Welcome back to The Word on Fire Show. I'm your host, Matthew Petrusic. Thank you for joining us.

Today we bring you the second half of Bishop's lecture at Charles University in Prague.

In this talk, Bishop focuses on St. Thomas Aquinas' distinctive notion of God as Ipsum essay,

and its connection with some of the principal themes of Catholic social teaching. St. Thomas Aquinas,

who is often named among Bishop Barron's personal heroes, was born 800 years ago this year. Enjoy.

In this entire discussion, we see the role that Ipsum essay plays in the determination

of political life. The God who is in all things by essence, presence, and power is in the

body politic non-competitively as the ever-present final moral

cause. Now, I want to say a little bit more about the moral values that for Thomas constitute

the common good and thus inform and orient political life, namely justice, peace, and friendship. Following Augustine, Aquinas argues

that peace is the tranquillitas ordiness, the tranquility that follows from right order,

and hence amounts to the reestablishment of the original order of creation. As such,

it is right relation to justice.

And friendship is an expression of the love that ought to obtain among human beings. It is to see

the other as a second self. And what is this but the living out of the fundamental metaphysical

truth that we are always already connected to

each other through God. It is not the least bit accidental that the social contract theories of

political life that emerged from Hobbs, Locke, and Rousseau were predicated upon an entirely different

metaphysics from the one that we've been considering.

When the participation ontology of Aquinas broke down under the influence of late medieval nominalism

and Scotus' univocal conception of being, God indeed became a sort of supreme being among many.

And the link, therefore, that all created

...