics, he makes the point that if you came across the severed hand, you would say that used to be a hand. He said you would identify it as a hand, but you wouldn’t think of it as an actual hand in the full sense of the word. Why? Because the hand has all these abilities. It’s not just this material thing. We identify the hand, not just in terms of its quantitative dimensions, but its functionality. To function as a hand it has to be attached to a body. And he says, similarly, if you had a human being who was, say, cast off on an island, living a completely solitary existence, that person would not exist as a full human being. They would be like the severed hand. Yes, they would technically be a human being, but because they’re cut off relationally from all of these other people, they’re cut off from all of these relations that are absolutely essential to what it means to function as a human being. Then it wouldn’t be a human being in the full sense of the term.

[00:46:44] Dr. Eric Gudan: So it’s no longer a living hand because it’s not connected to, and it lacks the dynamism in order to fully live and flourish as a hand, similar to the person on a desert island without community.

[00:46:56] Dr. Anthony Flood: Right. So that means for all of us, these relations are absolutely essential. We can’t live a solitary existence and still be a human being in a full sense of the work for Aristotle. And I think that tradition picks that up, that you’re going to need other people. Other people aren’t just accessories. They’re absolutely essential to the process of integrating yourself in virtue and everything else that’s important. So to put it in terms of that context of the clinician, I mean that’s very specific in the sense that we’re talking about a, you know, client relationship, you know, in these four walls and such. But that I don’t think is completely outta step with what we’re doing outside of those walls. All of us are in those relations. This is just a lot more focused. But that it’s necessary. I mean, I think it’s just, it’s the natural extension of what it means to exist socially. So the client is going to, I think a good way in there would be the client seeing that all human beings need this. All human beings need to be in this relation in order to have that worthwhile life. That, as bad as the trauma is, the trauma doesn’t make us dependent on other people. It doesn’t put us in that position. That’s where the trauma is. We are in a relation of need with respect to other people, and then the trauma has confused that point little bit, I think, if that makes sense.

[00:48:34] Dr. Peter: Yeah, I often think of like the will as like the tip of the spear, like it can kind of get us into a position to have the experiences, especially experiences of relationship that reform us and help us to unify inside. In other words, I might not be able to will, for example, to stop drinking if I’m too far gone. You know, it may be beyond the power of the will to stop drinking, but I could check myself into a rehab program and limit the capacity, or limit the access I have and begin to enter into treatment that would help me reform myself, interiorly. So yeah, I think the will is absolutely critical. It’s necessary.

[00:49:20] Dr. Anthony Flood: It opens the door.

[00:49:22] Dr. Peter: Yeah, it’s not sufficient on its own. Otherwise, because that seems to be an attribute of God, actually, to just will and then have it happen, right? It’s like, seems like we’re reaching for some omnipotence there, in terms of the will that denies other aspects of our humanity. 

[00:49:38] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yeah, just to sort of conclude my thoughts on that, ’cause I think I got myself a little bit distracted. I think in terms of the counselor, client, to go back to that early part of the Nicomachean Ethics, right? If you don’t want to have the virtue, you’re not gonna get it. But at the same time, it’s the absolute first step in order to begin the process to get it. And I think if there was a patient who literally had zero willingness to engage in therapy. I don’t know the research, I’m doing this from a philosophical perspective. But I have to assume the probability of success is near zero. It would almost have to be. So again, all you need is some baseline willingness. And I think that opens the door to this relationality of this external agency that can come and, you know, aid in that process of healing. 

[00:50:35] Dr. Peter: So what does Aquinas tell us about internal relationship? Like what does he say about how this actually works, you know? So like, you know, internal family systems, we would say, well, there’s an innermost self and that innermost self can relate with the different parts. The different parts have these different roles within the human person, managers, firefighters, you know, exiles and so forth. Is there sort of something equivalent in Aquinas as he’s describing inner relationality? Or is it left more undefined?

[00:51:07] Dr. Anthony Flood: I think both.

[00:51:08] Dr. Peter: Okay.

[00:51:09] Dr. Anthony Flood: There is something he says that I consider to be very profound. And, well, I’ll just say what he says and we’ll see what he doesn’t say in that context as well. He talks about the fundamental drive of every substance. So for him, I know it’s technical terminology, but a substance for him is any individual thing that exists, anything that has its own principle of unity to connect it to our earlier conversation. So any individual thing in the world, it’s a substance and then it has various attributes and qualities. Aquinas says the first act of any substance, whether it’s conscious or not, is the act to continue to exist. It wants to continue to be.

[00:51:54] Dr. Eric Gudan: So self preservation. 

[00:51:56] Dr. Anthony Flood: He uses the word “wants” there, but the drive is towards continued existence the case of animals. So not yet human beings. So just all animals. That is what we would call the desire for self preservation that we have, that animals want to continue living. And it’s actually an awareness. I mean, it’s a felt push towards self preservation. Well, with human beings, it’s the same thing. We are a substance first and foremost and the first sort of act is going to be towards continued preservation. But he says, for human beings, this is gonna actually be an act of self-love because self-love at the very animal level or even the plant level, that’s just the desire to continue to exist, right? You love you, you’re loving yourself to continue to exist. But for human beings, self-love is the first sort of part of that. So at the level of, when I experience myself from the earliest of conscious life, I have this experience of self-love that I, on some level, understand that I’m a good and it would be good for me to continue to exist. 

[00:53:14] Dr. Eric Gudan: Affirming your inherent goodness, we wanna perpetuate that, right. 

