Hierarchy and Woman: Aristotle vs. Aquinas w/ Andrew Willard Jones

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Aug 31, 2026 | In The Catholic Culture Podcast

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Groundbreaking Catholic political thinker Andrew Willard Jones joins the podcast to discuss a brilliant lecture he recently gave at the New Polity Conference. St. Thomas Aquinas is often said (dismissively) to have gotten his view of woman from Aristotle’s biology. But while he did accept some of Aristotle’s biological errors, they disagree on something far more fundamental, namely their metaphysical interpretation of difference and inequality among human beings. A comparison between the Aristotelian view and the Christian/Thomistic view of inequality is profoundly instructive for how we see not only the difference between the sexes, but civil society and the entire cosmic hierarchy willed by God.

Links

New Polity https://newpolity.com/

Andrew Willard Jones, The Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics https://stpaulcenter.com/store/the-two-cities-a-history-of-christian-politics

Transcript

Thomas Mirus: [00:00:00] Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Catholic Culture Podcast. I’m Thomas Mirus. This podcast is a production of Catholic Culture, and if you’d like to support the show, please go to catholicculture.org/donate. I’m sorry it’s been a while since my last episode. You know, maybe I shouldn’t have started three different podcasts. It tends to make it harder to focus on any one them at the same time. I had to give a lot of time to the Lives of Popes podcast recently because I was writing, like, seven or eight installments on St. Leo the Great. But now that I’ve finished that up, I’m free to focus on the Catholic Culture Podcast for a while.

Okay, so, I’m excited about today’s guest. Back in May, I went to the New Polity Magazine conference in Steubenville, Ohio. The topic of the conference was Man and Woman. And it was a great conference in general, a lot of really interesting talks. And I’d say three or four really outstanding talks in [00:01:00] particular.

One of my favorites, perhaps my favorite, being by Andrew Willard Jones, who spoke, essentially giving a comparison of the view of hierarchy of Aristotle versus that of St. Thomas Aquinas, but especially when it comes to the sexes, or, in that context. And the talk was very interesting terms of the sexes, but also, more generally, best account of the hierarchical order of creation that I’ve heard.

And I found it very compelling as to things that I’ve been thinking about for a number of years now, hierarchy being particular interest of mine. And so I’m really, really happy to have Andrew Willard Jones here. He is the academic dean at the College of St. Joseph the Worker, where he teaches history and politics. He’s a founding editor of the journal New [00:02:00] Polity, and he’s the author of several books, including Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX, whose feast it is today, actually, now that I think of it. Other books he’s written in recent years include The Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics, and Church Against the State: on Subsidiarity and Sovereignty. Andrew, welcome to the podcast.

Andrew Willard Jones: Well, thank you very much for having me.

Thomas: Okay, so, how to start here? The idea of hierarchy, the idea of authority, is something that kind of preoccupies me because over the years I’ve realized that it’s fundamental in many ways to a lot of disagreements that [00:03:00] the modern, you know, secular world has the Catholic Church, and modern Catholics have with ancient Catholics. And by ancient, I mean before the past century, more or less. [laughs] The view of authority as something kind of inherently oppressive or hierarchy as something that necessarily, degrades that which is under it, right? is very deeply ingrained in us, even if we are Catholic today, even if we accept authority and hierarchy in particular contexts, we may react strongly against it in other contexts. so don’t know if you would agree with that, but I just see that in so many different issues, and obviously you deal with church and state, and that’s one such issue, right? Or just not even church and state, just the state. What is the state? What’s the basis of the fact that it can command us, you know? Like, is this just [00:04:00] all by consent of the governed, or is it, you know, something from God? All those kinds of questions. Likewise, the question of men and women, you know, husbands’ authority over their wives in marriage, things like that.

So I don’t know if you would agree with that general framing, but it seems like this is such a deeply... If pride is the characteristic vice of the modern world, then it makes sense that, you know, hierarchy and authority would be the things that it rebels against the most, right?

Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I agree, of course. Anytime you bring up hierarchy, power, authority, it’s already pre-charged with, a bunch of content, you know, modern content about the ultimately exploitive nature of all power, right? And that is something that I think is, a product or an aspect of just losing sight of what Christianity is.

Okay, so it’s a part of our kind of modern [00:05:00] apostasy where we forgot that power as domination is incredibly frequent and bad and all over the place. But power or mastery as benevolent or as natural and as ordered towards the common good is very much essential to a Christian understanding of, really, the cosmos.

So not just social order and of the church, but as the cosmos as a whole. St. Thomas himself makes this distinction in the question in the beginning of the Summa where he asks whether or not mastery, human mastery over other humans is natural. And he answers with, well, depends you mean by mastery, you know, the typical sort of Thomas fashion. He goes, if in one sense you have the kind of mastery that a master has over his slave, which its dominant characteristic or its characteristic is that the master [00:06:00] uses his mastery over the slave for his own good rather than for the good of the slave. So it’s a sort of instrumentalizing of the other.

Whereas the mastery, the other form of mastery is, the standard example is the sort of mastery that a good father has over his son, or a good king over a free people, which is, power or mastery that is ordered to the good of the one over whom it’s wielded. Right?

And so those are kind of the two forms. And what’s happened in modernity is that second form, the, the form of the father over the son has been forgotten or has been sort of cynically deconstructed to where it always... Modern society, modern thought tends to always reduce to the master over the slave, right? I mean, this is from the beginning of modernity. This is what [00:07:00] Hobbes does. This is from the beginning the modern move.

Thomas: And of course this hasn’t stopped us in any way from seeking power over others.

Andrew: Well, no. Yeah. Far from it. In fact, what ends up happening is just political theory becomes the theory of mastery and slavery, basically.

And even approaches towards or attempts to figure out Christian politics often become the question of, “Well, when is it good to be a slave?” Or, “When is mastery appropriate?” And it’s still working within the paradigm of the master-slave discussion, often. And so you get the idea sometimes among Christians of submission, that the citizen has to obey in all things but sin, and all these kinds of things. Which are really [00:08:00] ways of articulating authority that is structurally identical to the kind of power that a master has over a slave, with just the sort of fideistic claim that it’s good. That it’s, like, appropriate in this circumstance or that circumstance. Whereas the distinction that Thomas is making is far more fundamental than that.

