 Good to be here. My name is Matt Fradd. I am originally from Australia. I met a American woman who was better looking than my country and worth moving here for. We've been married 15 years next month and it's terrific. I originally met my wife doing ministry in Ireland. We were part of a team of 12 that flew to Dublin and then got into a van and drove up to Donnie Goal. And we began running retreats there for three months. That's how we got to know each other. And I remember realizing two things very quickly about the Irish people having just arrived. And the first was that I had no idea what they were saying to me. People often say to me that my Australian accent has become rather muted over time, but that's because I'm so tired of people not understanding what I'm saying. And so I have to do this. But I remember just, we showed up at this one place and some very lovely older priest came up to me and it sounded like he said this. Oh, give me the old chapel in the soccer ball. Yeah. Yeah, what? Oh, give me the old chapel. Yeah, no, but seriously, what? And you know, there's only a couple of times you can say what before you can't keep doing that. And so the third time he spoke, and I had no idea what he said, I had a choice to make. I could either go, I'm so sorry. What? Or I could just pretend I understood him. So that's what I did. I just went, yeah, yeah, good. Okay, good, that was the right answer. The second thing I realized in Ireland, they used language differently to us. One of the words I first encountered was crack, which is an Irish word, C-R-A-I-C, which is Gaelic for fun. And if you've been there, you know this. People will come up and say, what's the crack? And you're supposed to say, not much. You're not supposed to say, how's your crack? Trying to mix it with the locals. That didn't go over well. But I remember before our very first retreat, my wife, she wasn't my wife at the time, but I was working on it. Anyway, she and me and the rest of our team were kind of chatting with the teenagers before this retreat, trying to get them to like us more before we talked to them about Jesus. And my wife was chatting with a small group of girls in the corner of this hall where we would be running the retreat. And fun fact, if you're a female from America, everybody in Ireland just assumes you must have been a cheerleader. So they're, are you a cheerleader? No, I'm not a bloody cheerleader, you know. And the next question they asked was, is it gonna be the crack on the retreat today? And my wife thought they meant cocaine. And she knew that they were, you know, making fun or something. She didn't think they actually were asking whether there would be crack cocaine. But my wife just played along and went, no, no crack on the retreat today. One of the girls said, but you guys seem like you're full of crack. Yeah, right. So Cameron said, I know we might seem that way. But what you were witnessing is just a pure joy of Jesus. So say no to drugs. And at that point, the confusion was apparent and one of the girls tried clarifying. And she said, oh no, crack is fun. No, it's not. That's what my wife said. It might seem like fun now, but later on it'll getcha, you know. So cut that out. No, it's Gaelic for fun. It's not fun. This was how we began our ministry in Ireland. And it seems to me that there are certain words and phrases and even arguments that we as Christians hear or make use of that we've used so often or have heard so often that they cease to impact us the way that they should, you know. So when somebody says to me, God loves you. And I'm like, yeah, I'm convinced I have no idea what that means or a very small understanding of it. If I did, I suppose I would fall down and cry with joy. But other words as well, like we've talked about already in this back and forth exchange with Trent on worship and marriage and things like this. And so over the course of this conference, we're going to be using language we've heard a lot before, including today's talk on happiness. And so it's just my prayer that the Holy Spirit would guide you and me into a deeper understanding of these things so that we can know him more in order to love him more. So let's pray. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. Good and gracious God, holy and victorious Trinity, we worship you. We trust you. We turn to you in our hearts, search for life. You are our satisfaction. You are the fulfillment of all our desires and we dethrone those false prophets, those false idols from our heart who we have turned to seek our ultimate good. We repent of that and we beg you Lord for the grace that we need to repent and to turn to you and to courageously seek you and love you. We ask this in the name of Jesus Christ, amen. St. Thomas Aquinas, pray for us. So when most people think of Thomas Aquinas, they might think of what he has to say about God's existence or being in essence, what he has to say on metaphysics or just war theory or these sorts of things. But over the last five years, I've been running a podcast called Pints with Aquinas and the idea is if I could sit down with the angelic doctor and have a chat over a brusky and he could bring it down to a fifth grade level, what might he say to me? What might that