[00:53:17] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yeah. And that’s the fundamental drive of, the fundamental dynamism of what it means to be a human substance and probably any, you know, any personal substance. But he’s talking about human beings in this case. Okay, well, why that’s conscious, why that can become a conscious drive is because we have these capacities that animals do not, namely in this case the intellect or the mind, also the will, but mainly the mind here, which is capable of reflecting back on itself and knowing itself, what we would just think of as self-consciousness and that it’s because human nature objectively gives us these powers, like intellect and will, that experientially, we’re able to, at a primordial level, have that experience of self-consciousness, but also experience ourselves as a good thing that ought to continue to exist. I mean, that’s, I think, a pretty powerful thing. And I think it’s not like just made up philosophical language. I think if a person just thinks about it, well, why do you want to continue to exist? Well, you have to say, because I think it’s good to exist. I mean, otherwise it doesn’t make sense. But it’s not merely that you’re reflecting on this philosophically and saying, oh, existence is good and I want to continue to have it. It has to be prior to that. And I think it’s happening. You see it, you know, in the life of a 3-year-old, 4-year-old. They like being themselves and they want that to continue to exist. 

[00:54:59] Dr. Anthony Flood: Now, to be a self means to be cultivated and formed in all the relational ways we’ve talked about. That’s another way of looking at the Aristotelian point. Take a child who has no sort of relations helping that process of cultivation, it’s gonna end in a absolute disaster. But what’s prior to those relations in a sense, is this conscious awareness of one’s own goodness, and the desire for that to continue and the desire to continue to seek those things you perceive to be conducive to that existence.

[00:55:30] Dr. Eric Gudan: Ah, I noticed that there’s a little bit of wiggle room here in perceived to be good. Sometimes you do that better than others.

[00:55:36] Dr. Anthony Flood: So, I mean, to get into my boring academic life, I did my dissertation on Aquinas on self-governance. And it was wrapped up in an analysis of their particular person who was saying Aquinas and other medieval ethicists, they just characterized morality as obedience to commands. That you’ve got commands, you obey them, that’s all you’re supposed to do, move on. And it’s just so far from Aquinas’s actual view because he prized self-governance. But I didn’t talk about love and I certainly didn’t talk about self-love in the dissertation. And then later when I was doing research on Aquinas on self-love, all these different passages where he talks about self-love, I found him very intriguing. He explicitly puts self-governance as one of the, really, two of the essential properties of self-love itself. In other words, self-love comes first, then two of its essential properties are willing the good to yourself and then actively seeking the good for yourself. So in other words, everything we do arises first from that love that we have for ourself.

[00:56:54] Dr. Anthony Flood: That’s why it’s so central. But before anybody goes and thinks, well, this is just gonna make Aquinas into, you know, pushing some form of selfishness in some way. It’s like we didn’t give ourselves the goodness that we have. This is the other key point for Aquinas, right? Yes, we recognize that we’re good and we want to continue to be because we’re good, but we didn’t give ourselves our goodness, right? It was there before. That was part of the package when we came to understand ourselves. In other words, we came from some other being. And Aquinas says, because we owe our very existence, our very goodness to the being who created us, this is what’s going to keep us, at least in a proper sense, from being prideful or arrogant or, you know, narcissistic and all of this. Because whatever we have that’s good, I didn’t earn it, I didn’t create it. It came from without. I found it there at the beginning, and I didn’t give it to myself. It came from God. And so that love of God is ultimately gonna temper and structure and do all sorts of things to keep love of self from becoming wicked, at least in principle. So I just wanna throw that qualification out. 

[00:58:09] Dr. Peter: Right, because that’s a sticky wicket for some people is that there should be no self-love. We should not love ourselves. 

[00:58:15] Dr. Anthony Flood: But here’s the thing. For Aquinas, if you took that line that we should not love ourselves, he would take that as a slap in the face to God. What you’re saying then is that I should not love that which is good, right? You’re saying one or two things. You’re saying either you are not good, which is a slap in the face to God because God created you. So either God screwed up, in which case you shouldn’t exist and you shouldn’t love yourself. Or you are good, but you shouldn’t love the fact that you’re good. And Aquinas finds that very bizarre. Why would you not will the continued existence of the goodness that you are? If you’re good, we will that which is good. We love that which is good.

[00:59:04] Dr. Eric Gudan: Just simply being based in reality. Yeah.

[00:59:06] Dr. Anthony Flood: You shouldn’t love yourself as the source of goodness, but you love yourself as good, and then you love God as the source of that goodness. So it’s always gonna be directed. It begins with that awareness of your goodness. But the object of the love, even in self-love, doesn’t rest with the self. It’s ultimately a love of God as the source of one’s goodness. Another way of thinking about this, just to go back to Scripture and Aquinas loves going back to this quote as well, when Jesus says to love your neighbor as yourself, he doesn’t say, love your neighbor instead of yourself. Right? It says, love your neighbor as yourself. The way that we love our neighbor presupposes a prior love already there, namely, the love you have for yourself. So just as you recognize that primordial goodness in you and desire the continued existence of that thing, so should you see that analogous goodness in your neighbor, will the continued goodness of that neighbor, and just as you will to do those things that you perceive are conducive to your continued goodness, well, you need to be doing those same things for your neighbor. So you literally are going to actively will and seek those goods for your neighbor as you would your very own self. 

[01:00:25] Dr. Eric Gudan: Template of goodness in action. Yeah.

[01:00:29] Dr. Peter: So this idea, which I first came across in your book, you cannot love your neighbor more than you love yourself. This is something you say that, yes, Aquinas draws out. Which is like astonishing, right? Like if I laid down my life for my neighbor?