Thomas: So I’d be interested to hear, you know, coming into this conference, and you tend write about politics, but this conference was about man and woman. I’d be interested to hear why you decided take up this particular topic comparing Aristotle and St. Thomas. But if I can just say, when the topic of Aristotle and St.Thomas on the sexes comes to mind for me, I notice that people very frequently take the fact that [00:09:00] St. Thomas relies to some extent on Aristotelian biology, which may in itself be exaggerated, you know—but because Aristotle was wrong about certain things, they take that as a way to dismiss what St. Thomas says about differences between the sexes. And I find this to be, in my opinion, sophomoric, because first of all, the fact that St. Thomas might use a particular argument doesn’t mean that it’s the entire basis of his position. I mean, first and foremost, a lot of the time, for instance, when he’s talking about husbands and wives, he’s citing St. Paul. And then maybe he uses something or some presupposition from Aristotle, to justify it in some way. But, the other reason is that other fathers and doctors who were not Aristotelian said very similar things about, you know, the roles of men and women. And so I don’t think that that suffices to just sort of explain away St. Thomas’s position. [00:10:00] But your talk gets at things that are much more fundamental than the biological stuff. And I don’t know, maybe that’s a good place to start, and if you just have any general thoughts, first of all, about like why you decided to take up this topic and to discuss their views of hierarchy in this particular context as well.

Andrew: So, so just to start out, St. Thomas doesn’t talk very much, he doesn’t write much about distinction between the sexes, okay? And, when he does, it’s, it’s normally a part of another discussion that he’s having, right?

Thomas: Like a commentary on St. Paul or something like that.

Andrew: Yeah, it’s just not something that occupied his thought very much. He didn’t spend a lot of time working on it. Though like most of Thomas’s work, even when he touches on something briefly, there’s a lot of profundity in it. But one of the things that happens is that [00:11:00] people, because Thomas does repeat some of the Aristotelian formulations regarding male and female, they take that as Thomas’s understanding of that difference—or, even maybe blow it up into a more important, aspect of Thomas’s thought when, in fact, I would say in my reading of it, is that that is a weakness in Thomas. Like, that he ought not to have just, you know, sort of regurgitated Aristotle’s, notion that a female is a sort of deformed male or something like that. Like, that’s a mistake, and Thomas is not immune from doing that.

But the argument, the real basis of the argument for me is that Aristotle’s discussion the male and the female is not [00:12:00] incidental to his understanding of social order itself. That it’s actually just an instance or an application of way he believes society as a whole in fact functions. And therefore, if we look at the way Thomas and the Christian tradition understands hierarchy or how society itself functions, then we can see that there is a very, very wide divergence between the two, and that therefore, a different interpretation of the male-female distinction opens up as a possibility.

And so that was the place I was going with that. Obviously, I’m very interested in political question, and so I use the male-female distinction or difference as a launching pad into that discussion, right? So, the basis of the distinction between Aristotle and St. Thomas here is that, I think, if you don’t mind me just going right into this, is that [00:13:00] Aristotle has a profoundly different understanding of the sociality of man. And I think this is very, very often forgotten or misunderstood because we so often read Aristotle through St. Thomas, right? We don’t even realize we’re doing that. But you read Aristotle and he says things like, Man is a social animal, or, you know, that, Man is a political animal and man’s end is achieved in the polis. And we as Christians hear that as all men achieve their end within the polis. Right? That, like, oh, men, every man has an end, and we achieve our fulfillment within the polis, and we tend to hear it that way. That’s a Christian way of hearing it. Because what Aristotle then goes about, goes into great length in explaining is that actually [00:14:00] what he means here is that man is a political animal in the sense that a man’s end or man’s end is the production and the maintenance of the perfect man. Not that all the men in the polis achieve some sort of fulfillment. That’s not the point. Not the fulfillment of the species. But rather the polis is kind of the support mechanism or the conditions of possibility for a man to achieve perfection. So the socialness, there’s a much stronger corporate understanding within Aristotle.

You see, so if any man is to achieve perfection, which is self-sufficiency, right—perfection in virtue and self-sufficiency for Aristotle—one of the prerequisites to that perfection is perfect [00:15:00] leisure, right? So that he can contemplate the perfect good and the perfect true.

But of course how is it, this is just very sort of rudimentary questions here, but how is it that a man achieves both self-sufficiency and leisure? And it’s like, well, the way in which Aristotle explains this is that you have to come to understand the entire social body as being instrumental to his achievement of that perfection.

So the way that Aristotle describes this in the very beginning of the Politics is in the whole discussion of natural slavery and of the natural slave. And it’s incredibly important. That’s actually, I think, the key to the understanding his entire politics is the discussion on natural slavery. It isn’t some sort of unfortunate residue of his time or something like that. It’s at the very heart of the entire discussion. Because what [00:16:00] he’s arguing there is that men are of different degrees of manliness, of manness. There are men who are more men than other men, and the lesser men are ordered towards, or properly ordered towards the good of the greater men, and therefore natural slaves, and are ordered by those greater, those who are greater in the hierarchy of power within the city. But for the good of the greater. Now, it’s only incidentally for the good of the natural slave. So in the same sort of way that, say, and this is the explicit example that Aristotle gives, is that in the same sort of way that you have an ox that plows your field, and he’s—You’re using that ox for your end. You want him to plow your field. But [00:17:00] the ox’s end is survival, and his survival is incidentally necessary for him to work towards your end. Therefore, you feed him give him a place to sleep. And so he achieves his end, which is lesser than yours, as an animal, which is survival. He gets to survive, and that survival is a part of an incidental condition of possibility for him being instrumentalized towards your end. But he doesn’t really participate in my end. He only participates in it as an instrument.

We use the word participation in a Christian theological sense, in a substantive manner. When we say that we participate, say, in the intellect of God, we mean that we have an intellect that in fact shares in the activity and ends of the divine [00:18:00] intellect. That’s not the form of participation that we see, that we find within Aristotle.

In Aristotle, the participation is as an instrument or as a piece of the body. So in the same sort of way that, we could say a hand of a body participates in the health of the body. And it’s like, okay. But a hand itself has no justification for existence outside of its service to the body as a whole. You see? Like to the person. And this is the reason why you could never talk about the hand having an end, that we wouldn’t more accurately be able to talk about the person having an end, not the hand.

The hand is an instrument for the person, which is the reason why we’ll sacrifice it, right? [00:19:00] We’ll sacrifice it, and that’s fine. That sort of hard corporate nature is what underwrites Aristotle’s politics.

Thomas: By the way, this is probably a reason why when Saint Paul talks about the wife, you know, being the body of her husband or him loving her as his own body, it’s important that he says body instead of, like, a particular body part like hand or something like that.