conversation look like? And I was very impressed when I found Thomas Aquinas's Treaties on Happiness. I found it not only beautiful, but very convincing. And so I decided I wanted to write a book about it. Here it is here. It's, here's my favorite part of the book. It's my dedication. Are you ready? To my very good wife, Cameron, who upon learning during one of my rather dramatic melancholic moody spells that I had written a book entitled How to Be Happy said, wow, you should read that. So this is not a book on Matt Frad's 10 Tips to Be Happy, but rather it's about what Thomas Aquinas has to say about happiness. In the short time we have here together, I wanna address that briefly, happiness. And then I'd like to share with you five remedies for sorrow that Thomas Aquinas talks about in the Summa Theologiae. I've even brought one copy of the Summa Theologiae with us and so I wish I had a beer. That would have really made this ideal, but we'll go through that together. So in the Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas makes the distinction between perfect happiness and imperfect happiness, or beatitude for perfect happiness, and felicitous for imperfect happiness. And Aquinas says that we can only be fully happy when we behold God face to face, since God is the object of our desire. Here's what he says. The object of the will that is of man's appetite is the universal good. Just as the object of the intellect is the universal true. Hence it is evident that not can lull man's will, satisfy him fully, save the universal good. This is to be found not in any creatures, but in God alone, because every creature has goodness by participation. Wherefore, God alone can satisfy the will of man according to the words of Psalm 1025, who satisfyeth thy desire with good things. Therefore, God alone constitutes man's happiness. So when we ask, how can I be happy? What we're really asking is, how can I reach my ultimate good? Because when people talk about being happy or wanting to be happy, they don't say I want to be happy in order that such and such. They want to be happy full stop. Nobody says I want to be happy so I can be rich. People say I want to be rich so that I can be happy. We can, however, be imperfectly happy in this life, and only imperfectly happy. That doesn't mean to say we can't have a good degree of imperfect happiness, but it won't be complete. Aquinas says the goods of the present life pass away since life itself passes away, which we naturally desire to have and would wish to hold abidingly for man naturally shrinks from death. Therefore, it is impossible to have true happiness in this life. And I actually think that recognizing that fact may be the first step to experiencing a good degree of happiness in this life. Because if you think that you could be perfectly happy in this life, you'll probably wander around wondering what on earth is wrong with you and why you can't be fully satisfied in these different earthly goods. But we pray in the hail, Holy Queen, that we journey through a veil of tears. And I fall into this trap very often. Just the other day, I was wondering about the house, puffing and going through the pantries and the refrigerator, and it was about 10 o'clock at night, and my wife said, what are you doing? And I said, looking for happiness. I thought it was in the pistachios, but it wasn't. So we're gonna try the whiskey, and if it's not there, I don't know what I'm gonna do, but if I find it, I will let you know. Aquinas says, imperfect happiness can be had in this life, it can be acquired by a man by his natural powers in the same way as virtue in whose operation it consists. So Aquinas is going to say that if you want to be happy in this life, be virtuous. As Emanuel Kant once said, making a man happy is very different to making a man good or a different question. But I'm not sure that's right, actually, because morality has a lot to do with happiness. When we think of morality, we might think of thou shalt not statements, telling you not to do the thing you really want to do, and if only you could do, then you would be fully happy. But actually, it's the man or woman of virtue, that's the person who's going to experience a good degree of happiness in this life. I think it's kind of summed up in that verse from the Catechism, I think it's 2339 on the subject of chastity. The Catechism says this, the alternative is clear. Either man governs his passions and so finds peace, or he lets himself be dominated by them and becomes unhappy. It's a great line. It's almost like giving you the invitation. Would you like to be unhappy or peace? Happy, so you can choose. Anyway, so I thought that was quite good. When I was 12 years old, one of my dear friends and I would go rollerblading together. We'll call her Jane. And one day, Jane sat me down on the side of a road on our rollerblading journey to discuss some really important things. She was not happy and she wanted to be happy. She actually couldn't see any point in continuing to live. She was 12 years old. She shared with me about some terrible things that were taking place in her house and she wanted to know, like, what do I do? How can I be happy? And so I tried to give her reasons to be happy. I said, this, well, next