[01:00:52] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yeah. And I did not say that just now, did I? So going back to that Scripture passage, love your neighbor as yourself. Okay, that does certainly seem to rule out the reading that you should love your neighbor instead of yourself. In other words, it is certainly not a disavowal of self-love. It presupposes that self-love is good. But it doesn’t necessarily follow from that, that we should love ourself more than our neighbor. But that is exactly what Aquinas does, right. So, Aquinas’s other continuation of his commentary on this passage, which by the way, that particular, in terms of the Gospels, Jesus says that in the Gospel of Matthew, to love God above all things, love neighbor as yourself. Aquinas has a commentary on the entire Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of John. So there’s so many different things you could read with Aquinas, but one of the quick things, if you know there’s a Scripture passage associated with some point where you wanna understand Aquinas on, just go to a Scripture commentary, it gives you sort of a direct access into what he’s thinking about those things. He thinks there has to be a logical priority of the love of self over the love of neighbor. And this comes from two different points. Number one, he says, the way in which you’re going to love your neighbor modeled on how you love yourself. In other words, the only way you know how to interact with other human beings, how you know how to will goods and do things that are actually to the benefit of the other. The only way you know those things is that you’ve already been doing them for yourself, right? So it’s, well, I like X, Y, and Z, and I like when X, Y, and Z happens to me. So I’m gonna use that as my frame of reference for how I relate to others. So he says, there’s just always gonna be that priority of, I know how to relate to others because I’ve been doing it with myself already. But the deeper point, why he thinks there’s a priority of the love of self over love of neighbor is because the chief thing that I’m willing to myself in the act of self-love is union with God. Right? It goes back to that both naturally, but he really gets into it supernaturally with sanctifying grace through the sacraments. But just keep it generic here. Because I am not the cause of my own goodness, and yet that’s the first thing that I recognize in my conscious experience is my goodness and my desire to continue to exist. Because I recognize that goodness didn’t come from me, I can’t take credit for it. Well, that leads me back to the source of that goodness, which is God himself. So the first thing, not necessarily the temporal first thing, but the first in order of importance, the first thing that I should be willing to myself in order of importance is that highest good of union with God. Right?

[01:04:04] Dr. Eric Gudan: That which should take priority.

[01:04:05] Dr. Anthony Flood: And that’s why, in terms of the commandments themselves that we’re talking about, love your neighbor as yourself is not the first commandment. It’s the second. And it’s the second for the very reason of what we’re talking about, because of the absolute goodness of God, both on God’s own terms, but also God as creator of my goodness. Well, I need to love God above everything else, including myself, because what little goodness I have is, it’s not only from God, it doesn’t even compare to the goodness of God in God’s totality, right? So, I mean, either way, my love is going back to God. Okay? So when I love my neighbor, that has to be conditioned by the way I’m loving myself, but the way that I’m loving myself, if it’s a proper love for Aquinas, is anchored in this non-negotiable, absolute love of God, right? 

[01:05:03] Dr. Anthony Flood: Now, put this practical, more practical in terms of what you just mentioned, Peter. That means that, yes, I can sacrifice my life to save my neighbor, but Aquinas is very clear. I cannot apostatize from God in order to help my neighbor. The relation to God comes first. It’s absolutely non-negotiable. And that conditions self-love in such a way it cannot reach out to my neighbor in certain ways, at least not legitimately.

[01:05:39] Dr. Eric Gudan: Or else it ceases to be that what you, that’s the way it’s organized.

[01:05:43] Dr. Anthony Flood: Right. So, Aquinas is very clear. You cannot sever the relationship with God in any way. You cannot harm that through serious sin or anything of that nature. It’s never justified for one’s neighbor. Well, let’s go back to the beginning. If you loved your neighbor more than yourself, then that would allow for the possibility of why not sacrifice my relationship with God if I thought it would help my neighbor?

[01:06:12] Dr. Peter: Oh, I see.

[01:06:12] Dr. Anthony Flood: If I could love my neighbor more. But Aquinas says you can’t do that. There has to be the priority of, God has created you as an individual, and your first, most basic responsibility is getting yourself in right union with God. And that means the love of self, which runs through God, has to have a natural priority, and a supernatural priority, for that matter too, over the love of neighbor. 

[01:06:33] Dr. Eric Gudan: Okay.

[01:06:33] Dr. Peter: So this is really important for those individuals, those Catholics, that have, and others, that have like self-sacrificing manager parts, who are, you know, who are like, okay, in order for the good of the marriage, you know, with my non-Catholic spouse, you know, I’m gonna go to my spouse’s place of worship, for example. Because that’s what he needs or that’s what she needs in order to be a more full person, at least at this point, and needs me not to practice Catholicism, you know, or something like that. 

[01:07:15] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yeah. I mean, why it is that you can sacrifice your life? I mean, because that does seem a bit strange that, well, why still can you sacrifice your life and not be sacrificing the structural priority of the love of self? Because that seems to fly in the face of what we’re saying. The reason is because for Aquinas, we’re not ultimately mortal, that we will continue to exist, right, beyond bodily death. So you’re in effect sacrificing your bodily existence for your neighbor, which can be a very good thing to do, but you’re not actually sacrificing your true, real existence ’cause you’re going to continue to exist. I mean, the interesting question would be, would Aquinas allow for you, if you had the choice to go out of existence altogether, sever your existence altogether, which would include severing your relation from God, for the good of the neighbor. Could you do that? The vast majority of his passages would say, no, you can’t, you couldn’t even do that. There’s one little passage in Paul where it confuses it, but I’m not even gonna talk about that passage because it’s an outlier. And even Aquinas thinks at the end of the day, it’s just, it’s not gonna undermine his main point here. But yeah, but there’s the more practical dimension to this too.

