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: 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...

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.

🧵⬇️ 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. 🧵⬇️

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.

⬇️🧵

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. ⬇️🧵

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 ⬇️🧵


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…

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? ⬇️🧵 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. ⬇️🧵

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 🧵🧵 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.

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/

Yesterday, I took my family to a diner in small town Oklahoma.

We were a family of six in a small diner, but the kids behaved well. Next to us was an ancient looking man, alone, wearing a “Vietnam Combat Vet” hat.

As we packed up to leave, the elderly man waved me over… 1/4🧵 With my infant in tow, I had to get quite close to be able to hear him.

With teary eyes, he pointed to my family and said, “this is what I fought in the war for.”

The immediate solemnity of the moment was staggering, palpable.

I grasped his arm, looked him in eyes… 2/4 🧵

Today is the feast of St. Teresa of Avila, famous for her "Transverberation."

"The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one cannot possibly wish it to cease."

Let's talk about eros (erotic love) in Christianity without being puritanical or bourgeois: 1/9 🧵 Eros, erotic love, is a need-love, a self-love, an appetite for affirmation, fulfillment, and rest by satiating in beauty.

While the beauty of the lover and sex is often introductory, erotic love is actually a call to ascend toward greater beauties. 2/9

The “Restoring a Nation” conference is underway:

**Another World is Possible**

Great to meet so many people in person. This is largely a #CatholicTwitter meet up.

Great opening from @gjpappin, @PatrickDeneen & @SohrabAhmari.

🧵🧵 Tweets from the conference: Wonderful talks - @PatrickDeneen expressed that this conversation cannot be reduced to a critique of liberalism (left/right), but being “post-liberal,” as @PostlibOrder is named, is about a positive vision predicated on the common good with creative solutions.

Today, we celebrate the Transverberation of St. Teresa of Avila.

"The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one cannot possibly wish it to cease..."

Let's talk about eros, "erotic love," in Christianity without being puritanical or bourgeois: 1/9 🧵 Eros, erotic love, is a need-love, a self-love, an appetite for affirmation, fulfillment, and rest by satiating in beauty.

While the beauty of the lover and sex is often introductory, erotic love is actually a call to ascend toward greater beauties. 2/9

Is this still not the norm?

When I was in the diaconate, they flew in a seminary professor from a "conservative" seminary who taught us homiletics *exactly* like this.

His "great idea" was to give homilies in first-person as a character from the reading...

https://twitter.com/hannonregular/status/1563125898194194433

I think homiletics is quite difficult at the moment - especially as a deacon.

If your parish is habituated to hearing a narrative each week from the cleric's life, attempting to "break" that habit by doing something different is really agitating - no one has a palette for it.

How can we read the Bible like St. Thomas Aquinas & Dante? - A short thread (🧵)

In the 1300s, Dante wrote a letter to his patron saying you read the Comedy the same way the early Church read Scripture -- in four senses: literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical. 1/6 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.

Today is the 15th anniversary of the “Regensburg Address” by Pope Benedict XVI.

One of the most important post-conciliar documents, it explains (1) Christ as Logos (2) the providential harmony of Greek wisdom & Hebrew faith and (3) the “dehellenization” of the West.

Quotes: On the Logos, the Eternal Word, and “the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry.”

The coupling of Greek reason and Hebrew faith is an act of Providence.