year we'll go to high school and that'll be great. But for everything I suggested, she asked, and then what? Well, then we'll get our driving license. I don't know what you do here in America, but in small town Australia, when you're a teenager and you get your driving license, here's what you do. You drive up and down the main street. That's it. We used to call it chucking a mani, you know? We'll go chuck a mani, yeah, let's do it. There'd always be those kids with the fancy cars, really expensive cars. You don't know how they afforded it because they make the same amount as you, you know, nothing, but there you have it. So I said, we get to do that. And she said, well, then what? And I said, well, then you'll leave high school and maybe get a job or go to university or something. And then what? Like to everything I said, her point was, what's the point? Is there a point? I remember saying, you'll get married, you're gonna have kids, okay, then what? Then they'll have kids, you'll be a grandma, that'll be sweet. Then what? And eventually I remember having to look at her and saying, you know, then you die and stuff. Well, not stuff, just die, it's what's gonna happen. She looked at me as if to say, do you see my point? And I did, that if there is no point to our life, then maybe if we're experiencing a good degree of pleasure, we can continue, but if we're not, why bother? It seems to me the five most fundamental questions that human beings ask themselves are very much tied up in this question of happiness. And if you can think of a more fundamental question, you can let me know and I'll adjust my thought and even this talk. It seems like it's something like this. Where did I come from? Who am I? Why am I here? How should I live and where am I going? Wouldn't you agree that those are fundamental questions? Either we're interesting people who ask them, or we've had three Margaritans and we begin to ask them, but at some point in people's life, we ask questions like this. And it occurred to me while I was chatting with my friend Jane that if atheism were true, we would have dogmatic answers to each of these questions. Where did I come from? Ah, good, here's the answer. You have been coughed into existence by a blind cosmic process that didn't have you in mind. Sweet, okay, it's like the opposite of a Matthew Kelly talk, you know? Like, well, who am I? Well, good, you are the result of matter plus time plus chance, sweet, okay. Why am I here? What's the point? But it seems to me that if there is no God, if this whole thing is one big, gigantic accident, we could agree with Richard Dawkins when he says that why, at least in this context, is a silly question. If there is no meaning to the universe, it follows that there is no meaning to your little life. You might pretend that there is. You might even adopt certain purposes, like to fight against abortion or some such. And that's cute, good for you, gets you through the days and the long nights, but it's not actually the reason for your existence, yeah. Well, how should I live? We ask, and I don't know about you, but it seems to me that if God doesn't exist, the answer is, I mean, really, however you like, in whatever way you find some amount of pleasure, since we are not for anything, no end to which we are going, we can live in whatever way that sort of makes us happy in the here and now. And so that might mean living in a way that contributes to the flourishing of your group or your nation or whatever, but it might not. And who's to say that you're wrong to? I mean, suppose I start acting in a way that you find objectionable, because it's not conducive to the flourishing of you. What would you say? Like, stop it, we don't like it. And I'd say, who are you? I don't care. You'll say, well, we'll hate you. And I said, I hate you too. I do not care. Like, it doesn't seem to me there's a good answer to that. And then finally, where are we going? Well, if atheism is true, I think we should agree that all of us will die by the look of you, some of you sooner than later. Yeah. It occurred to me recently that the number one question people will be asking after my funeral is, where's the potato salad? You're welcome. Think about that for a bit, right? We will all die individually. And think about this now that we're on depressing thoughts. There will be a time when somebody thinks about you for the last time. Ha, that's bloody terrible. But not only will we die individually, but cosmologists tell us that as the universe is expanding and running out of power, that we will eventually reach what they call heat death, where the universe will be ruinous, right? Spreading out throughout seemingly infinite space forever. And from that vantage point, if you were to ask, would it have mattered if the Big Bang never had ever occurred? I think the answer is no. I mean, it doesn't really matter. It all comes out in the wash. All of human existence was like a spark that flickers, appears, and dies forever. But if atheism is false, then we can begin asking those questions again, and I think they will direct us in our desire for happiness. How should I live? Where am I going? If I've been created in the image and likeness of God, to act in a certain way, to love in a