[01:08:39] Dr. Anthony Flood: And I, you know, I’m getting way, way abstract with this, but Peter, going back to the practical things, I mean, even somebody who just wants to help their church charity, but they’re doing it to the point of personal exhaustion where they’re making themselves, you know, physically sick or their immune system is so weakened that they can’t stay healthy. There has to be, the virtue of prudence is gonna play a role in this, that, in order to help others, you still need to be there to help them. So you need to be taking care of yourself in a sufficient way, in order to make that happen. Now, there are of course going to be extreme cases where sacrificing yourself to the point of your own life, or, you know, just even to the, you know, tirelessly working to the point of sickness in these extreme cases. Those happen every now and again in the course of human events. There’s no doubt about that. But for every day sane sanctified lives, it’s going to be taking the time to not only invest in that relation with God, but doing those things to maintain your psychological and bodily health, to be in a position to help the others. And, you know, and to go back to Scripture, Aquinas, he talks about even in Jesus’ active life, you see him going off to have a retreat with the father, where he’s gonna say, I’m gonna go do this for a while, and he leaves the public ministry. Well, that’s the model, right? That as invested as Jesus was in the public ministry, even in that stage of his life, he didn’t do it to the point of sacrificing that, call it his spiritual health and that prior relationship that needed to be maintained. But at the same time being willing to sacrifice himself on the cross, when the whole thing culminated. Because that, yeah, at the extreme, that’s something that we might be called to do, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t take care of ourselves by choosing the better part, if you will, of resting and contemplating even at the expense of sort of active, busy work. And we could put that in terms of, you know, taking the time to do those things that keeps us sane in order to be the best loving beings we can be.

[01:11:09] Dr. Eric Gudan: Maintaining the structure, keeping things in balance, like the statement, in case of a cabin depressurization, please put the mask on yourself and then put it on the person next to you so you don’t pass out first. Because otherwise you may pass out. I’ve been thinking, I have some questions about virtue and talking about the self gift and the connection with God and tied with this Nicomachean Ethics about gratitude. Because I seem to recall a point where Aristotle kind of rejects gratitude as the quality of the great souled man because he would not be kind of incumbent upon someone else to be beholden to them. And that’s, I think that’s different than what you just presented of Aquinas. And so I think that’s where, I mean, Aquinas picked up a lot from Aristotle regarding virtues of the mean between two extremes and whatnot. But also there’s some corrections he makes because of his understanding of our fundamental dependence, radical dependence upon God. And that a great souled man would of course be grateful to God.

[01:12:04] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yeah. So, the virtue of magnanimity, which for Aristotle is the highest act of virtue. So it’s not merely a virtue for Aristotle. It’s the highest act of virtue. And by the great souled man, he means somebody who, there’s two points. Number one, they have all the other virtues, at least to some degree. But they’re robust in all the other virtues. But then this last virtue, this last greatness making quality is that willingness to project yourself into society in such a way where you know that you’re virtuous, you know that you’re well ordered. And that doesn’t mean you want people to serve you. You’re still actively helping others, even for Aristotle, in doing those things to contribute to the social relationship. But you also are expecting almost, if you will, honor from other people. You know, they should be recognizing your greatness.

[01:13:04] Dr. Eric Gudan: Because that’s his understanding of like reality, similar to how we would say, look, being grateful to God is living in reality. He’d say, well, it’d be natural for them to give honors to a great man.

[01:13:13] Dr. Anthony Flood: Right. So Aquinas reads this, and he does not dismiss magnanimity. And he actually puts it in terms of humility. I mean, Aquinas being Aquinas, he likes to do these things. He’ll say the magnanimous person is the most humble. Why? Well, because they do have a true sense of self. They do have enough reflection to know they have these virtues. They have these different capacities, strengths, and abilities. They know that they’re bringing a lot to the table, if you will, but they also know that it all comes from God ultimately. And so the final act of awareness that comes from in magnanimity for Aquinas is awareness of utter and complete dependence on God, which means God gets all the credit. So he takes Aristotle, kind of preserves it a little bit, but really just completely subverts it. Because all the honor goes to God and the saint knows that. The saint knows that they don’t get ultimate credit. Now that doesn’t mean we don’t cooperate in these processes of virtue. Aquinas thinks we all have what he calls instrumental causality. We are actual agents. It’s real what we do, but, you know, the example that a lot of people give is, I go out and give my son a hundred dollars to go buy me a great present and he goes out there and buys me a great present for a hundred dollars, we can praise that gift and praise my son for giving me that gift. But ultimately it all came from my a hundred dollars. And same with our very existence. We’ve gotta enhance it and do the things we can do to do that, but at the end of the day, for Aquinas, at least, the credit is always owed back to the source of our existence itself.

[01:15:09] Dr. Eric Gudan: Thank you. I have another kind of question regarding virtue as habit, and it made me think about some of the books I’ve been reading about habit, like The Atomic Habits, The Power of Habit, and we’ve said before, what Peter was saying about willpower being the tip of the spear and kind of forming the habit, forming the virtue about almost identity. And that may be confusing if I use that word. Some people understand it in different ways, but to identify as. Like, the example in this habit forming book. If you want to be someone who exercises every day, you can form the habit of frequent exercise, but it’s actually kind of better to identify as an individual who goes to the gym every day and what does that type of person do? That type of person, what’s the next step you can do? Well, you can put your gym shoes on every day. And so you’re identifying as an athletic person and a person who exercises, taking that next step. And I think that translates pretty well to the virtuous life of, I identify as a prudent man. What’s the next thing a prudent man would do? Well, he’d stop and close his mouth for a second and think before he says a couple other things or whatever the case may be, to act in a prudent way. Right?