Andrew: It’s the whole thing. Yeah. That’s right. So for Aristotle then, what happens is the natural slave is understood as the property of the master, and so as an extension of the master himself. So in the same sort of way that we would think of as a hammer as an extension of the workman, right? And not as a separate entity that has its own ends, right? Or has its own fulfillment. It’s just an extension of him, and so we can still talk of the [00:20:00] craftsman as being self-sufficient even though he uses a tool.

And so Aristotle wants to take that way of thinking extend it to the entire social body so that you have this class of aristocrats, of excellent men, who are achieving the perfection of man. And he can argue that they have self-sufficiency precisely because everything that’s below them are extensions of their own intellect and will. You see? Everything below them is their property and therefore it’s just an extension of them. So the polis becomes the body that serves them as the person, right? And therefore you have, you have inequality within the polis is a form of being deformed, deformity.

[00:21:00] So that lower levels within the hierarchy are less human, so much that at the very bottom, the distinction between the animal and the menial slave is blurred. And it’s actually blurred at the top, too. The distinction between the great man and, like, a god is also blurred. So you have this blurring of the line there, in both directions.

So with Aristotle, at the bottom, the ends of the slave are base ends. So the ends of the slave are, you know, let’s just say food. He wants to live. And the same sort of way like an ox does. And the master will allow or facilitate the fulfillment of that end because it’s incidentally important for the proper instrumentalizing of the slave, and [00:22:00] that’s when Aristotle says, “Therefore there’s a community of ends,” or there’s a sympathy in the ends.

That’s what he’s talking about. He’s not saying that they share an end. It’s in the master’s interest to provide those who are below him whatever it is they happen to be after, right? And what they are after is degraded ends, so either just survival or money or reputation. So as you work your way down the political hierarchy, you have different levels. It’s only at the very bottom you have the slave, the true slave.

Thomas: So, like, between there might be the merchant class or-

Andrew: Merchant class ... right, yeah ... who wants money. And the self-sufficiency of the city requires the activity of merchants, right? So the ideal perfect life of the aristocrats requires the activity of merchants. And therefore the properly ordered city or the prudentially [00:23:00] ordered city by the aristocrats would be such that the merchants can achieve their end, which is making money. Okay, but they don’t achieve the human end as such. They’re a degraded or a deformed version of humanity.

Thomas: So a fundamental point here in your discussion of Aristotle is that, you know, he thinks that there’s this one end for human beings, and not everybody is capable, not all are capable of attaining to that end. There’s something a man should be, but not all of them can be that. And that is because nature produced them in such a way as not to be able to achieve that end. And yet, the fact that nature produced this deformed, defective version of a man is necessary for the good man, the noblest man to achieve his end, and for the whole to achieve its end. This is somehow a defective result of nature.

Andrew: So it’s a perfect species. It’s like a weird paradox, right? It’s that, but you have to then take Aristotle seriously, when you’re talking about man as a political animal.So that the whole, the self-sufficient thing, which therefore is sort of like the individual of the species, is the polis. And so the, the polis itself achieves its end when the aristocrats achieve the end of man, and therefore, it’s like the lower forms within the polis are kind of like drones in a beehive. They’re lesser bees than the queen, right? But they’re an essential aspect of the social thing, which is the beehive, which is the basic unit of the species.

Thomas: Well, and then, you know, in the case of the sexes, because he believes that, he believes that a woman is a, [00:25:00] you know, basically the result of a reproductive process that ought to have resulted in the production of a male child, but by defect resulted in the production of a female child. But obviously he knows that this is necessary for the perpetuation of the human species. And so again, this paradox comes up, but I think it’s very interesting that you’ve pointed out that this paradox does not just come up in the case of man and woman, but it’s throughout his entire social theory.

Andrew: It’s everywhere. It’s the basis of the whole thing, and explicitly so. So he says that a woman, a female is produced because of an excess of coolness, right? So temperature. And then he’s like, “and by the way, this is also the reason why the southern peoples are natural slaves,” ‘cause they’re also produced with an excess of coolness. And so they’re deformed in the same sort of way. They’re effeminate. And so they’re naturally to be conquered by the warmer [00:26:00] men who are—

Thomas Now, we don’t wanna exaggerate, you know, Aristotle doesn’t see women as natural slaves exactly. He doesn’t see them as subhuman or something like that, but in a sense he sees them as defective versions—I mean, I’m just trying to give him his due in terms of practicality. He believes a wife is her husband’s companion in some sense, right? In other words, ethically speaking, I think that it’s not that he thinks that women are just chattel for men or something like that.

Andrew: No, in fact, in my discussion of Aristotle here, I go to the extreme in order to get the sort of outline of the theory, but it’s not extreme everywhere. So what I mean, the hierarchy has all the middling rungs in it. And the friendship that’s possible between a higher ranking person and a [00:27:00] lower ranking one changes as they become more intimate, closer or further away. You see what I’m saying? So the father has a different sort of relationship with his son than he has with a slave who he could buy and sell. Do you see? But that’s really a matter degree, not a matter of kind.

And I think that that is maybe missed with him because he says things about friendship where you go, “Oh, well he’s saying you can be a friend with your wife.” Well yeah, that’s right, but it’s not the kind of friend the aristocrats have with each other. It’s the sort of friendship that a man has with his wife. Do you see? And that is one of use. And that again, it doesn’t, it sounds worse in our language than what he means by it.

Thomas: Well, you have to look at his categorizations of friendship. There’s friendships of usefulness, there’s friendships of pleasure…

Andrew: Yeah, so use and pleasure are actually the most fundamental political forms of friendship for him.

Thomas: Huh. Wow.

Andrew: So I would challenge... I would say Aristotle’s actually more consistent on this than most people read him, and one of the reasons why that people, I think, get confused by him is when you read his Politics, he has this discussion of natural slavery in the beginning, and then extends it to include, you know, anybody who adopts someone else’s reason rather than their own, okay? So anyone basically who follows orders. But then he shifts gears, and throughout most of the Politics then, he’s talking not about all the human beings that [00:29:00] live within the polis, but he’s only talking about the citizens. Right? And the citizens are this aristocratic class.

And so now we start getting confused, ‘cause he starts to talk about the order between the citizens and what the politics should look like, and now he’s only talking about the citizens. It’s already been presupposed that we have this whole, vast, apparatus of human activity that are not citizens. Right? And then so we get all this stuff about Aristotle and democracy and the middle class and represent—and all this language, all this stuff people talk about. And it’s like, oh, no, he’s only talking about the ruling elite. Right? And that’s what he’s talking about the entire time. And I think that gets often forgotten or missed.