certain way, to be in a relationship with God, then all of a sudden it becomes a lot more clear as to how I should live and where happiness lies. Okay, I wanna look now at Aquinas's five remedies for sorrow because I just love them so much and I love Thomas so much and I can't wait to meet him in heaven and be like, I'm so sorry for tarnishing your name with my cheap little podcast, but you were so cool, can't wait. Aquinas gives, as I say, five remedies for sorrow. The first, he says, is, it's gonna be very obvious, but you can write these down because if you are feeling sorrowful, these will help. Do something pleasurable. But of course, Aquinas doesn't mean something that's illegitimate or something like that, he means do something pleasurable and in a legitimate sense. Here's what he says. Pleasure is a kind of repose of the appetite in a suitable good, while sorrow arises from something unsuited to the appetite. I love this line. Consequently, in movements of the appetite, listen to this, pleasure is to sorrow what in bodies repose is to weariness. So just what sleep does to a weary body, pleasure will do to a sorrowful soul. Therefore, just as all repose of the body brings relief to any kind of weariness, so every pleasure brings relief by assuaging, satisfying or doing away with, any kind of sorrow due to any cause, whatever. And here I think it's important to distinguish between, say, doing something that's pleasurable, recreative and leisurely, as opposed to engaging in, like, disassociating activities. Because I think, if I was to guess, the greatest sin of our age is that of sloth, which means not just doing nothing, but even doing a lot of things to avoid doing what we ought to do, a sort of sorrow in the face of what's required of us. It's very easy to scroll through my Twitter feed while listening to a YouTube video on the next tab while receiving a text message from somebody who I now need to respond to. And none of this is leisurely. It seems to me that it's dissociative, which what I mean is you're not actually engaged in what you're doing. And I fall into this as well, and I continue to. I'll find myself watching a movie on a laptop, opening up another screen, not even watching the thing, I just opened up and then playing, but then reading something else, and you finish something like that and you've vaged out, but at the end of it, you're completely exhausted. It seems to me more and more that the truth is that leisure or genuine rest, enjoyment in something pleasurable that's recreative actually takes work. Like what's easier, just binging a Netflix series or sitting down enjoying a coffee and reading something beautiful? Obviously the latter, but whereas the first doesn't bring deep relief, the second does. You may have heard of this if you listened to my podcast, but for the last three years, I've taken the entire month of August off of the internet. So tomorrow's my last day, and then you have no idea how happy I am tomorrow afternoon. I have my wife change the passwords on my computers because I have no self-control. I give my phone away to a friend who puts it in his safe because I have no self-control. That's why I'm not happy, right? And then for the entire month of August, I get to seek out leisure. Now I have to work a lot harder these past few weeks to get ready for August, but I have that blessing of having a job where I can actually take the whole month off. And I don't know if you've tried to have like a tech fast or just to be without your phone for a weekend or an overnight. You realize how pathetic you actually are. The other day I left my phone in the office and as I was walking towards my elevator, I reached for my phone because I had some brilliant thing that the world needed to know about right then and there, which of course isn't the case. So I think in this tech-saturated culture, doing something that's pleasurable and legitimately recreative might mean doing something like abstaining from technology. The second thing Aquinas says, and I love it because he sounds like my mom did when she was speaking to me when I was six, is this. Pain or sorrow is assuaged or helped by tears. So the second thing you should do if you're experiencing sorrows as Thomas Aquinas is weep and groan. So that means don't just cry, it needs to be an ugly cry. Thomas says, tears and groaning naturally assuaged sorrow. And here's where he sounds like my mom. But since he's Thomas Aquinas, I won't be too dismissive of it. Because a hurtful thing hurts yet more if we keep it shut up. Isn't that what your mom said to you? Because the soul is more intent on it. Whereas if it be allowed to escape, the soul's intention is dispersed as if it were on outward things. So tears and groaning. Now if it's been too long since you've actually cried because you've believed some nonsense about crying being undignified or something, you might have to encourage that through reflecting upon your own sins or listening to beautiful music or detaching from those things that you use to distract yourself. Here's the second reason tears and groaning is good. Because an action that befits a man according to his actual disposition is always pleasant to him. In other words, if you have to act in a way that you