[01:16:13] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yeah. That’s Aristotle’s big shortcut in all of this, that Aquinas picks up on this as well. He says, if you wanna know what the right thing to do is, look to the phronimos, which is the wise person. He said, you don’t need to just sit there and figure it all out yourself. Look to somebody who seems to have it all together and imitate their behavior. It’s a shortcut. Aquinas picks this up in terms of the imitation of the saints and things of that nature. It’s like, look, you don’t need to know all the dogmas and all these things that scholars know and be able to parse out whether Jesus had one will or two wills or all those sorts of things. Just, you have holy people in your lives, imitate ’em. Just do what they do and then you will be on that right path. Now again, it’s a shortcut. I think of it better as a big headstart. At some point you still need to take the reflectivity and the ownership and fine tune that. But, yeah, I think that’s very much part of the tradition of imitation of the virtuous in terms of those practical heroes in our life, the practical exemplars, as the way that we can go about doing this.

[01:17:21] Dr. Peter: So I asked you this question in the last episode about Plato. It went something along the lines of, you know, did a person, did the Greeks back in the fourth century, third century BC, did they sit around reading the Republic as sort of a self help book? Right. Is there a way to kind of read Aquinas and understand. You’re giving us a hint of that when he says, imitate those who are holy or imitate those who are wise. Are there other things that he addresses about the navigating of the governance within? You know, in other words, I would say that in a lot of modern approaches, parts and systems based approaches, there’s a lot of discussion about what the relationship among parts, for example, should look like. In other words, how do we relate well within? And one of the things I’m not sure of, and I’m not well read within the Summa or the other works of St. Thomas Aquinas, but does he get into like sort of the brass tacks? The development of virtue, for example, I’m having a hard time translating that into like, what does that interrelationship look like? At least based on my limited understanding of virtue as he defines it. 

[01:18:30] Dr. Anthony Flood: I think the answer, I’m always hesitant to make these strong negative statements because I know there’s Thomistic scholars out there that are thinking no, no, he says it here. don’t think he does. I don’t think he gives you what you’re looking for. I think he comes closer. There are times where he’ll give, we actually have a collection of sermons he gave, which are much more practical, but the collection of sermons that we have are actually academic sermons. So even there, you know, he’s addressing students in an academic setting, even there, you’re at that level of what I would call theory more than application. But I do think, I mean, I think the quick answer is yes, he talks about the imitation, but he also talks obviously about having an active prayer life, that you’re actually doing those things. I mean, as we know, he’s the one who composed the Eucharistic hymns that are part of adoration and things of that nature. Those would be the things, I think we could point to. But at the same time, those don’t answer the questions that I think you’re asking in this case of if you’re actually talking about the integration of the interior life and how to do it. I there’s just not a lot there.

[01:19:48] Dr. Peter: Okay.

[01:19:48] Dr. Anthony Flood: Other than, if you’re seeking any one virtue, it’s always going to help in other areas of your life too, for Aquinas. That any pursuit of the good has a diffusive effect, that the more goodness you acquire in any one area is gonna have a spillover effect to others. So over time there should be improvement.

[01:20:09] Dr. Peter: There is a type of Catholic, often referred to therapists, in my experience by spiritual directors who essentially would like to find, you know, a cure for bulimia in the early church fathers or who would like to be able to overcome, you know, some sort of psychological symptom or some sort of psychological disorder without having to go outside of the Catholic tradition at all. And one of the things that I’m really adamant about, that Dr. Gerry is really adamant about at Souls and Hearts is that we wanna bring in these other types of approaches and harmonize them with the Catholic faith. And we even got a comment, for example, in the episode on St. Bonaventure, where one of our viewers was concerned that if FS for example, doesn’t have its roots in a Catholic friendly founder, for example, kind of concerns about, you know, Richard Schwartz and some antipathy toward Catholicism, for example, that he openly admits, in the introduction to the second book that was sort of a Christian IFS book. And so I’m just curious about like where was, you know, St. Thomas Aquinas, obviously he was looking at Aristotle, relied heavily on Aristotle. Like where was he in terms of bringing in non-Catholic sources, apart from Aristotle?

[01:21:27] Dr. Anthony Flood: Well, I mean, before we even go apart from Aristotle, I think the Aristotle point actually makes the point you wanna make. The quick history lesson here. So the text of Aristotle were actually lost a couple generations after the death of Aristotle, just Alexandrian Empire collapsing and all of this, a lot of things happen to where the texts of Aristotle, outside of some basic logical works, are no longer available to people. They just disappear. And so for hundreds and hundreds of years, there is no Aristotle. So all of the church fathers, none of them had Aristotle. They had a couple basic logical works called the Organon. So Augustine will reference that and just say, yeah, but the Ethics, the Metaphysics, none of that’s there. So around the year 1200, the texts of Aristotle are reintroduced into Europe. Some small group of scholars had grabbed them in the political turmoil, headed over to Syria and then Iraq. And so the texts did survive, but really not part of anything having to do with the Roman Empire, and then ultimately Europe.

[01:22:37] Dr. Anthony Flood: But now all of a sudden these texts come back around the year 1200, and they are of a 100% pagan person with commentaries, usually from the Islamic scholars who took them and translated them first into Arabic, and then from the Arabic translated into Latin. Alright, so when Aquinas is in the university system when these texts are being thrown available to everyone. And his teacher was sympathetic to the texts, right? So Saint Albert, probably know the name St. Albert, was very sympathetic to Aristotle.