So for Aristotle, my point in all of this is that he has a, a hard parts-to-whole understanding of human unity, where there are the [00:30:00] parts, human beings are parts that all assembled together make up a whole. And there’s a sort of fulfillment that each one of those parts is capable of, and that’s the best they can achieve, and it’s good that they should achieve it. It’s good that the lower rankings can achieve the fulfillment of their role, right? And have whatever degree of happiness they can have at that level, right? So it’s not, we don’t wanna make it overly evil or wicked or something. Like, he thinks that the merchants should be happy as merchants, that the slaves should be happy as slaves, right? This is—

Thomas: The fact is that St. Paul compares, you know, people, members of the Church to parts of a body, right? And with different levels of dignity even.

Andrew: That’s right—You know, I think St. Paul’s point [00:31:00] is a little bit different than Aristotle’s there.

Thomas: Yes, of course. I’m just saying that there’s some level of, there’s something that resonates there. There’s some level of, there’s some partial truth in what Aristotle is saying.

Andrew: Oh, totally! There’s a lot of truth in it. Okay, so here’s, here’s the transition, right? Is that what Aristotle is seeing is the reality of inequality, the reality of differences and the reality of power differentials, the reality of hierarchy, that it’s real, right, and that it’s present, and that there’s various degrees, like you said, of nobility, of dignity, of excellence are being achieved, that’s an obvious reality of human society. So then you say, okay, if that’s, if that is natural, if I see that everywhere, and then I wanna try to understand how human beings achieve their end, then the end must somehow not be opposed to that inequality, but must [00:32:00] assume it, you see? And so I think he attempts to produce a solution for that.

Thomas: And the title of your talk is actually “Not Unequal Enough: The Egalitarianism of Aristotle’s Treatment of Women.” And I take the implication of this to be that, you know, Aristotle thinks equality is necessary, but he also, thinks that it’s a result of evil. And so, if things are not achieving the same end in exactly the same way ... maybe I’m butchering this, but basically he sees inequality as the result of a mistake, an error in the process of nature. And so there’s an implicit egalitarianism in there insofar as you see inequality as kind of a bad thing, at least in the individual instances of it, even if it results in something good.

Andrew: Well, it’s always the result of some sort of deformity.

Thomas: So there’s not, it’s not like there’s greater and lesser good. It’s like there’s good and then a defective version of that good.

Andrew: Yes, defective versions of it. So there’s one measure, right? There’s the measure of the good, the excellent, and then things are ... every human being is then measured against that one good. And therefore are capable of being ranked, and to the degree to which they achieve that, are capable of achieving it.

Okay, so what I think is radically different when you get into the Christian understanding, radically different, is that the Christian understanding involves difference and inequality as prerequisite to the achievement of perfection of each of the members within the hierarchy of difference and inequality.

Thomas: And didn’t you connect this to [00:34:00] theology in some way, to the view of creation? Am I remembering correctly?

Andrew: That’s right. Yeah, so, so this is the understanding of the cosmic hierarchy, and this gets into some metaphysics here. But anything, everything can only achieve its fulfillment by being acted upon by something else.

So you have the classic formulation of potency and act, right? And that something can only be moved from potency to act by something that’s already in act. Yeah. And so you have the idea that any given entity, the example I gave, I think it was an acorn, right? Can only become the fulfillment of its nature as an oak tree if it’s acted upon by the soil, by the sun, by the water, right? Which are higher than it in the sense that they’re already in act in those regards, right? So that which is an act [00:35:00] activates the potencies of other things. And what that means, though, is that everything achieves its end both by being receptive, so has a passivity to it. It has to receive the act of higher entities, right? And then that enables its activity, and its activity is then itself activity on the potencies of other things which activate them.

So you get this cosmic vision of what Thomas will describe as, of both multiplicity and inequality, right? Because in both of those, both multiplicity, different kinds of things, and inequality between those things are prerequisite for the cosmos’ dynamic imaging of the Creator, and this can be very subtle and very beautiful, right? The example that Thomas will give is—[00:36:00] and he’s of course expounding, Dionysius, Augustine and various fathers—but is that, everything that God creates bears the image of the divine in its own mode, right? So if he creates a dog, it images God in a doggish mode okay? And that feels funny, it’s funny to say, but a tree in a treeish mode.

He is the craftsman. The things that are created are the work, his works of art, and therefore image him in the kind of way, the kind of analogical way that a craftsman is imaged in his work of art. Right? That he’s in it, but it doesn’t look like him or sound like him or whatever, you know what I ... He’s in it in the sense that his idea, his exemplar is, is expressed in the object that he creates. So [00:37:00] what Thomas is getting at ultimately when he talks about multiplicity is that each type of thing images God in a different mode or shows something about the creator in a different, from a different angle.

But because the difference between the divine idea and the thing that’s created is infinite, it’s qualitative, not quantitative. Right? That the more things that are created, the more almost, like, perspectives on the creator open up. You see, like, like, he’s the kind of creator who creates trees. He’s the kind of creator that creates rocks.

The more things that open up, it’s like if you had an artist, and if you, you know, van Gogh or something, and you just saw one of his paintings, you might know, “Oh, I, he’s the, whoever this is is the guy who did this.” But now if I can see 100 of his paintings, I know him better.

So that’s the idea of the multiplicity of creation. But [00:38:00] that multiplicity is still finite, and this is where, so the distance between the infinite and the finite isn’t bridged. But this is where the dynamism of what I was talking about earlier of cause and effect or act and potency comes in, where it’s not just that he creates the static thing, like a rock that images him, it’s that he creates things that exist in time and that change in time, so their nature isn’t static but dynamic.

Which means that that nature now implicates the whole act-potency matrix of everything else that has a dynamic nature. Now we’re starting to approach an infinite image, you see, or an analogue of infinity. We’re starting to get an imaging of the infinite in the finite

Thomas: And there’s particular ways in which they image God. And so, last year I think read this [00:39:00] very beautiful passage in the Summa contra Gentiles, which I’m sure he says this elsewhere, and it’s this very Dionysian idea, but basically that God created this universe of unequal things in such a way that, some, indeed many, perhaps all creatures in some way, not only image God in themselves in some way, but they can imitate God in being the sources of good for creatures beneath them.

Andrew: Yeah! That’s exactly what I’m getting at.

