 This one's okay this one because I have a question more to you than to the lecture But speaking about American uniqueness and the values that it stands for that stands for individualism and the founding fathers have read Intellectuals that were proponents of the natural law like John Locke But I have a question about history of ideas and how do how you see that because you say that Every religion it's an enlightenment and when we are enlightened and we actually are You know putting individual first but when you look at a history of ideas Well, you had Aristotle first when it comes to natural law But then there was also late medieval period and Saint Thomas Aquinas And he was also and he sort of introduced Aristotle to to to Western Europe But it was way before enlightenment and he was a Catholic saint So do you see any positive preludions to enlightenment before or? I mean, yes, I mean there's no question that they say we're talking about the period of the Enlightenment Which is like the 18th century John Locke and Newton all the way to the founding of America really Very little good happened after that intellectually but Yeah, I mean the enlightenment doesn't come out of nowhere It has it has roots and it's ultimate roots of Aristotle, but Aristotle disappears from Western thought for What 1300 years or something like that and he's rediscovered by Aquinas and Aquinas is a genius Aquinas is a one-of-a-kind You know once in a thousand years kind of genius and Aquinas is struggling because he's a Catholic But he's also reading Aristotle and Aristotle makes a lot of sense to Aquinas and he's going but how do I resolve this with? Christianity and he doesn't in the end really resolve it But what he does is it gives? Respectability to the idea of the secular the idea of human reason the idea Even of the pursuit of individual happiness on this earth because that's that's Aristotle right to achieve you domineer in this Earth to achieve human flourishing Aquinas gives it Respectability and embeds it into the Catholic Church, which means that from them on the Catholic Church can't reject it it struggles with it and From that all the Renaissance happens about 200 years later And then the Renaissance are further discoveries of Aristotle and of Greek culture now now They see the sculptures and the plays and the architecture and they go whoa What have we lost for two? You know 1200 years. Where were we right? You know that they had indoor plumbing in in Rome It was indoor plumbing that offsets with with pipes that have water and then it was gone It disappeared from you know they used to have tall buildings and then and then we got to the point where in the West we couldn't build more than two stories During the middle and dark ages right and then we had to rediscover all that so they're rediscovering all this stuff And you remember that that dome in in in Florence where they can't finish it because they don't know how to make a bit dome now The Romans had built domes bigger than the dome there, but they didn't know how to do it And they had to wait until a genius architect. I forget his name Brunelleski came around and said this is how you do it Right, but they didn't know how to do it. They couldn't figure it out even though the Romans had big much bigger domes earlier We lost knowledge huge quantities of knowledge and we slowly rediscovered them and we discovered them and then we started discovering science in spite of the Catholic Church who burnt at the stake people who did disagreed with it or put Galileo under house arrest and then finally We discovered science and now we can understand the world and only then can you get an enlightenment only then can people say ah ha Reason is efficacious reason can really tell us about the world Aristotle makes sense And then you get Locke and the French enlightenment and the Scottish enlightenment and the founding of America and the just Explosion of science that happens in the 18th and 19th century just an explosion you think about the amount of knowledge We gained in those 200 years Exceeds all the knowledge in the whole hundred thousand years previously The other hand is it really so black and white because somebody could argue that I mean Aquinas had the luxury to study Aristotle and write all these books Because of Catholic Church. Yeah, the Catholic Church that made us all poor The destroyed civilization the destroyed the Roman Empire Yes, that Catholic Church then allowed Thank God Aquinas to actually have a little bit of spare time to study Aristotle. Yes So after they decimated Western civilization and destroyed it Yeah, okay, so they gave him a little bit of time good for them. No, I mean no the Catholic Church gets no credit It gets huge negative credit. It is a force for destruction in human history. I'm sorry I know you guys are Catholic, but that is a fact You know Rome was doing fine and when it turned Christian. It was the end of Rome Now Rome was already pretty decadent before that so it was on decline already But you guys really nailed it in the heart and there's nothing good nothing good from a civilizational perspective happened in Catholic Europe between 400 when Rome falls and and and the Renaissance with the exception of Aquinas discovering what he discovered Making possible the Renaissance So it's the anti-Catholicism of Aquinas It's the Greek pagan influences That save the west This is from a pagan Jewish atheist. Yeah