Episode Transcript  

One

The Nature and Delightfulness of Truth

One of the most exciting words a child discovers is the word “Why?”

This is a beautiful word – one of the most powerful words in the human lexicon. 

This word is a key, a currency, a path to truth. 

As C.S. Lewis says, questions are the human need for answers, as thirst is the human need for water

And an answered question brings a greater consolation, satisfaction, and delight than a cup of cold water to a man in the desert.

Because the soul’s need for truth is greater even than the body’s need for water – and the delight is therefore correspondingly more profound.

That’s why we spend so much of our time looking for truth, looking for answers. That’s why Wikipedia, Siri, and Google and AI get so much traffic. 

Because it’s good to know. We want to know. 

And yet, even though we have greater access to information than ever before, do we really have a deeper, more joyful understanding of the world and ourselves? 

Or is our knowledge now limited to the trivial, the superficial, the current, and the partisan?

What do we need to have the pleasure of deep understanding? And how can we pursue that fundamental good? 

Two

The Marks of Real Understanding

Aristotle once gave three excellent conditions for knowledge to count as true and complete. 

Here they are

First, your view of something has to be able to make sense of the subject matter. You have to be able to give an account of the thing to be explained, whether that’s basketball, electricity, economics, the crusades, or the Church’s teaching on Purgatory.

Secondly, you have to be able to answer all the objections against your view.

If you can’t answer every objection, then that means there’s still a side of your subject matter that you don’t understand, that’s still fuzzy. 

In fact, it’s precisely through answering objections to the faith that the Church has, over the centuries, filled out and developed her understanding of Jesus and the Gospel. 

Being able to put objections clearly, and answer them satisfactorily, is the art that people like Aquinas brought to its highest level – and we should be able to follow their example.

And thirdly, says Aristotle, you should be able to explain how it is that other people’s misconceptions arose in the first place. 

If you don’t understand how other people, made in the image and likeness of God, could be mistaken about this topic – then there’s something about other people and about the topic that you’re missing. 

And that means you’re missing something important.

So what is it you’d like to understand better? What is it you’d like to know more about? 

If you really want that knowledge to be fully human, a simple google-search or Wikipedia rabbit-hole probably isn’t going to do it.

We need to do the hard work of study to get the satisfaction, the joy of acquiring knowledge. 

Three

Superficiality and Partisanship

As we just saw, one of the marks of really deep understanding is that you can really sympathize with other people’s misunderstandings.

So the fact that our society is getting more and more partisan, polarized and divided is an indication that our knowledge is getting more and more superficial.

People with a superficial understanding of some topic – religious, political, historical – these are the people who like to label everyone who disagrees with them as “stupid.”

The profound delight of truth is turning into the self-indulgence of self-righteousness. 

So what can we do to replace being superficially “informed” with an actually deep understanding that can really satisfy and bring about greater peace instead of greater division? 

Four

Intellectual Rigor and Peace

The great English Poet, Alexander Pope, wrote: 

A little learning is a dangerous thing

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring

There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain

And drinking largely sobers us again

In other words, a superficial knowledge can actually make us drunk, or less thoughtful – whereas deep knowledge brings both pleasure and clear-headedness.

Unfortunately, for many of us, our only understanding of very complicated and involved topics comes from the news – which is designed to be partial, quick, and limited to the present

In other words, the whole point of the news is to be superficial. And even if you try to balance by reading the news on the right and on the left, you’re still training yourself to think in superficial and partisan terms.

That’s not the way to acquire the habit of good knowledge.

Instead of watching or reading a bunch of news, if you really want to understand a topic, read a book by someone who has thought deeply about it – not just deeply about recent events, but about the nature of the thing.

For instance, if you really want to understand immigration – don’t read posts by people on the left or people on the right talking about the current immigration crisis.

Read what the Church says. Read what Scripture says. Read what philosophers have said, read what moralists of the fifteenth century have said. 

Do what CS Lewis says everyone should do – for every two books you read, read one really old book to get a broader perspective.

If you really want to understand something, instead of just picking a side, then dedicate yourself to the subject – and delight as you transcend the annoyingly repetitive talking points of the contemporary dispute.
And as you develop a deep understanding, you’ll develop a more confident and balanced view of the contemporary situation, and one in which you’ll be more sympathetic, and therefore more convincing, to the two different sides that a superficial, unreflective understanding has fixed into a permanent deadlock.

This is the path to a real knowledge about anything. A knowledge that brings pleasure instead of passion. A knowledge that brings peace instead of partisanship.

Five

Meditation and Contemplation

This habit of going deeper and deeper into some subject is most wonderfully repaid when it comes to our faith. 

Entering deeply into the Scriptures, or into Moral Theology, or into Church History, or into the Systematic mysteries of the Trinity, Christ, the Church, Our Lady and the Saints – this is the greatest pleasure and peace a soul can know.

This kind of knowledge comes from deep reading, but it also comes first and foremost from prayer. 

Our model should be the old men in the temple of Jerusalem – when the Christ-child came to teach them.

Those old men were disciplined enough to have learned very deeply the things of God.

But they were humble enough to be amazed at the wisdom and the flashing brilliance of the child in their midst. 

Discipline and humility – these are the marks of someone who wants to really understand.

These are the marks of someone who is open to God’s gift of insight, and the incomparable joy of seeing it all come togethe

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