do not feel, you've all experienced how unpleasant that is. Like when my wife says, hey, we have that thing tonight. And I go, oh, gosh. All I want to do is stay home and read and smoke my pipe or something. But no, we've got to go to this bloody party, you know? And I don't want to be there because I'm an introvert and I don't really like dealing with large amounts of people. I never know how to enter or end a conversation in little clusters that people form. I'm like, do I leave now? I just feel very awkward about it, right? But having to pretend otherwise is exhausting. Hey, how's it going, you know? So Aquinas is saying one of the reasons if you're sorrowful, you should cry and groan is because it befits how you actually feel. Here's the third thing that you should do if you want to do away with sorrow. The sympathy of friends, the sympathy of friends. When one is in pain, it is natural that the sympathy of a friend should afford consolation. And this is why Aristotle indicates a twofold reason. The first is because since sorrow has a depressing effect, it is like a weight whereof we strive to unburden ourselves. So if we unburden ourselves to a friend, it's like the weight is dispersed. And the second reason, he says, is that when we see the affection of somebody for us as we share our pain with them, we're reminded of their love and that burden is easier to bear. And I think during this COVID lockdown pandemic thing, I think many people have tried to be self-sufficient. I'm gonna stay at home, watch Netflix, get door dash, have that Zoom call with the office or something. But actually being with another human being and sharing your joys and sorrows with them is what Aquinas says would be required if you wanna alleviate your sorrow. The fourth thing he says is contemplating the truth. It's a fascinating difference between the beasts, right? Irrational animals and us. When irrational animals have their needs met, they go to sleep. When you and I have our needs met, we ask questions, which is why I think it's, you know, no coincidence that philosophy arose when and where it did in ancient Greece, which it was in a relative degree of peace where people could begin to ask questions about the meaning of life and the meaning of morality, how we should live and these sorts of things. I'm not sure who said it. If you do, tell me so I can finally attribute this to this person. Somebody said it sounds like Chesterton, but Trent wrote a book on what the saints never said. So I'm afraid to attribute it to him lest he ask me a bunch of questions to show me I'm an idiot. Okay, so somebody said that beasts or cows chew contentedly in the meadows while men smoke discontentedly in the bars. I think that's very good because you and I weren't made merely for the pleasures of this life. We were made for God. And this is actually being used as a sort of argument for God's existence. Listen to what C.S. Lewis wrote. Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for these desires exist. A baby feels hunger. Well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim. Well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire. Well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. And so that's why I think we shouldn't be terribly surprised when we engage in something beautiful, experience a large degree of happiness and yet feel unsatisfied. Especially in those times where we feel deeply happy, I think it's usually at those times that we feel our dissatisfaction the most. I remember my wife and I being in San Diego at Little Farmer's Market and trotting down to the beach and the sun was brilliant in the sky as it sank beneath the ocean. It was like this lovely red mango color. And my wife and I were just loving each other's company, loving the weather. I remember I just decided to strip down to my boxes and go swimming in the ocean and I was body surfing. And I remember thinking, I have never been this happy and I remember thinking at the same time, is this all there is? As Peter Crafters said, those deepest experiences of happiness and pleasure we encounter seem to be nothing more, or not, I shouldn't say nothing more, but seem to be a finger pointing to something else, a prophetic moment that says this is not all there is. So we ought to contemplate the truth because we were made for God and it's a tremendous beautiful activity to reflect upon things like that, which is why you're here today. You find some pleasure in apologetics, thinking about the deep questions. If you didn't, you wouldn't be here unless somebody dragged you here. Here's the final thing Aquinas gives us and this is my all-time favorite. If you're feeling sad, here's the fifth thing you could do. Sleep and baths, or sleep and baths, depending on whose sides you're on, if you're feeling sad, you could sleep and have a hot bath. Why does Aquinas say this? Because we are not merely ghosts in the machine. We are our bodies. Our bodies are equally a part of who we are. So when we can soothe the body in an appropriate sense, we also soothe ourselves. Aquinas says, sorrow by reason of its specific nature is repugnant to the vital movement of the body. And consequently, whatever restores the bodily nature to its due state of vital movement