Questions from the Unsettled Mind

We admire a judge in court, we praise sound judgment in a crisis, and we insist that science tell truth from error. Then someone quotes Matthew 7 at us. What exactly is Jesus prohibiting?

In this episode:

• Sorting the cases by their object: criminal conduct, ideas, deeds, and persons

• John Stuart Mill on casting ideas into the arena of criticism, and the awkwardness that condemning judgment is itself a judgment

• Why the prohibition cannot cover moral teaching, given that Jesus, the prophets and the apostles all judged deeds constantly

• The log and the speck, and hypocrisy as the real target of the warning

• Socrates on minding your own business, and George Washington on entangling alliances with people whose affairs we never understand from the inside

• Jesus's further move: our own business is itself in trouble, and we are condemned by the standard we impose on others

• Why only love heals vice, and what the judger is unwilling to do for the neighbour whose failure he wants to exult in

Mentioned: Matthew 7 · John Stuart Mill · Socrates · George Washington

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

The Immaculate Conception is not the virgin birth, and it is not the Incarnation. It concerns Mary's own conception, and there is a biological reason it makes far more sense than most people realize.

In this episode:

• The three doctrines kept properly apart: the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth and the Immaculate Conception

• One person in two natures, and why the Gnostic picture of two men inside one body gets Jesus wrong

• Why a virgin birth at all: the miraculous sign, the exclusion of a human father, and protection from the disordered appetites St Paul calls the flesh

• Isaac, Samuel and John the Baptist as earlier miraculous births, and how Mary's case differs from every one of them

• The biological argument: a woman's eggs form in utero, so the cell that became Jesus already existed inside St Anne

• Why the doctrine is proposed as fitting to the divine plan rather than logically necessary, and what Mary's freedom still required of her

• The feminine arc that outruns a single generation, grandmothering as prayer at a distance, and a word for those who had bad mothers

Mentioned: Ineffabilis Deus, Pope Pius IX · St Anne · Gnosticism

Many of these questions are collected in Questions from the Unsettled Mind and More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, both available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

God told Moses he was coming down into the camp in three days, and the Israelites said they would rather stay in their tents. We smile at that. But our alternative to their fear may not be love at all, only indifference.

In this episode:

• Psalm 111 on the fear of the Lord as the beginning of wisdom, and whether we lost the love by never forming the fear

• Why the Eucharist is the same divine objective in a different mode, and why bread is no harder for God than flesh was

• Peter Kreeft's dilemma of the skeptic and the saint, and how reciting the creed lets us slip out of both

• What the old Christians did beforehand: fasting until after the liturgy, and confession before approaching God

• Denying the reality of the Eucharist and denying the Incarnation as twin sides of one coin

• The old Orthodox fast of meat, wine, dairy and oil, and what forty days of it does to your anticipation of Easter

• The Herodian stairs on the Temple Mount, cut at uneven intervals so that nobody could approach the Holy One at speed

Mentioned: Peter Kreeft · Exodus · Psalm 111 · the Lenten Fast

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

At a dinner performance the singer asked how many in the room had a goddess within them, and nearly every hand went up. Then she asked how many had forgiven themselves. The hands went up again.

In this episode:

• What happened at that table, and why the order matters: divinity claimed, then divine authority assumed, then the dance

• What the pagans knew that the audience did not, that Athena and Aphrodite were jealous and punished mortals who grasped at divine prerogative

• The golden calf raised while Moses was still up the mountain, and the Levites who came down with him with swords drawn

• The Jewish machinery of guilt: confession to the priests, the sacrifice of livestock, and the High Priest at the Ark once a year

• The party self-absolution leaves out, namely the victim, who is owed something and holds a right of justice

• Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and why real forgiveness always costs something dear

• Thomas Watson on the low door of the kingdom that can only be crawled through, St Bernard's humility, humility, humility, and the beatitudes

Mentioned: Thomas Watson · St Bernard of Clairvaux · the golden calf · the Beatitudes

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

David Hume said you cannot derive an ought from an is, because things merely happen to be as they are. Genesis 2 stages a discovery that only makes sense if Hume is wrong.

In this episode:

• Why God waits for Adam to notice that he has no mate rather than simply supplying one

• Naming the animals as Socratic dialectic and Aristotelian experience, God having made a rational inquirer and then given him something to find out

• The argument from divine honesty: God would not wait for Adam to discover what could not in fact be discovered

• The alternatives Hume would be forced to defend, that Adam's maleness was a bizarre artifact or that God is a deceiver

• Universals as the baseline for what is normative, and how the empirical sciences still hunt for them under the name of laws

• The one thing in all of creation God called not good, and what it took to complete the man

• Why Adam's discovery ran through intellect, emotion and desire at once, and ended in the first love poem

Mentioned: David Hume · Genesis 2:18-23 · Socrates · Aristotle

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Fatigue, grief and disease can make giving up look like the reasonable option. The Church calls the slow drift towards it despair and treats it as a vice, not because the pain is unreal, but because of what despair actually targets.

