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Dcn. Garlick, Chancellor 🇻🇦 Profile picture
@HarrisonGarlic1
Aug 15 • 12 tweets • 5 min read • Read on X
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What if you had a map to happiness?

🪜That’s what the “ladder of love” is—an ancient practice that can bring fulfillment to your modern life.

🪜Plato discovered this ladder of love, and Christians adopted it into their spiritual writings.

🧵Here are the steps to happiness: Image
First, you have to understand your soul.

You have a natural love called "eros"--and it wants to satiate in beautiful things and be happy.

Not some of the time. But all the time.

We want to be happy always.

And this presents a problem... Image
The desire of your eros is infinite.

But the beautiful things in this life are finite.

Good food, an amazing spouse, great friends, etc - it is all limited.

It can only make you happy in certain ways and for a limited time.

And many people respond poorly to this... Image
They live a life of restless consumption - moving from one beauty to the next.

Are we doomed to a life of dissatisfaction?

Plato and the Christian saints would say NO.

We have to learn how to climb to higher beauties - climb the ladder of love. Image
Your soul has three parts:

1. Intellect that loves truth
2. Spirited that loves nobility
3. Appetitive that loves pleasure

And each part is made healthier, more beautiful by a virtue:

1. Intellect via prudence
2. Spirited via courage
3. Appetitive via temperance Image
What about justice?

Justice is the virtue that makes the soul well-ordered, with each part working in harmony and loving its proper beauty. It adorns the whole soul like a crown!

And these four virtues are attested to in both the Old Testament and in Plato. Image
Image
And this introduces the "ladder of love."

The soul must move from the lower beauties of the flesh to the higher beauties of the soul.

Let's look at the FIRST RUNG: Pleasure.⬇️ Image
The eros of a young man is sparked when he sees a beautiful woman.

The beauty draws him out of himself, makes him want to be better, to be worthy - beauty is a challenge.

But the beauty of the body is an invitation to the beauty of the soul - like a sign or guidepost. Image
The love of the beloved leads to loving his or her soul - who they are.

As Pope Benedict XVI says, eros finds its completion in marriage, as the self-love of the lover is extended to the beloved, because they become one self.

And this reveals a secret of the Bible... Image
Many forget that it is our eros, perfected in marriage, that God uses as an icon of His love for us.

In the OT, Israel is wedded to God. Idolatry is adultery.

In the NT, Christ is the groom, the Church is the bride - we become one flesh with Him. Image
So, our desire, our eros isn't bad - but rather we must see the beauty that leads to pleasure as an ICON of greater beauties of the soul, especially God.

BUT this is only one part of the ladder of love - there is much more! Image
Join us this week at THE ASCENT for our new article:

🪜How does the soul ascend to God?

It is a beautiful teaching that can help your soul ascend to all that is true, good, and beautiful.

A great new project with @the_culturist_ and @SirEvanAmato.

theascent1.substack.comImage

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More from @HarrisonGarlic1

Dcn. Garlick, Chancellor 🇻🇦 Profile picture
Jul 30, 2024
Setting Dionysus upon a perverted parody of the Last Supper was an intentional sign.

But of what?

Dionysus and Jesus represent two spiritual movements at war in the world.

🧵⬇️ Image
First, who is Dionysus?

It is important to know that he, a man, was born of a man. He was born from the thigh of Zeus.

He's often presented a male with female qualities.

And he brings a madness that makes women as like men, and men act like women. 🧵⬇️
Second, he's not who you think he is.

He's not a jovial wine god of happy-go-lucky hedonism.

That is a mask. A lure.

Underneath he's a cruel, licentious god that brings a madness of a bestial release in sex and violence.

⬇️🧵
Read 14 tweets
Dcn. Garlick, Chancellor 🇻🇦 Profile picture
Jul 18, 2024
Let’s talk about political power.

Most right-liberals see political power and authority through Hobbes.

Power, authority, coercion are always a violation of the subordinate, a dominance of one will over the other.

⬇️🧵
Image
Image
Political power becomes a sort of necessary evil amongst the assumed egalitarianism of man.

For example, even hierarchy is unnatural to man, an artificial necessity for politics.

It’s no wonder the right eschews power and proclaims a supposed neutrality instead. ⬇️🧵
It also no surprise that the right has conceded power to the left.

The left moves left. The right compromises. Everything shifts left. Repeat.

As Plato noted, good men unwilling to take the reins of power are destined to be ruled by lesser men.

⬇️🧵
Read 6 tweets
Dcn. Garlick, Chancellor 🇻🇦 Profile picture
Sep 22, 2023
How did Aquinas and Dante read the Bible?
How, as moderns, are we reading it incorrectly?

Let's read the Bible like our forefathers.