is opposed to sorrow and assuages it. Moreover, such remedies from the very fact that they bring nature back to its normal state are causes of pleasure, for this is precisely in what pleasure consists. Therefore, since every pleasure assuages sorrow, sorrow is assuaged in such like bodily remedies. So, a massage or a hot bath or even a glass of wine, you know, this is a bodily experience. These things I think are ways to alleviate sorrow. So putting these things together, if you're super sad here today, here's something that you could do. You could, I don't know, think about the deep questions in life, which is what this apologetics conference, of course, is all about. You could go home, you could chat with a friend about what you're going through right now. You could have a large glass of red wine, a hot bath, a good night's sleep. And I think that's a nice, and then you're gonna have a cry too at some point. I'm not sure when you wanna do that before or after the wine, I'll leave that up to you. Right, much more could be said about Aquinas and what he has to say about sorrow. For example, and I'll end with this, he goes through a list of the things that we seek out to make us happy and argues for why they cannot be our ultimate good. So, things like fame and money and pleasure and honor, he shows why these things can't make us happy. He doesn't just say they can't, like my mum did, money can't make you happy. And I went, yeah, I'll show you, right? Or as one comedian said, okay, people say money can't buy you happiness. But it can buy you a jet ski and I've never seen anybody sad on a jet ski, right? But when you read through the Sumer and you see what Aquinas has to say, what you find out is his arguments are incredibly compelling. God and God alone is the fulfillment of our desire. We will not be fully happy until we see him, please God, face to face in the next life. We can experience an imperfect happiness in this life and that to the degree in which we grow in virtue. So, thank you very much for listening and the book is available at the bookstore if you want it and it will make you happy. And if it doesn't make you happy, whatever fraction I get from the sales will make me, no, it won't. Oh, goodness. What should we do? Should we take some questions or should we wrap up? Ooh, 10 minutes. Let's do some questions. Don't argue with me or yell at me. That made me very nervous. Poor Trent. But if anybody has any questions, you wanna raise your hand, we'll bring around a microphone. There's a fellow there. It seems you were talking about feeling sad and we're not unhappy anymore, we're depressed and taking a bath and going to bed is exactly what depressed people do and now we say that they need some drugs in order to make them be normal which makes them actually unhappy. What's the difference between depression and unhappiness? And nearly being unhappy. Yeah. Right, so first I would say that you said depressed people sleep and have baths and these sort of thing and that might be the case but it would be to an inordinate degree. The times in my life, I'm not sure if I experienced depression, I wouldn't really know how to define it clinically but yeah, there have been times where I've just laid in bed and just not wanted to get out and not wanted to care about the world or my place in it but I suppose when Thomas is talking about sleep and baths and these sorts of things and even pleasures, he's talking about legitimate pleasures that actually recreate us so that we can be who God is calling us to be. Now as far as the distinction between well, am I depressed or am I just experiencing sorrow? Maybe one way to figure that out would be to engage those five remedies for sorrow that Aquinas talks about and if you're still actually experiencing what you think might be depression to see a good therapist or psychologist or even psychiatrist because that's above my pay grade, I wouldn't know when or whether somebody needs drugs but I'm certainly wouldn't discount it. So you're right. Simply saying, well sleep and do something pleasurable is not going to be enough for somebody who's experiencing legitimate depression. Where's the microphone? Thomas Aquinas has always been an intriguing figure to me and I'm sure in the Catholic Church but reading Thomas Aquinas has always been a suggestion to me like you ought to read nuclear physics or something just so difficult that you're not going to get much out of it. Do you have some suggestion how to take a first step in coming to grips with Aquinas? Excellent question. Somebody once said that when you read Augustine Augustine is beautiful like a garden is beautiful and I've said that Aquinas is beautiful like a board game instruction manual is beautiful. Not a word is wasted. There is no ambiguity. I will say what I need to say was few words as possible and that can sometimes rub people the wrong way. You feel like, is this a flesh and blood person who wrote this or some sort of computer? But of course when you read his poetry and his hymns you see that he was indeed a flesh and blood person and that's why in fact I think people are surprised when Aquinas is like, hey, you should have a sleep and a good bath. You're like, oh, this is the guy who I find so difficult