Fr. Bonaventure Chapman came back to Tulsa, and the night before this recording he stood in front of a room of men and talked about prayer. Adam woke up the next morning, remembered what Father said, actually did it, and reported back that it helped. At least on that one day. Father took the win: one day works, that's great. The line that stuck was the smallest one in the whole talk. Do a little, habitually. When his spiritual directees hand him a Lenten list, he almost never crosses anything off, because each thing on the list is usually good. He just ratchets the quantity down so they don't run straight into failure. Thirty minutes of silent prayer a day sounds holy when you're writing it down. Lent is long. Start with five, and know that five minutes a day for a year is a lot of time.
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The full talk on the prayer life is going to patrons, so if you want it, patreon.com/thecatholicmanshow. Everything that comes in goes back into the show. It is not yet feeding anybody's children. They haven't reached those levels of despair.
Father's definition of prayer is the setup for the whole episode. Prayer is wasting time with God, because he's worth wasting time with. He learned to say it that way as a chaplain at Providence College, where the Dominicans each took a Division I team and he got women's basketball. He told them up front he wasn't their coach and wasn't there to fix anything. He was there to waste time on them, which is how you tell somebody they're worth something valuable to you. That's what he takes prayer to be. You're not the producing agent. You showed up, you set the time apart, and even if you never touch contemplation that morning, you did the thing you were there to do.
Same logic runs through beauty. Adam still remembers standing in front of Michelangelo's David in Italy and getting hit by it harder than he expected, and he doesn't consider himself an art guy. Father used to teach philosophy of art out of Richard Wollheim's Painting as an Art, where Wollheim describes needing roughly 45 minutes in front of a single painting just to clear his head enough to see it. So Father assigned it. Thirty to forty minutes, one painting, write down what happens. He did it himself in front of a Twachtman winter scene at the National Gallery, wearing the habit, people staring. Thirty minutes in, the painting changed. The cold went warm and a house appeared that he had not been able to see. Art works on you the way truth and goodness work on you. You don't take it apart, you let it tell you something.
Then the topic: ethics as praxis, not poesis. Why doing good is not like making a cake.
Aristotle splits practical reason in two. Praxis is doing, and its target is the doer. Poesis is making, and its target is the thing made, the finished product sitting on the counter. We almost always think about the moral life in the second category, which is why we judge ourselves by outcomes. But nobody talks like that about actual making. If a man says he's a great cake maker and every cake he produces is garbage, that doesn't compute. The goodness of a maker is settled by the product. You're not allowed to say "I'm a good carpenter, the house just always falls down." Father's point is that a man can be a lousy cake maker, a lousy air traffic controller, a lousy software developer, and still be a good man. Mother Teresa was not, as far as anybody knows, a baker.
So what makes a man good is what he does, not what he produces. Ethics comes from character, and character is habit. Virtue is the power to do the thing you're for. The knife is a good knife because it's sharp and heavy, and it's a good knife sitting in the drawer, not only while it's cutting. Honesty works the same way. You build the habit so that when somebody asks you a question you don't have to run the math. You just tell the truth and then deal with whatever comes.
Dave pushed back on the ends and the means, and Father's answer is the hinge of the episode. Of course the ends don't justify the means, if by "end" you mean the external result. But the real end of the moral life is you. The good man is the end. Which means the end does justify the means, because the means are you, acting. There's almost no space between them in a person. A bad act always produces a bad result inside the man who does it, no matter how well the situation turns out.
Adam raised the obvious objection: doesn't that collapse into egotism, where I'm just farming my own soul and calling it virtue? Father's answer is that acting is outward by nature. You don't tell the truth in a vacuum, you tell it to a person in a situation. You don't forgive in the abstract, you forgive somebody who may well take advantage of you afterward. The act reaches out even though the character it forms is yours. And for Aristotle the common good sits above the individual anyway. For us it's better still, because the highest good is a person you can actually be friends with, which Aristotle had no room for. He couldn't make sense of relating ethically to a god at all. Show him the Annunciation and he'd say Mary owes that being nothing, because you don't share a nature with it.
Then the hard question. Where does the standard come from? Aristotle says virtue is a mean determined by reason as the prudent man would determine it, which sounds like a circle, and Father grants that it is one. Aristotle was an empiricist. He found out what a good knife was by handling knives, and he found out what a good man was by watching good men. The trouble is we might pick wrong and end up admiring power. St. Francis of Assisi would not have impressed Aristotle for one minute. Too humble, not magnanimous enough, not getting anything done. But we were handed the answer key. The saints are our moral exemplars, which is why Benedict XVI treated them as the living interpretation of the Gospel, and why Paul could say imitate me as I imitate Christ.
The takeaway is practical, in the real sense of that word. When you're stuck, don't ask what result you can engineer. Ask what a good man does here. Socrates settled it in the Crito: we would rather suffer injustice than do it, because suffering is something that happens to you and doing is something that is you. Father uses the same test in the confessional. Was this a happening or a doing? Were you engaged in it, or did it land on you? Most of us don't sin out of malice. We sin out of weakness, backed into a corner where one small wrong thing looks like it solves the bigger problem. That's making, not doing. Your job was never to manufacture the good outcome. Your job was to be good.