Thomas: And so there’s a particular way in which we are dignified by being able to give, to those, to be a source of good for others, and indeed for even creatures beneath us. And to make those creatures in some way participate in our good, participate in higher goods. This is very much, very [00:40:00] much explicit in Dionysius’s discussion of the angelic hierarchy, for instance. Thinking about the angelic hierarchy is very instructive for us because we see that there is a hierarchy positively intended by God that is not the result of, “Oh, well, this person committed more sins in his life, so he has less glory in heaven.”

No, none of these angels sinned at all. They’re all perfectly fulfilling what they were meant to be, and they’re not equal. The greater ones pass down enlightenment and you know, glory and, instructions and whatever else to the lower ones, and the lower ones participate are continually raised up and made to share in the good of the higher ones, ultimately the good of God. There’s this other element, too, which we haven’t brought up yet, which is that—Not only, it’s not that those lower angels or any lower creatures are only [00:41:00] participating in God via the higher creatures, but there’s also a direct participation in God on each rung of the hierarchy.

Andrew: That’s the key. What you brought up there is exactly right, that goodness is not just subsisting goodness, but goodness is also the ability to impart goodness to others, right, that’s better than just being good. It may even be necessary, to be good is to be the imparting of goodness to others. And therefore, if creation is going to be good, the things that are created must impart goodness to others, which is, again, an imaging of the divine creator. And therefore, everything participates in the causal order, which is a participation in the creative dynamism of the cosmos as a whole. And that’s a part of what makes them good.

That’s the reason why all of creation together is very good, whereas each individual thing is only good. Right? So therefore you [00:42:00] get the necessity of those entities that have a more intense act, okay, so a more intense participation in the divine, in that they are the means, I guess we could say, by which those with a less intense participate in the divine more intensely. Okay, so there’s a sort of reaching down and lifting up, right?

So and, one of the ways that this is described very frequently is in, in the, in the hierarchy of being or the great chain of being, right? Where you have the standard hierarchical ordering of inanimate objects, minerals, water, rocks, whatever, and then plants, and then animals, and then man, and then the angels above man. And in each, the interaction between each one of those levels is the lifting up. When plant drinks the water, the water is brought into the life of the plant, is elevated beyond its mineral status [00:43:00] into life. Right? When the animal consumes the plant, it becomes sentient in the animal. When man orders things according to reason, they participate in the mind, the rational mind, right, and so on.

Thomas: And none of this eliminates the proper good of each thing either, even though it’s being raised up—

Andrew: No, it perfects it. Yeah, the idea is that it perfects it rather than eliminates it. And that it’s not, it’s not an act of instrumentality. So it’s not that that which is lower exists for the, just the achievement of the end of that which is higher. That’s not right. The way Thomas would describe it is that the ends of the entities in the cosmos are, is a truly common good. Meaning that the good thatthat they are each [00:44:00] entity is after is a good that can only be had when it’s all had together, meaning when everything else achieves its end, right? Ultimately that end converges on God himself, right? That, the kind of exodus from God in creation and then return to God in the act of the hierarchy, the elevating act of the hierarchy. But everything returns to God in its own mode, but only through its interaction with the other entities in the hierarchy.

I mean, hopefully you can start to see how this affects social, theory, because what ends up happening is, for Thomas, he uses the cosmic metaphor or simile to describe the social entities, the society of man, fundamentally, like [00:45:00] constantly, right?

Like as the cosmos is, so is human society, right? Like this is a sort of foundational metaphor or simile. And the idea is that the human person is the natures in the cosmos, so much so, so much so that each individual person is an act of direct creation. Right? So each individual person’s soul’s infused at the moment of conception by an act of direct creation with no secondary causation. And that is similar to how the creation of the species is, each species in the cosmic creation. And so every person, human beings, the point is that the human species is unique and radically different than any other species, because in a sense, we could talk about it as a [00:46:00] species of species. Meaning, like, each person has a uniqueness, a created uniqueness that is analogous to the kind of uniqueness that entire species have in and of themselves.

Thomas: I would say it’s analogous to the uniqueness that the angels have, because they really are each their own species according to St. Thomas.

Andrew: And that’s explicitly the connection, is that man is this interesting creature, right? So what Thomas says is that angels, each individual angel is his own species because they don’t have to reproduce. They’re immortal. And so, they don’t have the problem of reproduction, of replicating, right? And therefore each one is individual, that’s the nature of being a spiritual nature. Now, what’s interesting about man is that we are both immortal in our souls and mortal in our bodies, so we [00:47:00] share in the characteristics of both animal species, the way animals have a species, and the way in which angels do, right?

So we are persons. I think that’s, like, what we’re getting at, is the idea of a person, right, who is not just a representative of a species, but is, but is a spiritual whole in his own right.

Thomas: I don’t know if this is Maritain who said this, but society as, like, a whole made up of wholes. Is that something that he said?

Andrew: Yeah, yeah. So a whole made up of wholes. This idea, and it becomes profoundly complicated or subtle contemplating the meaning of that, right? Politically. Because you have to see that every individual person has the same end, right? Which is ultimately unity with God. And that end is only achieved through the social hierarchy, which becomes the [00:48:00] Church, right? So through their social world. That’s the way in which it’s mediated to them, and the way that they participate in the social world in their ascent to their final end.

And so what you end up with is you start to imagine, it’s almost like Aristotle ... It’s almost like if you take Aristotle and go, “Well, what if every individual person was like that perfect aristocrat,” okay? Or was capable of that. And in a sense, the entire cosmic order, from the point of view if you zoom in on one person, it’s like the entire cosmic complexity is ordered towards his perfection, right? But that’s true of every person, all of whom are then also ordered to each other’s perfection.

[00:49:00] So it’s not just that the social order is a microcosm—but each human soul is. Right? And that each human soul as a microcosm of the cosmos includes an imaging of the social whole, the human social whole.

This is the meaning of justice. That a just man is properly ordered towards those around him in society, right? So he, he has an ordering to each, everyone around him, both higher than him and lower than him, that is the ordering that will satisfy his end only in and through his work towards the satisfaction of the end of those whom he’s interacting with. This is the meaning of justice.

So you can retain the Aristotelian observation. [00:50:00] Hierarchy, difference, differences in virtues, differences in intelligence, difference in abilities. Difference in, you know, age, right? Gender, whatever. All these differences that also have built in with them inequalities, and see the profound necessity of that without viewing it, without necessarily supposing that any piece of that is deformed. Rather, it’s unique.

It’s a unique universe in and of itself. Each person. And therefore you can start to see then what I’m getting at with the title, that it’s not unequal enough. Aristotle’s not understanding or not seeing, I don’t think he has the resources to see, he doesn’t have revelation, to see just how profound the differences between human persons really are.

