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The Josias Podcast Episode XLIV: St. Thomas More

For the feast of Sts. Thomas More and John Fisher, Fr. Jon Tveit and Amanda are joined on the podcast by James Monti, author and historian, for a conversation on the life and example of St. Thomas More.

Bibliography

Header Image: A follower of Hans Holbein the Younger, Sir Thomas More (1600s)

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The Josias Podcast Episode XLIII: St. John Henry Newman on the Blessed Virgin Mary

As May—the month of Our Lady—comes to a close, Matthew Walther, editor of The Lamp Magazine, joins Amanda and Fr. Jon Tveit for a conversation on St. John Henry Newman and Our Blessed Mother.

Bibliography

Header Image: Sir John Everett Millais, John Henry Newman (1881)

If you have questions or comments, please send them to editors(at)thejosias.com.

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The Josias Podcast Episode XLII: The Virtue of Religion

Urban Hannon returns to the podcast to join Fr. Jon Tveit and Amanda for a conversation about the virtue of religion—what it is theologically, and what it demands practically of us and our society.

Bibliography

Header Image: Jules Breton, The Blessing of the wheat in Artois (1857)

If you have questions or comments, please send them to editors(at)thejosias.com.

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The Josias Podcast Episode XLI: Education

Fr. Jon Tveit and Amanda are joined by Deacon Harrison Garlick and Chris Ruckdeschel for a discussion on education, avoiding the pitfalls of the “Great Books,” and recovering the classical liberal arts.

Bibliography

Header Image: Francesco Pesellino, Seven Liberal Arts (c. 1450)

If you have questions or comments, please send them to editors(at)thejosias.com.

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Many thanks to our generous supporters on Patreon, who enable us to pay for podcast hosting. If you have not yet joined them, please do so. You can set up a one-time or recurring donation in any amount. Even $1 a month would be splendid.

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‘Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit’ and ‘Creatio Ex Nihilo’: Science and Creation

William E. Carroll 

Is there a fundamental incompatibility between the first principle of the natural sciences that it is not possible to get something from nothing and a primary religious belief that God creates all that is “out of nothing”? Claims that we must choose between the two suffer from a misunderstanding of both. Thomas Aquinas provides a solution to the apparent contradiction between the two.

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TRACT IV or The Tome of Pope Gelasius on the Bond of Anathema

By Pope St. Gelasius I

Translator’s preface: Pope St. Gelasius I (r. 492-496) will be known to Josias readers as the author of the famous letter Famuli vestrae pietatis, more commonly known by its famous phrase Duo sunt. It is the paradigmatic statement of “Gelasian dyarchy.”

Pope Gelasius here addresses the case of Peter III “The Hoarse,” patriarch of Alexandria (477-489), a Monophysite and hence an opponent of the Council of Chalcedon (451). He had been excommunicated by Pope Felix III in 484 for accepting the heretical Henoticon, or reunion formula, of the Emperor Zeno. This episode, called the Acacian Schism after the Monophysite patriarch Acacius of Constantinople who held communion with Peter the Hoarse, is described more fully in our preface to Famuli vestrae pietatis. 

In this Tome, meanwhile, Pope Gelasius insists that that imperial authorities have no power to absolve Peter from his excommunication, which is reserved to the Apostolic See. This occasions a more general discussion of the distinction between ecclesiastical and temporal authority.

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Changes to Our Editorial Staff

At the end of this week, our editor Urban Hannon will enter the seminary of the Fraternity of Saint Peter, with a view to eventual ordination to the sacred priesthood. While this is great news in itself, it brings with it the sad consequence that we must lose him from our editorial staff.

Our current senior editor, Fr. Jon Tveit, will take the reins as editor.

We thank Mr. Hannon for his work at The Josias this year. Please join us in praying for him, for his seminary preparation, and for his ordination one day to the priesthood of our Lord, if it be His holy will.

Prayer for the Priests and Seminarians of the Fraternity of Saint Peter, and for vocations to the same.

V. Remember, O Lord, Thy congregation.
R. Which Thou hast possessed from the beginning.

Let us pray.
O Lord Jesus, born to give testimony to the Truth, Thou who lovest unto the end those whom Thou hast chosen, kindly hear our prayers for our pastors. Thou who knowest all things, knowest that they love Thee and can do all things in Thee who strengthenest them.
Sanctify them in Truth. Pour into them, we beseech Thee, the Spirit whom Thou didst give to Thy apostles, who would make them, in all things, like unto Thee. Receive the homage of love which they offer up to Thee, who hast graciously received the threefold confession of Peter.

And so that a pure oblation may everywhere be offered without ceasing unto the Most Holy Trinity, graciously enrich their number and keep them in Thy love, who art one with the Father and the Holy Ghost, to whom be glory and honour forever. Amen.

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Machiavelli’s Secularization of Glory

Ubi est mors victoria tua?
ubi est mors stimulus tuus?
(1 Cor. 15:55)

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori—“It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s fatherland,” proclaimed the Roman poet Horace.[1] Such was the sentiment shared by Niccolò Machiavelli in his exaltation of the fatherland (patria), expounded especially strongly in his critique of Christian religion, culminating in Discourses on Livy II.2. Machiavelli perceived a corrupted attitude among the citizenry toward their patria and laid blame at the foot of the altar: “For, had they borne in mind that religion permits us to exalt and defend the fatherland, they would have seen that it also wishes us to love and honour it, and to train ourselves to be such that we may defend it.”[2] While castigating the religion of his day as the source of weak and “effeminate”[3] attitudes toward the patria, he also claimed the mantle of Christian morality to argue that it was permissible and, indeed, laudable to defend and fight for the fatherland.[4] On this latter point, Machiavelli could have located vigorous support in the writings of many great minds throughout the history of Christendom. Yet, at the same time, he deliberately avoided doing so, and especially avoided the fact that a robust conception of the sacrifice and the virtue of dying for one’s patria had developed and reentered the social imagination over the course of the Middle Ages. This is likely no accident, as this conception was anything but Machiavelli’s own. To suffer death for one’s patria presupposed fighting for and defending it. Death inherently occupies a space between the temporal and the eternal; it is inescapably eschatological, inextricably bound up with questions of salvation, sacrifice, and martyrdom in Christian theology and imagination. For both Machiavelli and the medieval mind, sacrifice for the fatherland was a means of attaining glory—albeit in radically different ways. 

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Our Contraceptive Speech

Master Adamo lies a bloated mass of “watery rot.” His amorphous frame bears his diseased paunch and distended limbs, as his lips curl and crack under his parching fever—despite being a waterlogged waste. He lies before Dante the Pilgrim and Virgil and explains how King Minos poured him into the last ditch of the eighth circle of hell. He was a counterfeiter of Florentine florins. He blurred the lines of reality in life and now he lays blurred—a poor counterfeit of his former self.

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The Josias Podcast, Episode XXX: Queen Elizabeth II

Pater Edmund speaks with Pater Ælred Maria Anthony John Howard Davies, Subprior of Stift Heiligenkreuz, about the late Queen Elizabeth II.

Music: Henry Purcell, Thou Knowest, Lord 

If you have questions or comments, please send them to editors(at)thejosias.com.

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Many thanks to our generous supporters on Patreon, who enable us to pay for podcast hosting. If you have not yet joined them, please do so. You can set up a one-time or recurring donation in any amount. Even $1 a month would be splendid.

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