Welcome to the Tumistic 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 Tumistic Institute chapters around the world.

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to mystic institute.org. In Philippians 4-8, we hear St. Paul tell us this. Whatever is true,

whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is

commendable. If there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about

these things. And yet we've gathered here to talk about sins. All right, so this will require some explanation.

But by way of having a little order, we'll go through these three steps.

First, I'm going to try to give an explanation for that tension or oddity.

And we're going to do this with the monastic tradition, and we'll ask why we might or would turn our attention to evil and what it might mean to know or understand evil.

And this is also going to be a preliminary presentation of an early monastic model of temptation

and the overcoming of temptation.

Then I'm going to present the teachings of the Fathers of the Church

on the perfection or completion of Christ's temptation in the desert. In the specific sense

that Christ's victory over the three temptations is a victory over every possible temptation to sin.

And then finally, I'm going to propose that we can think of temptation, especially in Christ,

as somehow useful.

Temptation in God's providence is not merely an obstacle to beatitude,

but a way to salvation and to the kingdom of heaven.

So back to the first question.

If it is true that our intellects are created for the contemplation of the good, we have

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