Thomas: Right. So we’re getting this, this [00:51:00] view of hierarchy as something beneficent. I like to say that hierarchy is kind of inclusive by definition, right? ‘Cause it’s not just a ranking, but it’s actually a relation and a harmony between higher and lower ranks. And another point that you made in your talk was that, even though the lower—One of the complicated things that people struggle with, I think, is how can the lower exist in some way as its own substantive good and also for the sake of what is higher? You know, is it possible for the lower to sort of, because obviously, like, the water does serve the end of the plant life, you know, that it’s absorbed into, right? But it also has this good in itself.

Andrew: Yeah, I just think that that [00:52:00] has to be very carefully understood. I mean, what the tradition has tended to say is something like, everything that’s below man is sort of for the sake of man, right? But the reason, the logic there is that man is the mode by which the whole returns to God. You see? And, so man’s fulfillment of man’s nature, what Thomas says is that, is that the end of man is the end itself. Okay? So, so every other nature has an end, that’s proportionate to it. Whereas the end of man is the end. God. Like, the end itself. And so everything else has to be for that end, ‘cause that’s the end in which all ends are summed, all ends converge. [00:53:00] So even there when it’s saying that everything below man is for the sake of man, that’s not an instrumental assertion.

Thomas: Not merely instrumental, yeah.

Andrew: It’s not therefore we can it all and do with it—That’s not the meaning of it at all. It’s that man contains within himself the perfection of all things. So they find their perfection in his elevation of them to the divine source.

Thomas: A point that could be made in terms of politics too is probably that there’s a difference between saying that, you know, let’s say the citizen exists for the good of the president or something like that… There’s a difference between saying that and saying that, like, individuals are ordered towards the good of the whole, and they are perhaps [00:54:00] directed and coordinated towards that good of the whole by some authority, rather than saying that they are for the good of that authority per se.

Andrew: Drastically different.

Thomas: Like that they’re for the good of the state, in the modern sense of that word, as opposed to the good of the state in the sense of the whole, including themselves.

Andrew: Yes. When Christians say it in that second way, they’re making the mistake of being too Aristotelian. [laughs] ‘Cause I think that is what Aristotle thinks, that the lower is for the sake of the higher, in a sort of competitive sense, right? Whereas, what we’re getting at here is that the lower, I mean, in a sense it’s for the sake of the higher, but you have to understand that the higher end or the fulfillment of the higher includes intrinsically the elevation of the lower into the higher end.

Thomas: Yes, that’s the key.

Andrew: So it’s like, you’re not using it up, right? You’re not [00:55:00] harvesting the resources or something like that. It’s exactly the perfection of the lower things in the perfection of the higher thing. It’s really important that we get that right. The other thing that needs to be understood is the way human ends work because it—

And maybe this is a little bit of a tangent, but it’s important, I think, is that humans, what Aristotle says is that the lower loves the higher more than the higher loves the lower. So love goes up, not down, right? So the lower rankings have admiration, respect, they show honor and glory to that which is higher than them. And that which is higher kinda collects that, it makes them great.

Thomas says the exact opposite. Right? The exact opposite. So the hierarchy, [00:56:00] there’s more that flows down than comes up. So the father loves his son more than the son loves the father. This is what Thomas says. And so the father gives more than he takes.

That is the nature of the whole hierarchy all the way to the divine source who gives more than he takes. And the reason why then, I mean, if you think about the paradox of a whole social order of giving more than you take, well, it would collapse if there wasn’t a source from outside of itself. And that source from outside of itself is God.

When you said earlier that every piece touches God or is ordered to God directly, and I said that’s the key. And that’s why, is because a hierarchy of gift giving is only sustainable if every rank within it, every piece within it is capable of giving more than it receives, which means it’s receiving surplus from someplace.

And that is its connection to the divine. So the grace that flows into the human hierarchy doesn’t flow in at the top. It’s not like, the way like a divine right monarchy type person might wanna think about it, right? You have this king at the top who orders the world and is the will that everything is for his good, and then God above him or something.

No, it’s not that. It’s that the supernatural touches the natural at every point. And so the entire social hierarchy in its entirety, it itself moves towards God. You know, in its relationships. Without destroying them. That’s why grace doesn’t destroy nature, it perfects it, you know?

Thomas: And as Christians we say it is better to give than to receive, so it still retains the nobility of the different ranks, in that the higher, it’s not that the higher exists for the sake of the lower, that God exists for the sake of creatures per se, although in a [00:58:00] sense, yes, the father is for the sake of his son.

I mean, it gets complicated with human, with rational creatures because they are preeminently the ones who are lovable for their own sake. Even though in some sense the lower creatures can be in some sense for their own proper good, but much more so are human beings uninstrumentalizable even more than—

Andrew: Well, it’s a very complicated thing. So this is something I talk about with my students lots of times and it’s just… So if you think about, the example I give is myself with my family, my children. My children make me happy. But I don’t love my children so I can be happy. Like, it’s not, I love my children and happiness is a consequence of that. But even if it didn’t make me happy, I would love them.

Thomas: It’s kind of an inversion of what Aristotle says about the slave getting his good incidentally from the good of his master.

Andrew: Right, right. [00:59:00] So it’s like the gift giving or the love that flows down, you love that which is beneath you because of love, and then the result of that is your own elevation into happiness. And so you’re achieving your end, but your end isn’t kind of like, it’s not like the object of that you’re after. I mean, you are in some sense, but in another sense I love that which is beneath me for its own sake. And the fruit of is my ascent into happiness. So if you imagine the whole hierarchy operating that way, right, from top to bottom including the celestial hierarchy of the angels, you can see how the whole thing can have solicitude down, and in that solicitude down the whole thing is elevated up.

[01:00:00] And that’s the kind of inversion of the pagan universe, right? It’s like flipping the pagan universe on its head.

Thomas: But it’s not a destruction of hierarchy, but it’s like a radical re—reinterpretation of it.

Andrew: Yeah, yeah. Well, I think it’s a radical affirmation. It’s like you look at what they saw, and they were right. You know? But they didn’t see, they couldn’t see it. They couldn’t see what it really was. And yeah, so any sort of notion of egalitarianism has to be dismissed out of hand, right? Like, it is not the case. It is essential to human society that difference and inequality exist, because difference and inequality is the prerequisite of gift-giving.