In this episode:

• Despair as the erosion of hope, and what Romans 8 promises that despair takes away

• Hope mapped onto our aspirations and imagination, as faith belongs to the intellect and charity to the will

• Aquinas on faith as greatest in the order of generation while charity is greatest in the order of perfection

• Why faith is a choice rather than a feeling, and why feelings cannot be relied on when everything is collapsing

• Job's though he slay me, yet will I trust in him, and the claim that nothing mortal or immortal can block that choice

• The line between grief and depression, which are natural reactions, and despair, which is the sin

• Jesus praying for his disciples in John 17 after accepting the cup, and Hebrews on the joy set before him that he did not yet feel

Mentioned: Romans 8 · St Thomas Aquinas · Job · John 17 · Hebrews

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Ask how to get into heaven and you have already gone wrong: the question fixes on the place and loses the person. That second mistake may be the one that keeps you out.

In this episode:

• Why a question about admission is a different kind of question from one about a relationship, and why the comparison is meant to be uncomfortable

• The rich young man in Luke: the one commandment Jesus deliberately leaves off the list, and why greed was only the surface of his problem

• What the man actually refused, which was not the money but the invitation to come and follow

• Why heaven is the meeting place between you and pure goodness, and what that means if you prefer your vices

• Luke 18:19, where Jesus challenges the man for calling him good, and what the man failed to notice standing in front of him

• Nicodemus trying to work out how to climb back into the womb, and "born again" as a measure of how total the change has to be

• The question worth asking instead: what sort of person would I have to be to become God's lover

Mentioned: Luke 18 · the rich young ruler · Nicodemus

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven, says Milton's Satan. But nobody rules in hell, because hell is bondage to sin. And the word we reach for instead, autonomy, turns out on inspection to be a contradiction.

In this episode:

• Auto-nomos taken apart into self-law, and the verdict of Judges that each man did what was right in his own eyes

• Why law by definition applies universally, so that I should like to go fishing today can never be a law

• How right and wrong collapse into want and do-not-want unless they mean something larger than desire

• Locke's life, liberty and property lined up against the commandments on murder, theft, adultery and false witness

• Why the tenth commandment is the key to the other four, and where it meets Socrates on minding your own business

• Liberty mistaken for license, and the chain of non sequiturs running from I want this to you ought to provide it

• Why hell is the state of maximal illusion and terribly lonely, and why a bird is free in the air while mermaids who demand legs never are

Mentioned: Milton, Paradise Lost · John Locke · the Book of Judges · Socrates

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

The pulpit and popular culture agree that the best love is unconditional. Whenever those two agree, something has gone wrong. Love that asks nothing of you is not love at all, only sentiment.

In this episode:

• Why the fact that God loves Satan too shows that being loved does not by itself improve anyone

• The distinction that does the work: love is unconditional with respect to its subject and highly conditional with respect to its object

• The father who says I love you and keeps funding his son's drugs, and why metaphysics is not ethics

• Whether a man can love his wife as a whore, and whether he can love a whore back into a wife

• Why love and truth are two sides of one coin, and why love cannot reach completeness without repentance

• What demands for unconditional love usually amount to: a request that other people celebrate our corruption

• Paul Varjak's speech to Holly Golightly at the end of Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the cage she built for herself

Mentioned: Breakfast at Tiffany's · St Paul

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

A Christian version of follow your heart says the inner life has to be put right before the outer life can be. That gets the order backwards, and every couple who has lasted fifty years already knows it.

In this episode:

• Why the Law of Moses lands harder with Charlton Heston and a staff attached to it, and what that says about being minds in bodies

• George Washington and the cherry tree, and Henry V on St Crispin's Day, as evidence that truth needs concrete cases

• Forgiveness as the test case: you rarely feel affection for the person first, the choice comes first and the feelings come later

• Falling in and out of love, and why the universal advice that it takes work means some part of love must be chosen

• Why bringing your wife tea while cranky is not hypocrisy, since the will is as much of the soul as the emotions are

• What happens to the lover during the act of loving: the kettle, the steeping, the sugar, and then the look on her face

• Jesus on the heart following the treasure, read as the heart following your labour

Mentioned: Henry V and the St Crispin's Day speech · George Washington and the cherry tree

Many of these questions are collected in Questions from the Unsettled Mind and More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, both available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.