[01:23:16] Dr. Eric Gudan: He’s great.

[01:23:17] Dr. Anthony Flood: And that’s how Aquinas gets them. But when Aquinas is looking at them, he is doing this against the very objections that you’re talking about where the other members of the Catholic faculty are saying, but this is not a Christian thinker, this is a pagan thinker. Alright? This is somebody who, you know, we need to just set off to the side and pretend we never saw, basically. And Aquinas just more or less says, well, what difference does it make? Truth is truth. If it’s truth, keep it. If it’s false, just discard it, move on from it, right? So test everything. And if it’s true, keep it. If it’s not, it doesn’t matter where it came from. Because he says, again, it’s true, it’s not ultimately coming from Aristotle or this person or that part. If it’s actually true, it’s rooted in God himself, right? It’s gonna go back to the source of truth. So that’s who gets the credit here. And so he goes on and incorporates Aristotle and there’s other things. It’s not just Aquinas, but he’s sort of leading that charge to get Aristotle accepted into the larger conversation. And he does a very good job with it, but he never does it uncritically. I mean, just as we were talking about with magnanimity, even when he says, well, yeah, the Aristotle’s onto something here, the way he ends up reconceiving it, you know, it takes the sting out of everything you didn’t like about it and replaces it with something else.

[01:24:40] Dr. Anthony Flood: And he does that across the board. And it’s not just Aristotle. He’ll look at any source that he has. So in addition to the ancient Greek sources and ancient Roman sources, he’s also looking at Moses Maimonides, who is a Jewish rabbi. He’s looking at all the Islamic thinkers who are coming in with these texts of Aristotle as well. He’ll read anything and he’ll incorporate into his account, anything that he thinks is worthwhile and true. And that became the common medieval dialectical practice of doing that. So, you know, zooming ahead now to 2025, I mean, I don’t wanna be too flippant, but I mean, I’d just be like, well, what difference does it make, I mean, who sort of proffered the theory and got it out there and what their background was? You want evaluate it based on its own merits. And if these are good and rational and reasonable and worthy to use, maybe with revision, maybe aspects without, then do it. I think methodologically, there’s just, Catholics are not fundamentalist. The philosophical tradition has always been a big part of it. And the very nature of philosophy, just of its nature, is using something other than divine revelation to try to figure out the nature of important things, using reason, using our intellect to figure out the nature of whatever it is that we’re investigating. So again, whether that truth comes from divine revelation or from philosophical research or from scientific research, truth is truth. It doesn’t contradict itself and it can be incorporated into a very meaningful account of human nature. 

[01:26:28] Dr. Peter: Love it. I love it. So I have like one more major question and then I wanna check out what Dr. Gudan would like to talk about, and then we’ll go into our key takeaways. But why is it, do you think, that there is so little emphasis, at least this is my perspective, so little emphasis on ordered self-love? Why are we not talking about self-love, if this is so prominent in St. Thomas? Why are we missing this boat? If it’s a prerequisite for us to be able to love our neighbor, if it’s a prerequisite for us to be able to love God back, you know, to carry out the two great commandments, how come it’s left to a handful of like, you know, laymen to be talking about this in this way? Like, why is it falling, in a sense, on the shoulders of folks? Why are we not hearing about this more? Can you shed some light on why this seems to be such a neglected area? 

[01:27:20] Dr. Anthony Flood: I think it comes down to the passages in Scripture that seem to be saying self-love is bad, and maybe not necessarily self-love, but that same passage that we talked about prior, that you need to deny your very self. Well, if you need to deny your very self, then you probably shouldn’t be loving yourself either. And I think it’s an understanding of, misunderstanding of those passages that, it’s clearly a misunderstanding, because nothing else, as I said, even within that same passage, it doesn’t make any sense if you say that, well, I need to deny my very self. You still need to ask the question, well, who’s doing the denying? Jesus? Jesus isn’t telling you to negate your existence, that’s not what anything is about there.

[01:28:06] Dr. Eric Gudan: Kind of strange.

[01:28:07] Dr. Anthony Flood: But even Aquinas, I mean, here’s where it gets fun for Aquinas. One of the passages, he’ll ask the question, is self-love the root of all sin? All sin. And he answers yes, self-love is the root of all sin. So now he quickly goes on to distinguish between wicked self-love versus proper self-love. He acknowledges that fundamental impulse we have toward our own goodness and to continue to will our own goodness. He says that we have that impulse whether we like it or not. He calls that common self-love. Everybody has it. It’s just part of being human. But where we go with it is, you know, that’s when considerations of the intellect and will come in. How we choose to run with that? And he says, if we go in the proper direction, well then love of self becomes proper when we run it back to God as the source of our existence, which turns to moderate it and structure it and then it will lead out to others. But if we begin to love ourselves in such a way in what he calls the wicked sort of love or wicked self-love or inordinate self-love is another term he uses for this.

[01:29:15] Dr. Anthony Flood: Well now we’re loving ourselves at the expense of God. Or another way he’ll say it, loving ourselves in an exaggerated sort of way, in a disorder where we love ourselves as literally not merely good, but as a good greater than other goods out there, greater than the goodness of other people, and even better than the goodness of God. He takes that as to be Lucifer’s first sin. When Lucifer sees that, you know, he is as good as God, right? That’s the sin of pride. So even from the very beginnings in Aquinas, thinking through these things, self-love is still not something we wanna just embrace without qualification, because it very well can become sinful. And not just sinful in the way that my overeating can become sinful, but in this fundamental way to where it’s the thing that defines us as a whole. I become a selfish, prideful person when I have inordinate wicked self-love and all other sin is gonna flow from that. So I think people who reject it now, even, you know, those not reading Aquinas, their instincts aren’t wrong.

