Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.

Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.

The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.

To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org.

So I'd like to begin with just pointing out that there can be a kind of attention between our natural response to suffering,

which is get away from it, avoid it as far as possible.

That is natural and good.

And then perhaps what we'd think of as more of the spiritual perspective of embracing suffering or suffering together with Christ,

suffering in some divine perspective. It's maybe not easy to think about just in practice how those two things go together.

Do we have to completely deny our nature in order to suffer in a spiritual way in union with the Lord?

Or do we just operate naturally?

And then when things get really difficult, like, you know, diagnosed with cancer, for example, then we, the spiritual or the supernatural perspective kicks in.

And of course, neither of those can be right.

There has to be something more integrated.

So I'm going to try and get there in our talk today.

So I want to start by defining terms. Also a good to mystic thing to

do. Evil pain, lack, suffering. So suffering is a kind of evil in St. Thomas's lingo and also in

ours. Suffering is something evil. But of course, it's not an evil being done,

but it's an evil being suffered.

So that's the basic distinction.

There's an evil that we do called sin,

and we should always avoid that.

...