Okay. So the topic of our meditation today is the meaning of love, according to St. Thomas Aquinas and the tradition that follows.

And I thought that it would be a helpful way to organize our time to devote the first conference to love in a variety of forms.

And then the second conference, specifically to divine love, and we'll establish a kind of analogy

between or among them in such a way as to helpfully illumine what I think is most important.

But to begin, I thought it would be nice to have a kind of sketch, something a working principle in our mind,

whereby to proceed. So many of you, I hope, or at least some, perhaps, have read the book Brideshead Revisited.

Brideshead Revisited is one of the great novels of Evil and Waugh,

who was voted, I think, by Time magazine as one of the 50 most influential female writers of the 20th century.

Which is funny because he's a man.

Right. So he, by disposition, was a satirist. He was also kind of an angry man,

which you might imagine is a kind of deadly combination. But he permits in two works,

his sincerity, his kind of authenticity and his Catholic faith to pierce

through, those being the Sword of Honor trilogy, and then Brideshead revisited.

Brideshead is revisited, so therefore it's considered a classic.

It's shorter, that is to say. Okay. So in Bride said, the kind of basic plot summary is that

you have two friends, Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flight, they meet at Oxford.

They become fast friends. Charles is kind of serious and grave and unchurched.

Sebastian pertains to an old Catholic family, but he himself is supercilious and bizarre.

So he has a pet teddy bear, whom he names Aloysius, and he dotes on him.

And things like this just continue for the entire book.

But their friendship ultimately implicates Charles in the life of Sebastian's family.

So the flight family, the Marchman house, as it were.

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