[01:30:23] Dr. Anthony Flood: There’s something scary about hearing the word self-love or hearing that term. It does seem problematic, but you just need to calmly reflect on it and realize it’s non-negotiable. Even when this. Here, let’s have fun with this. Even when a person says they’re rejecting the notion of self-love, what are they really saying? They’re saying for me to be a good person, I need to shy away from willing the good to myself, of loving myself. Well, there’s sort of a practical contradiction there, right? We do those things that we know are good for us, you know, when we fast and do those other things, and we’re always aware that they’re good for us. That that’s part of the thing. We know that doing good things is good for us, even if that’s not our ultimate motive. Right? So when I help my neighbor, I know that that in some way enhances me, that that is a way of loving myself even in those acts of self-sacrifice. It’s not my motive. It’s not why I’m doing it. But the point is, is our will just naturally always seeks the good. That’s what it does. It wills the good, it wants union with the good as much as possible. And that begins with the goodness of our own self as the source of everything.

[01:31:47] Dr. Peter: But that can become distorted, right? So that the third donut might be looked at as the perceived good, right. When in fact it is no longer, right.

[01:31:57] Dr. Eric Gudan: But it’s still good.

[01:31:59] Dr. Anthony Flood: And that’s why I keep saying perceived because Aquinas makes the, his word is apparent, but, you know, just because something appears good to you doesn’t mean it is good. You do have to make that distinction, but yeah. But obviously our existence itself, it’s not an apparent good that I exist. It’s a good. 

[01:32:17] Dr. Eric Gudan: He thinks so.

[01:32:18] Dr. Anthony Flood: And God thinks so, right? I mean, God does not want us taking ourselves out of existence or trying to take ourselves out of existence. That’s the first fundamental thing we’re supposed to be doing is continuing to exist.

[01:32:31] Dr. Peter: And even in the case of suicide, it’s not usually, my understanding is it’s not usually that people want to take themselves out of existence. They’re still seeking a good for the self of escape or release from pain or, you know, so that isn’t really a counter argument to what you’re saying.

[01:32:47] Dr. Anthony Flood: Yeah. So even in those cases, yeah, you’re recognizing that it’s good to be you, even even if bad things happen and there’s other evils. It’s still, it’s good to exist as a human being.

[01:32:59] Dr. Peter: So, and final question for Dr. Flood, dear Dr. Gudan, do you have something else that’s just burning before we go to takeaways?

[01:33:06] Dr. Eric Gudan: Oh, but it’s kind of a, not a simple question,

[01:33:09] Dr. Peter: It’s kind of like another episode, isn’t it?

[01:33:11] Dr. Eric Gudan: Kinda like another episode. Why don’t we pick this up later? Maybe I’ll frame the question though. I am wondering if the fundamental experience of self-love is what is accessed in a sense of recollection and the authentic self and the truths of the inmost self that we can find with non baptized persons to be able to access kind of a sense of pursuing the good. And I’m one. And while that can be disordered, of course, there is a being based in reality of life, ’cause I really like this kind of really grounded and inordinate, or, and I’ve heard this many times, it’s disorganized, not ordered, not following the law, not fit, not living in reality, making up your own stuff, a distortion, not acknowledging the way things are. So self-love in an appropriate way is connected to our foundational existence in God. And it’s simply the way things are. And we are submitting to acknowledging living in that reality rather than choosing a fantasy, made up, not real thing. Insisting upon imposing, huh, a lie in order to assert ourselves in some fake way. And so I really like the way virtue is flourishing and living in reality in an ordered way. And so the follow up question here is about that. That’s kind of a summary and I’m not sure if there’s a question that you found there in there, but if you did, you can comment on it.

[01:34:44] Dr. Anthony Flood: Well, I thought of something as you were saying that.

[01:34:46] Dr. Eric Gudan: Okay.

[01:34:47] Dr. Anthony Flood: I have not talked as much as I probably should have about the nature of friendship itself, where we’re talking about, you know, two human beings in relation, but it actually piggybacks off this point quite well, that, you know, when we have a friend, we will the good to them. I mean, when we have a really close, intimate friend, we will the good of what? We will the good first of their continued existence, that’s first and foremost. But then we also will goods and maybe seek the goods insofar as we can to enhance their existence, you know, and we enjoy being around them and those sorts of things. But in virtue of willing union with the friend, you wouldn’t wanna do an evil thing to your friend, right? You wouldn’t want to will them a bad thing. I think everybody would agree to that. Yet you are the thing you’re willing to your friend. Right? But in virtue of wanting to be friends with this person, you are bringing your presence into that friend, with your friend and you’re saying, right, I wanna love you, and I wanna enjoy that relationship with you. I want you to love me. Well, if you want them to love you, that’s another implicit acknowledgement that you are a good worth loving. Right? Otherwise, if you truly didn’t think you should love yourself, because that would entail you’re not a good worth loving, then what business would you have wanting another person to love you in friendship. Right? It would be odd. None of us think that way though, because we automatically, implicitly know that we’re bringing something good to the table in a friendship. Not that we’re perfect, not that we’re not occasionally selfish and all the rest, but we know that our fundamental existence is good and we’re sharing with another. And we see that in our friend that they’re a fundamental good that we wanna share life with. Right? It’s through friendship that we’re constantly reminding each other that, oh yeah, we’re good. And that we ought to be willing goods to ourselves. We ought to be willing our continued existence, which is self love, stripped down to its fundamental essence.