In order to give a gift, you have to have something the other one doesn’t have, right? So that, and gift-giving or [01:01:00] love is the very nature, the very end, that’s where happiness resides, right? And so any sort of flattening of society is highly misguided, especially if it’s done under any sort of pretext of Christianity.

But then at the same time, the flip side of that is any sort of domineering or any sort of idea that the bottom serves the higher and the higher is the lord and the ... Right? Any sort of early modern sovereignty thinking or divine right thinking, it’s also misunderstanding what the Christian hierarchy is. There’s profound dignity of the human person, which is, I think, something that 20^th-century theology has helped us understand. I mean, it’s there all the way through, of course, but 20^th-century theology has really helped us understand that.

Thomas: Hm. Yeah. So, you know, you gave this talk in the context of a discussion [01:02:00] of men and women, and you talked in the talk about, you know, Aristotle’s view of woman as a defective man. And then you talked about how different Aquinas’s understanding of hierarchy is, but I noticed that you didn’t get into the implications of this for Aquinas’s view, or maybe just the Christian view more broadly.

Andrew: Yeah. So I’m not an expert on gender theology or philosophy at all, so I work on this other stuff, and then it’s like, well, I can see a clear implication here, right? I think what I’m, what I’m getting at is that the differences between male and female, so…What we were just talking about where we have a human society and we have the differences between all the human persons. But it’s even a little bit more interesting than that, right? Because we have differences between different human families, between different cultures, between different, right, it’s not just individual persons that have differences, but there’s [01:03:00] all these other groupings that have differences between each other. So it gets even more elaborate and awesome.

But perhaps the most fundamental distinction to the human race is the male/female distinction, right? I mean it’s the most ubiquitous. And so that would be the first instance of difference within the human species, would be that men and women can be truly different and yet, have no sense of having to rank, in which is better. Do you see what I’m saying? And they can be truly different, not only in their functions or something, but in the way in which they order each other or aid each other or are necessary for each other’s fulfillment of each other’s ends. So the man needs the woman in order for the man to achieve his [01:04:00] end, and vice versa. But it we don’t have to reduce it to a sort of egalitarian complementary, complementariness or whatever it is. Like, you can still say, but it really is the case that men tend to be, I mean, so these are all, like, of course there’s exceptions. Tend to be, more, like the inequality is such that in certain categories or in certain types of behavior, men are more powerful, better.

Thomas: Like the exercise of authority, or—

Andrew: Yeah. Right And the way that the unity between the two works is that those differences are not suppressed, but are perfected.

Thomas: I wanna bring this to St. Paul. You know, I’ve read bits and pieces of comments that St. Thomas made about the sexes, but I think about St. Paul a lot more, and my impression is mostly when [01:05:00] St. Thomas is talking about a theological difference between, or fundamental difference between man and woman, he is basically just repeating St. Paul and giving reasons, you know, arguments for it. So, you know, people debate about Ephesians 5 a lot. And I think the implications for that are quite clear, you know, in so far as there’s the authority of the husband over his wife—and this is not like we need this whole discussion to understand this in St. Paul, because he says that the husband’s love is, authority is for the good of his wife. He says it right there, it’s very clear, and so clearly this whole worldview we’ve been talking about is validated there.

But you know, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about 1 Corinthians 11, which is very neglected. It’s like Ephesians 5 is controversial, but nobody even is talking about 1 Corinthians 11. I wonder if part of the reason for that is because the context is head coverings, and it doesn’t seem relevant anymore. [01:06:00] And, you know, regardless of the merits of that whole debate, I think even if head coverings is a matter of discipline, St. Paul is necessarily...he’s getting into theological reasoning about that topic, or he’s talking about what that symbolizes, and so the theological basis remains very relevant. Not that head coverings aren’t relevant, but anyway. So for instance, he says, and I think this is relevant, he says, “Man is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man. For man is not from woman, but woman from man, nor was man created for the woman, but woman for the man.”

And then he says this thing that’s very mysterious, “For this reason, the woman ought to have a symbol of authority on her head because of the angels.” And people have no idea what that means, right? But, I mean, maybe it goes back to the angelic hierarchy thing we were talking about, I don’t know.

But I think it’s interesting when he says, “Man is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man,” because I think to understand this correctly, and I don’t pretend to know exactly what he meant, but it seems to me to understand this correctly, we have to know that point about each rung on the hierarchy having a direct relationship with God, and yet each rung on the hierarchy also participating in God’s glory in some particular way through its relationship with the higher rankings, right?

Andrew: That’s right. Yeah.

Thomas: So my reading of this, what does it mean for... because it seems like St. Paul is saying that man is the image and glory of God in a particular way that woman is not—

Andrew: At least within the relationship between the two.

Thomas: This is what I’m saying, yeah. So basically, [01:08:00] what does the Church teach about, Church teaches both men and women are made in the image of God insofar as they are rational persons, you know, capable of union with God and the beatific vision and everything. That’s qua person, right? That’s qua person. We haven’t yet got into qua sex difference. And I think there’s room to say men and women have equal dignity and equal rank qua person, but there’s sort of a difference in a kind of pre-eminence qua sex difference. I mean, even St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross said, like, man has a certain or signifies preeminence because he was created first, and this has to do with why God became a man and not a woman.

And so it seems to me that what St. Paul is highlighting is insofar as there’s a difference between the sexes and a relation between them—yes, every woman is created in the image of God as a rational, personal being—but insofar [01:09:00] as a sex specifically, she participates in the image and glory of God as part of the unified human race through her relationship with man in one way or another. And that doesn’t mean that all—

Andrew: Well, but I mean, maybe a good… you’re tackling a very complicated and, like, I don’t know, this is outside of the way I could speak authoritatively to it. But often when I start contemplating these sorts of things, I think of Our Lady. And her relationship with Christ, with her Son. And perhaps there we see exactly what you’re talking about. Right? That that Mary’s glory is in her relation to the Son, right? And maybe something there where we can see the kind of thing you’re talking about, but without making the mistake of [01:10:00] degrading the woman. Because that’s where we wanna go, because we’re not good at this kind of thinking. Right? But I know that you know, if you encountered Our Lady, you [laughs] wouldn’t think of yourself as being somehow higher than her—

Thomas: No.

Andrew: Even though she’s a woman, right? But it’s no doubt the case that her perfection of her relationship with God is somehow through her relationship with a man.

Thomas: Yeah. And it’s not simply because he’s God and she’s not. It’s also why he became a man and not a woman.

Andrew: That’s right. I don’t think that’s merely a factor of the Incarnation, I mean, of the fact that he’s God. I think it’s also that he’s man. Right?