Raise your glass.
TOPICS COVERED
Fr. Bonaventure's talk to Tulsa men on the prayer life, and the full recording going to patrons
Why he cuts the quantity, not the items, when spiritual directees hand him a Lenten list
Starting at five minutes of mental prayer instead of thirty, and why "Jesus did it, I can do it" is not a plan
Setting the time apart as the thing you actually owe, whether or not the prayer "produced" anything
Prayer as wasting time with God, because he's worth wasting time with
Chaplain to Providence College women's basketball, and telling a team you're there to waste time on them
Standing in front of Michelangelo's David and getting hit harder than you expected
Richard Wollheim's 45 minutes in front of one painting, and the assignment Father gave his students
The Twachtman winter scene that changed at the 30 minute mark, and the house that appeared in it
Why art has to work on you, the way truth and goodness do, instead of being taken apart
Ethics as character, not as a list of oughts handed down from outside
Aristotle in the lagoon: the naturalist who studied octopuses and asked what makes a thing a good one
What makes a knife a good knife, and why virtue means power
Praxis and poesis: doing aims at the doer, making aims at the thing made
"I'm a good cake maker, I just can't make good cakes," and why that doesn't compute
Mother Teresa was probably not a baker, an air traffic controller, or a software developer
Why judging the moral life by results quietly turns you into a product manager of your own soul
The ends don't justify the means, except that the end is you, so in a sense they do
Why a bad act always produces a bad result inside the man doing it
Habits as the content of character, and telling the truth without running the math first
Is this egotism? Why acting is outward facing even when the character formed is yours
Aristotle's problem with the Annunciation, and why he couldn't be friends with a god
Kant versus Aristotle on what you owe a rational being that shows up in your room
Virtue as a mean determined as the prudent man determines it, and whether that's a circle
Aristotle the empiricist: finding the standard by watching people who actually live well
Why St. Francis of Assisi would not have impressed Aristotle
The saints as the answer key, and Paul saying imitate me as I imitate Christ
Plato is great on triangles and terrible on toads
Why you've never seen a real triangle, and why that toad is a real toad
Eudaimonia, and a criterion for the good life that stops at the natural
How the Catechism structures the moral life around the commandments but fills it with the virtues
Students, AI, and a professor who says just turn in the garbage, I care about you
Socrates in the Crito: we would rather suffer injustice than do it
The confessional question: was this a happening or a doing?
Why we sin through weakness far more than through malice
Being engineers and economists in America, and treating every moral question like a scale
REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE
Guest:
Fr. Bonaventure Chapman, OP, Dominican friar of the Province of St. Joseph, assistant professor of philosophy at The Catholic University of America, formerly professor of philosophy and chaplain at Providence College, and a host of the Godsplaining podcast. He mentioned a recent Godsplaining episode on Descartes, "the greatest Catholic philosopher," which you are free to go argue with.
Philosophers and thinkers:
Aristotle (384 to 322 BC), on virtue, character, praxis and poesis. The praxis/poesis distinction and the definition of prudence are in Nicomachean Ethics VI.4 to VI.5; the definition of virtue as a mean "determined by reason, as the man of practical wisdom would determine it" is Nicomachean Ethics II.6
Plato, the theory of forms, and the Crito
Socrates on preferring to suffer injustice rather than do it. In the Crito (49b to 49c) Socrates gets Crito to agree that one must never do wrong, not even in return for wrong. The sharpest "better to suffer injustice than to commit it" formulation is in the Gorgias (469b to 469c)
René Descartes, the a priori method, and the man thinking in the heated room
Immanuel Kant, duty, and what you owe any rational being
St. Thomas Aquinas and the medievals, and how Aristotle came into the Church through them
Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, delivered at the National Gallery of Art in 1984, published 1987). Father said "94 or something" on air; the lectures were 1984
Saints and Church sources:
St. Francis of Assisi, as the exemplar Aristotle would have walked right past
Pope Benedict XVI on the saints as interpreters of the Gospel. See Verbum Domini 48 to 49, on the saints and the interpretation of Sacred Scripture
St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 11:1, "Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ"
The Annunciation, Luke 1
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, moral life section, structured on the Ten Commandments with the content carried by the virtues (for example, temperance regarding the sexual appetite treated under the Sixth Commandment)
John Henry Twachtman, American impressionist. The National Gallery of Art holds several of his snow scenes, including Winter Harmony (c. 1890 to 1900). Father did not name the painting on air beyond "winter something or other"
Notes for accuracy:
Father said ethics comes from "ethnos." The Greek root is ēthos (ἦθος), meaning character or habit, which gives ēthikos. Ethnos is a different word meaning nation or people
Virtue does come from virtus, which is rooted in vir, man. The word "virus" in the same breath was a slip of the tongue, not an etymology
The transcript renders the Annunciation as "enunciation" and Godsplaining as "God's Blaining." Both are transcription artifacts