to read. Okay, a few ways of kind of entering into Aquinas. G.K. Chesterton's book, The Dumb Ox would be an excellent introduction. My favorite little book on Aquinas is by Joseph Pieper and it's called, I think it's called Thomas Aquinas and he talks about the milieu into which Thomas Aquinas was born, the controversies that were raging in his day. We often think of 13th century Italy and we might think it rather idyllic but you had the threat of Islam, new translations of Aristotle that in certain cases were being banned, the rise of the new universities. You've got the new mendicant orders, Franciscans and Dominicans which was an entirely new thing. So it was a tumultuous time and understanding Aquinas in light of where he came from can help and so that would be another book. The Thomistic Institute puts out lovely little videos on YouTube and they're about five minutes long and they're illustrated and they're done terrifically well, I think. I wrote a little book and it's in the shop, I think, called Does God Exist? A Socratic Dialogue on the Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas in which it's basically a fictitious story in which an atheist meets a Christian in a coffee shop and over the course of a week they go over arguments for atheism and God's existence based on the texts of Thomas Aquinas and so that might be a nice way to kind of enter into Thomas Aquinas as well. Thank you. Hello. Hey, to follow up on this gentleman's question in front of me about happiness and depression, what about Aquinas himself at the end of his life? Was he unhappy, depressed or indifferent when he all of a sudden stopped writing, seemingly without explanation? Yeah, I would say my guess would be he wasn't because it was on the Feast of St. Nicholas, is that December 6th, I think it was. The story is, there's different versions of the story but after Holy Mass he was praying and Brother Reginald, his secretary, overheard a conversation between our blessed Lord and St. Thomas Aquinas and our Lord said, you've written well of me, Thomas, what would you have as your reward? And whereas I would have said like a jeep and a trip to Russia, I don't know why I've always loved Russia, Aquinas gave the right answer. He said, non-nisite domine, which is Latin for nothing if not you Lord, which is the perfect response. I'll have all of it if I can have you. I'll have none of it if I can have you. I'll have some of it if I can have you but whatever I have it needs to be with you. I don't want everything and not you. Everything minus you equals nothing, you know? And it was after that time that Aquinas grew rather silent, you're right, he laid down his quill as it were and stopped dictating and the Summa Theologiae was left unfinished. It was after his death that Brother Reginald went into other works of Aquinas' and completed the Summa in the supplementary section with Aquinas' own words. It's not as if somebody else wrote them. He died in a Cistercian monastery and it was even there that the monks, they wouldn't even give him any rest there. They were asking him to dictate to them a commentary on the song of songs. Paul Bloke can't get any rest. My understanding is we do not have that commentary. I would love to find it or for it to somehow reveal itself but no, I think his reluctance to speak or to write had more to do with his profound mystical experience that he had with God. He said, after what I have seen, all I have written seems to me to be nothing but straw. And I don't think that that was an admission of depression. I think if anything, it might be the opposite. When you encounter God, maybe it's the things of this earth begin to fade away or something like that. All right, maybe one more question. Thank you, sir. Getting back to the first remedy for sorrow, do something pleasurable. I've heard this before and I don't know if it's rumor. Did Thomas Aquinas eat so much that they had to take a section of the table out for his stomach? I've heard that too. I've never seen that documented. When I look at, I think there were several biographies written of him within living memory and he is said to be a sort of robust and fellow, whether that means tall or fat, I'm not sure. So I don't know the answer to that. So he took repose and culinary treats. I think we have to be careful to attribute to saints what we ourselves would like to indulge in. That's what I would say. Gluttony is a grave sin. And even though sometimes I keep finding myself eating and drinking because I'm looking for happiness, I think we have to be a little careful. Actually, where's Trent? He's not here since he wrote that book. Did you know anything about that Trent? You know about Aquinas being fat. I know you looked into different quotes that saints wrote. Did you find anything in that regard? Yeah. Yeah, so the dumb ox, that might be another way that the myth developed. Apparently he was quite quiet throughout school and somebody said to him, you're a dumb ox. So maybe that's another indication that he was big. And of course, Albert the Great, his teacher, said to this fellow, you call him a dumb ox. And I tell you that one day his bellowing will be heard throughout the world. So St. Thomas Aquinas, pray for us. Amen. Thank you.