⬇️⬇️⬇️

In the 1300s, Dante wrote a letter to his patron saying you read his epic poem, the Divine Comedy, the same way the early Church read Scripture.

There are four senses: literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical.

The LITERAL is the historic sense, the intention of the author.

Per Dante, the verse "When Israel went out of Egypt" would mean the historic deliverance by Moses.

The literal is foundational to all the other three senses, like the foundation of a home, if skewed, skews the rest.

The ALLEGORICAL means one thing may serve as a "type" for another, e.g., like mana being a "type" of Holy Eucharist, foreshadowing it (John 6).

Dante notes that Israel being delivered from Egypt by Moses is like us being delivered from sin by Christ.

Allegory is at the heart of Holy Scripture.

As the Church teaches:
The Old Testament foreshadows the New, and the New Testament perfects the Old.

The MORAL sense answers the question: how should I act? How does this apply to my life?

Per Dante, Israel leaving Egypt is “the conversion of the soul from the struggle and misery of sin to the status of grace.”

We take the lessons from the literal and allegorical and say, as Aquinas notes, "what ought I do?"

Last, the ANAGOGICAL sense is what does this teach me about my final end, i.e., eternal happiness with God in heaven?

For example, Dante: Israel leaving Egypt is the final salvation of “the blessed soul from the slavery of this corruption to the freedom of eternal glory.”

As moderns, we spend almost all our time debating the literal and some time in the moral (how does this apply to me?).

But the allegorical, which is at the heart of Scripture, has become lost to us. It is alien and strange to us - what was once the primary way to pull moral lessons out of the Bible.

We need to recapture the four senses to allow the Holy Spirit to make Scripture come alive to us once more.

Sources and deeper drives ⬇️🧵

Image
Image
St. Jerome states, “Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ” (CCC 112). In other words, we come to know the reality of Jesus Christ by reading Holy Scripture.

Yet, what if we read the Bible incorrectly? 🧵

@AlcuinInstitutealcuininstitute.org/writings/essay…
Also, I had a wonderful conversation with @RewiretheWest on this subject:
Read 4 tweets
Dcn. Garlick, Chancellor 🇻🇦 Profile picture
Aug 27, 2023
How does a Catholic think?

What does it mean to have a baptized imagination?

Many know that the Church tells us to interpret Scripture through four senses: literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical.

But…

Aquinas and Dante also interpreted *reality* this way.

How? ⬇️🧵 Image
The medieval mind understood that the world was like a painting.

Like a Painter who has an idea of a tree and then creates a painting of a tree, so too do our trees image the idea of a tree in the mind of the Creator, God.

Our world is a sign or symbol of the spiritual. ⬇️🧵 Image
Let’s look at some examples:

#1

The most real thing is not found in material things but in the spiritual Idea.

For example, if all that was green was destroyed in the cosmos, green would still exist as an Idea in the Divine Mind—the perfect idea of green.

⬇️🧵
Read 9 tweets
Dcn. Garlick, Chancellor 🇻🇦 Profile picture
May 22, 2023
How can we read the Bible like St. Thomas Aquinas & Dante?

In the 1300s, Dante wrote a letter to his patron saying you read the Divine Comedy, his epic poem, the same way the early Church read Scripture -- in four senses: literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical. 1/6 🧵🧵 ImageImage
The LITERAL is the historic sense, the intention of the author.

For Dante, the verse "When Israel went out of Egypt" would mean the historic deliverance by Moses. The literal is foundational to all the other three senses, like the foundation of a home, if skewed, skews the rest. Image
The ALLEGORICAL means one thing may serve as a "type" for another, e.g., like mana being a "type" of Holy Eucharist, foreshadowing it (John 6).

Dante notes that Israel being delivered from Egypt by Moses is like us being delivered from sin by Christ. 3/6 🧵 (photo: @frobrien) ImageImage
Read 7 tweets
Dcn. Garlick, Chancellor 🇻🇦 Profile picture
Jan 25, 2023
Why did Jesus choose fisherman as disciples? Why not carpenters? Ever wonder?

Christ’s choice of fishermen recalls the primordial waters of Genesis and reveals an ancient pattern of water representing chaos and death that flows throughout all of Scripture.

In Genesis… 1/
After God made the heavens and the earth, the earth is formless, void, and covered in water - the Spirit of God flutters over the deep.

From that chaos, God draws forth the beauty of Creation. Order from disorder. This opening provides a template for other stories, like Noah 2/
In Noah, the primordial waters of Creation are recalled by God to retake the earth in chaos and death.

Yet, God again in His mercy drew forth salvation from the watery depths and humanity was made anew with Noah and his family. 3/
Read 13 tweets

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