A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Jesus entered the temple and began ejecting the traders saying, scripture has it, my house is meant to be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves. Jesus was teaching in the temple area from day to day. The chief priests and scribes, meanwhile, were looking for a way to destroy him as were the leaders of the people, but they had no idea how to do it, how to accomplish it. For indeed, the entire population was listening to Jesus and hanging on his every word.
And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. Saint Augustine more than once, refers to what he calls instructed ignorance. Instructed ignorance.
As I was studying theology apologetics, We talked about the preambles to faith. Cardinal Newman has a lot on this subject. Well, so does everybody else really. Because there's obviously, from a psychological point of view some sort of mechanism that's working here. Now by mechanism I'm using that word as I mean the most general way.
I I don't want to sound mechanistic. You see, you just take what we've been reading and what you know so well from the New Testament. Today's reading brings it out so clearly. Now just let me recall it to you. Our blessed Lord was teaching in the temple.
It says, from day to day he was of an extremely public figure. Now what's the result of his preaching? The chief priests and the scribes were looking for a way to destroy him. As were the leaders of the people. They wanted to get rid of him.
That's how they were impressed. That's the effect that our lord's preaching had on them. They wanted to murder him off with his head. And when you say chief priests and scribes and leaders of the people, that's pretty inclusive. Who's left?
The people. The hoi polloi, the proletariat. Now, how did the people, not the learner, the culture, the people with jobs, the prestigious people, the religious leaders, These were just the people. Wherever they were, they were nothing. That's the literal truth.
How did they they were they heard just as well as the scribes, the pharisees, and the leaders of the people. What was their reaction? The entire populace was listening to Jesus and hanging on his very word. How do you put these two things together? Now let us be very careful.
They're they're when we say the scribes, pharisees, the leaders of the people, you don't say all of because there were exceptions. But how how infinitesimal, how insignificant they were in numbers as far as we know from the text. Very, very few. But there were some. There were some.
So, once again we have to be careful about over generalizations. But the fact is that here you have a mass of people, they all see the same person, they all hear the same words, and they get just contradictory results. Their reactions are just absolutely opposed. The ones who should understand, the ones who had education, who had prestige of office, who were sincere, honest, God fearing men, there's no reason to doubt any of this. All they wanted to do as a result of hearing Jesus, of listening to Jesus was to murder him.
Whereas the the people who had none of their education, none of the culture, none of the social prestige, they they hung on his very word. Now how do you spell the difference here? Well, of course, we see you come back, you come back to a statement of Saint Thomas Aquinas. He didn't originate this, but it's the one that I know and it goes in English it doesn't sound well at all, but it goes something like this, whatever we know or whatever is known is known according to the mode of the knower. In other words, you may think of it in this terms, if you put a pair of rose colored glasses and look at the world through those rose colored glasses, the entire world will seem rosy.
If you put greenish tinted glasses and look through the world, everything you receive from the sense of sight is going to be tinted green. So that you see when we come to know, when when we become when we are on the receiving end of knowledge because we are acted upon in many ways we are passive. It what is coming in is transformed you might say, into something that I contribute to change it. My mind is not an absolutely absolutely perfect mirror of reality, not at all. Anything would be by way of not whether it sensory or any other way, what comes in, it comes into something like a furnished room.
Now, you say, well, how did this all start? Well, that's the big question. If If you the Aristotelian Thomistic view is that that when we come into this world, our minds are a blank piece of paper, a tabula rasa. And that everything we know we've we've gotten in. But once see, can you can understand the importance of this kind of a concept for education.
So that so that everything we bring in or everything we know, it doesn't come into me unadulterated. When a scribe or when a pharisee or when a leader of the of the people, when those men stood up and heard Jesus, heard the very same words that the so called people heard. They were all hearing the same thing. They were seeing the same man. But what a difference on the receiving end.
The first three scribes, the pharisees, leaders of the people, they saw here a man who was a threat to them. Here was a man challenging them, challenging them to their deepest roots of their convictions, of their position, of their prestige, of their learning, and let us add of what they saw to be their fidelity to God and to his law. That's how they received it. Whereas many of the other, the so called people, they had none of that. They had nothing to lose.
They we would say they had a much more open mind and we might say the others had a almost a closed mind. And that's what it boils down to. I've just been I've just finished reading Christopher Dirks. I've mentioned this book on C. S.
Lewis in which Derrick who knew Lewis well and knew him until he died and has the greatest admiration for him. I just received a letter from him and replied to one I wrote to him. He spoke of him as a very great man, that is Lewis. But certainly the Derek points out very clearly, what I mean why did Lewis take the step and become a Catholic? A Roman Catholic?
Everything pointed in that direction. Well one thing about the book I don't understand is why he doesn't refer to Newman because Newman went through the same thing for years. Everybody who knew Newman said, you ought to be a Roman. And this was so obvious to everybody around him that Newman was accused of being a Jesuit in disguise. At a parallel case, the same thing was said about Lewis.
I don't know how the judge was like that. That's how that's how that's how obvious the position of these men was about everybody around them. But it took Newman fifteen years to make the step. See that's why he was accused of being a hypocrite and a liar. Now as regards Lewis, it's a different story entirely.
But the question, why didn't Lewis because he everything points to the fact he should have, but he didn't. How do you explain these things? Well, part of the explanation is that it's a is the mistake we make in thinking of human beings as thinking machines. Remember, was Newman who said that it's almost the definition, almost the definition of man to say he is an irrational animal. This is is so much of this of the hyperbole that we conceive and with which we think of man and speak of man.
It's so unrealistic to the fact of what we are. As Newman pointed out, we are not thinking things. We are sensing, feeling, emotional, frenzy, passionate. That's the kind of a being we are and he goes on for a whole paragraph. And that's the reality of man and of women.
We are not disembodied souls. A man is not a soul. A man is not a mind. A human being is an enormously complex composite of all of it. The best you can say about a human being is that they are a microcosm, a little little world.
And so when it comes to these intellectual persuasions, when it comes to convictions, when it comes to analyzing human beings conduct in terms of being logical and consistent. You see, don't ever make the terrible abstraction of bringing out the man as simply mind or soul. We are none of those things. We are everything in a certain sense. Microcosm, a little world, a little universe.
And so the more we understand of this, the more sympathetic, the more patient, the more understanding we can be of other people. But more important still, the more patient and understanding we can be of ourselves. The name of the father, and of the son, holy spirit. Amen.