Thomas: Yeah, he’s the man, she’s the woman.

Andrew: He’s the man. Right, so I think there’s something… I don’t know. There’s something very subtle there and mysterious there that I’m not sure I know my way around.

Thomas: I mean, I think likewise with Christ and the Church. I mean, obviously Mary is an image of the Church, and helps understand this relationship. So I mean, it’s very clear, I mean, and the, the woman being the body of her husband, you know? She becomes the body. She participates in, you know, man is the head, but it’s like—

Andrew: Well, the helpmate. She’s the helpmate, she’s the body, she’s the Church. I mean, there’s all these images that we have that help us understand that there’s a certain loneliness to the man. Adam is first, right? Like, there’s a certain loneliness to us that the women don’t seem to have. And that they kind of, I don’t know, bring us out of that. There’s something profound there.

Thomas: Well, for her to be his helpmate, you know, if we take it as not just his personal servant or something like that, then [01:12:00] she is, you know, becoming a part of his task. His task over creation, you know? And so, so I think, you know, with the Church, obviously this whole Dionysian and Thomistic framework we’ve been talking about, like, obviously Christ enables the Church to be fruitful, you know? and to reproduce His image in souls, right? Right. And likewise, like, you know, Saint Paul says, “Woman was made for man, not man for woman,” And that sounds like a profound statement, and it must mean something, and it doesn’t sound egalitarian. Whatever it is, it doesn’t sound egalitarian.

Andrew: But we should be careful with it, because if you connect it to the Genesis story, then it’s like woman is made for man because man can’t do it on his own. Right? Or, like, man is insufficient. Right? So it’s not man as the, as the [01:13:00] self-sufficient lord, and then the woman comes to serve him.

I mean, the story is not that. It’s not good that this guy’s alone. He needs somebody.

Thomas: Yeah, I mean, it’s the paradox that he was created first, and so in a sense, woman, being, as Saint Paul says, taken from man always only existed in reference to man, you know?

Andrew: Yeah, something like that.

Thomas: Whereas man existed before he was in reference to woman, even though it was not good for him to be alone. So there’s, like, a certain initiative or a certain primacy, even though there’s this mutual dependence. ‘Cause right after this, of course, Paul makes a point of saying, every man, other than Adam, was born of a woman, And so we’re all dependent on one another in Christ. And yet there’s this certain, it’s not this sort of flattened egalitarian vision either. And so, yes, it is important to be careful with it, but we also shouldn’t shy away with it, from it. We embrace it, try to understand what it means. And so I find this passage particularly [01:14:00] fascinating.

And insofar as woman was created for the man, there’s an interesting passage, I think in reference to this verse, I’ve been working on, just as a personal project, translating a little book by Blessed Denis the Carthusian on marriage. And he says that, I think in reference to this passage, that man is to woman as her end. Which is pretty interesting. Now, again, there’s all ways, there are ways to go wrong with that, but—

Andrew: I think at some level what we’re seeing is, is Paul giving us glimpses of just how beautiful and complicated what we’ve been talking about this whole time is. With the nature of compounding ends. Yeah, the man is the woman’s end, but is it, is it his—[01:15:00] it’s more that her end is achieved through that. I don’t know. Something, something along those lines.

Thomas: Yes. Well, again, so she’s created in the image and likeness of God. She can have direct union with God. Right? But when you talk about, like, woman specifically, her fulfillment as part of the social order, for instance, then, this is sort of what we’re getting into.

Andrew: That’s what I’m getting at.

Thomas: Or woman as part of the Church, because even a consecrated virgin is a bride of Christ, who is a man. The church is woman, but the authorities of the church are male, Christ and his anointed representatives. So, it gets very nuanced, but I think we should dive into it go into it with the right spirit.

Andrew: I agree. Yeah.

Thomas: And I think that this, this Thomistic, this Dionysian, I mean, I only just read pseudo-Dionysius, last year or the year before for the [01:16:00] first time, but it seems very important for us now, for our political theory and for our social theory.

Andrew: I think profoundly so. A lot of the fights that you see going on in politics, where it’s like, is power good? Is power bad? Should people have power? I mean, all these kind of like post-liberal this and all this, and so much of it is all still within the frame of a modern discourse on power and politics. And therefore all these competitions and compromises and trade-offs present themselves in the modern way of thinking that are resolved in the ancient and medieval conception of hierarchy. And so we’re beginning to become aware of these problems more perhaps as modernity kind of breaks down. And now we have to go to the source where we get to find the solutions to them.

Thomas: Well Andrew, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. This was a [01:17:00] great discussion and it was really wonderful to talk to you.

Andrew: My pleasure. Thank you.

Thomas: You know, when I posted about your talk as I was at the conference, I posted online about how great this talk was, and I had a number of people ask me, is it gonna be published somewhere?

Andrew: Yeah. New Polity is publishing it. They have an issue coming out that is I think all the talks from the conference soon.

Thomas: Oh, that’s great. That’ll be well worth getting. It was a really wonderful conference, the first one that I’ve attended. And, I’ll also ask maybe for the listeners, and for myself too, of your books, like if we want more of this kind of thing, which one should we start with?

Andrew: Well, you know, the newest one, The Church Against the State, has a pretty significant treatment of some of this stuff in dealing with Pope Innocent III’s theology. I [01:18:00] think a lot of this is implicit in all the works, including, the probably most accessible is The Two Cities. But I have a new book that I’m working on right now that is an introduction to Catholic political thought and Catholic social doctrine, where this is a centerpiece of the whole thing. So that’s probably a few, maybe six months out, but The Two Cities is probably a good place to begin.

Thomas Mirus: Okay. That’s fascinating. I’ll mention, on this podcast I’ve been doing a gradual series covering the most important encyclicals of Leo XIII and very much emphasizing that social teaching includes more than just economics. Includes his teaching on marriage, on church and state, on liberty, and all of these different things.

And then I recently started a new podcast, a history podcast on the lives of the popes. So I mentioned I’m doing Saint Leo right now, but eventually I’ll get to Innocent III, so maybe I can interview you about him someday whenever I get to that, though it’ll be a long, long way off. I just saw a quote from [01:19:00] Saint John XXIII’s diary saying, like, “In recent months I’ve been really loving Leo the Great and Innocent III.”

Andrew: Innocent III is a complicated man ... quite interesting. And he’s a very, very interesting pope.

Thomas: Well, again, thank you so much, Andrew. Okay. It was really great talking to you.

Andrew: Thank you.

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