[01:36:52] Dr. Peter: So this has been great. Really appreciate it. What would, you know, Tony, what would you want our viewers or listeners to take away if there was one major point that you would like them to remember for the rest of their lives from this episode?

[01:37:11] Dr. Anthony Flood: Um, think I just made it. 

[01:37:14] Dr. Peter: Okay. Okay.

[01:37:15] Dr. Anthony Flood: That self-love stripped down to its essence is simply the recognition of and the continued willing of one’s own existence as good. Again, ultimately that’s gonna lead back to the source of the existence and it’s also gonna lead this way to wanting to will additional goods to make yourself more flourishing, you know, a greater share in goodness. But that we’re a being who exist because we’re good. And I didn’t go into the transcendental properties and I’m not gonna do it by way of summary. But Aquinas thinks that to be unified is to be good, right? To exist is to be good. So we exist, we’re good. And therefore, by recognizing that, we’re loving ourselves, we’re willing that good, we’re willing the good of that to ourselves in not only now, but as a continued way of being.

[01:38:10] Dr. Peter: Thank you for that. Eric, what do you got for us for a final takeaway, something you’d like people to remember from this episode?

[01:38:17] Dr. Eric Gudan: I really like being based in reality of the experience of being, being good, wanting good, affirming our goodness, affirming where we are. And that virtue is flourishing, is acknowledging the reality of the way things are, and is the way to be more alive and to be in accord with others, and to be in accord with ourselves and to be in relationship with God and to be beloved.

[01:38:48] Dr. Peter: All right.

[01:38:48] Dr. Eric Gudan: It’s just simply that.

[01:38:50] Dr. Peter: And for me it’s just that love of self, ordered self-love is one of the three loves that’s listed in the two great commandments. It’s not an optional thing. And we have that straight from the words of our Lord. And upon those two commandments, depend all of the law and the prophets. These are not just sort of, you know, minor dietary requirements that we could find in Leviticus or something. This is like central to our faith. And so whether or not you as a viewer, a listener, buy into internal family systems or you know, other ways that we’re offering to learn how to love yourself, think about that. Dwell on what does it mean for you to love yourself? You can have an entirely different model, but that you’d be actually deliberately considering what it means for you to love yourself and that you have a way to think about that and to live that out. Whether that’s in agreement with what we’re offering, you know, or not. That’s the central thing, ’cause this isn’t the only way. So that’s what I would offer. And with that, I want bring this to a close, first of all, by, by thanking God for this time together, thanking you, our audience, for being here. Because without you, this wouldn’t exist. And then to thank you, Dr. Eric, Dr. Tony for being here with us today. So just so grateful to you both.

[01:40:05] Dr. Eric Gudan: Thank you.

[01:40:06] Dr. Peter: If you like this episode, then like this episode. Get over to our YouTube channel at Interior Integration for Catholics and hit the like button, subscribe. And join in the conversation with us, write your comments, questions. Let us hear from you in the comments section for this episode in our YouTube channel. Dr. Gudan, Dr. Flood and I, we will respond to comments and questions. Also review this podcast, Interior Integration for Catholics on Apple Podcasts. Give me some ratings, give me some reviews, share your experiences there. Don’t forget those books by Dr. Flood. We’ve got links to them in the YouTube description for this episode. If you wanna learn more about self-love and self-governance according to St. Thomas Aquinas, I don’t think there’s a better resource out there.

[01:40:55] Dr. Peter: Now we are one month out from a big event. The Resilient Catholics community reopens for new applications, and we do this parts work in the RCC in a structured step by step, year long program in a community of like-minded Catholics. Why? To help you flourish and thrive. We’re very practical. We are very concrete about this stuff. We meet in small groups weekly, and we have so many resources, hundreds of experiential exercises, for your human formation. So many talks, so many workshops just for our members. Check out all those testimonials we have on the landing page at soulsandhearts.com/rcc, how the RCC has changed the lives of so many of our members. We have hundreds of members in the RCC, helping them to love God, to love their neighbor. Why? Because it helps them to love themselves in an ordered way, which is that prerequisite. Every applicant to the Resilient Catholics community, as part of that registration process, takes the Parts Finder Pro, and that’s a series of 22 measures that is designed to help you really explore and understand your inner life so much better. There’s a report that comes from that, somewhere between six and nine pages where we will lay out 10 to 15 of your parts, hypothesizing about them with their burdens, with their roles, and their inner relationships. And we’ve got a library of more than a hundred parts descriptions. We tailor those just for you. Two of our professionals look at every one of those reports. They take hours to do. You can see sample reports in the YouTube description for a fictional man and a fictional woman, just to kinda see what they’re like. That can really launch parts work.

[01:42:49] Dr. Peter: And we take discernment very seriously in the RCC. Our staff, like I said, spends hours looking at your application, writing and reviewing your Parts Finder Pro report. We meet with you on Zoom for a 15 minute meeting to go over that with you, so you’re discerning on your end about whether to join the RCC, we’re discerning on ours. And not just about whether the RCC is a good fit for you right now, but what other resources might make your human formation more likely to lead to your thriving. So if it’s a green light all around, we match you with your company mates. We pair you with a companion. Find out a lot more about this. You can call me. You can ask me about it. My conversation hours are every Tuesday and Thursday from 4:30 PM Eastern time to 5:30 PM Eastern time. You can reach me at 317-567-9594. And with that, we’ll bring it to a close by invoking our patroness and our patrons. Our Lady, our Mother, Untier of Knots, pray for us. St. Joseph, pray for us. St. John the Baptist, pray for us.