Think like a Catholic…
There is a particular modern personality type—you’ve met him—who has read half of a podcast transcript about Nietzsche, owns a yoga mat, and informs you, with great solemnity:
“I’m spiritual, not religious. I just try to be a good person.”
Which is impressive, because he cannot define:
what a person is
what “good” means
or why any of it matters
But he is trying, and that is what counts. And, don’t worry. We have moved beyond the rigid, oppressive clarity of two thousand years of Catholic thought. We now have TikTok Philosophers in Fedoras, Apoplectic Angry Atheists and Great Theologians like James Talarico declaring God as “non-binary”. More on him later…
Meanwhile, the Catholic Church—apparently the villain in this story—has spent two thousand years calmly insisting:
Things exist.
They can be known.
And you are not free to mutilate reality because you feel like it.
This, naturally, is considered extreme.
Let’s walk through how we got from Christ establishing a Church to Pastor Chad hosting a sermon series called “Be Your Best You.”
I. When Reality Took Flesh
Before Aristotle, before Aquinas, before the Enlightenment discovered feelings, something happened that permanently ruined every modern attempt to escape reality:
God became man.
Not a metaphor. Not a symbol. Not “my truth.”
A real man. In history.
“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”¹
Which immediately creates problems for modern thinkers, because if God enters reality:
reality matters
truth is objective
the body is not optional
This is the Incarnation—the moment when metaphysics stops being abstract and starts walking around.
The Passion: Reality Is Not Therapeutic
Then Christ is crucified.
Not as a metaphor for “healing your inner child,” but as a brutal execution. Want a good depiction?
Watch “The Passion of the Christ”.
The event tells us:
evil is real
sin is real
man is not naturally fine
This is deeply offensive to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who insists that man is naturally good and just needs better social structures.
Christ did not die because of zoning laws. He died because man is fallen.
The Resurrection: Nietzsche Loses Before He Arrives
Then Christ rises—bodily.
Which is a problem for:
materialists (who deny anything beyond matter)
nihilists (who deny meaning entirely)
Because the Resurrection declares:
Reality is meaningful. Truth is real. Death is not final.
Centuries later, Friedrich Nietzsche will announce that God is dead.
Christ had already handled that.
The Church: Authority Exists (Sorry, Pastor Chad)
And then Christ does something completely unacceptable to modern sensibilities:
He establishes a Church.
Not a book. Not a discussion group. A Church.
“You are Peter… I will give you the keys…”²
Keys mean authority.
Which means:
truth is not crowdsourced
doctrine is not negotiable
Pastor Chad does not get to redesign Christianity because he read a blog post
Then:
“Go and teach all nations…”³
Not:
“Go and facilitate open-ended dialogue.”
Teach.
With authority.
Enter Aristotle and Aquinas (The Last Adults in the Room)
Even before Christ, Aristotle had already noticed:
Things are what they are.⁴
Which is controversial today, but was once considered quite obvious.
Then came Thomas Aquinas, who unites:
Aristotle’s realism
Christian revelation
actual logic
And produces a system where:
Being — things exist and have natures
Truth — the mind conforms to reality
The Good — actions perfect a thing according to its nature⁵
In other words: a complete, coherent, unified account of reality.
Which is precisely why modern philosophy spends the next 500 years trying to escape it.
II. The First “I Know Better” (Cue Martin Luther)
Man has a unique ability to repeatedly adopt the declaration of Lucifer—”non-serviam”—i.e., “I will not serve”. And yet, in every instance, he truly believes he’s inventing a new TikTok trend.
This impulse shows up everywhere, but it got a major institutional upgrade with Martin Luther, who essentially said:
“What if the Church is wrong and I’m right?”
Which was just a reinvented version of:
“Yes, a snake offered this to my wife, but the apple was tasty!”
or, in today’s parlance:
“I’ve done my own research.”
Once you elevate private judgment above received truth, you have planted the seed for everything that follows:
my interpretation
my truth
my identity
my lived experience
And eventually:
“My truth says gravity is oppressive and my truth says I can fly”
Then you splatter on the ground after jumping off the building.
Reality will always offer clarity.
III. Descartes: The Man Who Discovered Himself
Now that authority is weakened, along comes René Descartes, who decides to doubt everything.
After dismantling reality, he triumphantly concludes:
“I think, therefore I am.”⁶
Which is like unplugging your house and announcing you’ve discovered electricity.
But the shift is critical:
Truth no longer begins with being
It begins with the self
Reality is now something to be reconstructed—if we feel like it.
IV. Hume: Reality, But Optional
Then comes David Hume, who looks at the situation and says:
“You don’t really know anything.”⁷
causation? unclear
substance? questionable
morality? meh.
Also:
You can’t get an “ought” from an “is.”
Which is convenient if you’d like to avoid moral responsibility entirely.
The Catholic response:
If you deny what things are, then yes—you can’t derive what you ought to do.
This is not a discovery. It is self-inflicted confusion.
See the building jumper above.
V. Kant: Duty Without a Foundation
Enter Immanuel Kant, who attempts to rescue morality.
His solution:
ignore what things are
enforce rules
Act according to universalizable maxims⁸
Which sounds impressive until you realize it never answers:
What is a human being?
Without that, morality floats in abstraction.
You can follow the rule perfectly and still misunderstand reality completely.
VI. Bentham: Morality Goes Corporate
Then comes Jeremy Bentham, who reduces morality to:
Pleasure vs. pain⁹
Now:
humans = data points
ethics = calculation
dignity = negotiable
If sacrificing a few increases overall happiness?
Congratulations—it’s ethical.
Just don’t call it what it is—ghoulish.
VII. Hegel and Marx: Reality Becomes Political
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel tells us:
Reality evolves. Truth evolves. Everything evolves.¹⁰
Then Karl Marx removes the metaphysics entirely:
truth → ideology
morality → class struggle
man → economic unit¹¹
This ends exactly how you’d expect with hundreds of millions in graves…
VIII. Rousseau, Feelings, and Pastor Chad’s Theology Degree
Jean-Jacques Rousseau says:
Follow your feelings¹²
Pastor Chad hears:
“Rewrite Christianity around self-expression.”
Now we have:
sermons about self-esteem
theology based on emotions
and liturgy that feels like a coffee shop
Reality is now subordinate to feelings.
IX. Nietzsche: At Least Someone Admits It
Finally, Friedrich Nietzsche arrives and says:
“Nothing matters.”¹³
Which is the logical conclusion of everything before him.
Once:
being is denied
truth is unstable
the good is invented
All that remains is:
Power.
X. Catholic Alternative
While the modern world experiments with every possible way of avoiding reality, the Catholic tradition continues to insist:
things are what they are
they can be known
they have a purpose
And from this flows a moral system based on virtue, not:
rules detached from nature (Kant)
or pleasure metrics (Bentham)
A man becomes good by:
aligning himself with reality
disciplining his intellect
ordering his desires
Not by:
redefining truth
optimizing happiness
or posting about it online
XI. A Final Thought
Modern philosophy tried everything:
doubt (Descartes)
skepticism (Hume)
duty (Kant)
calculation (Bentham)
evolution of truth (Hegel)
materialism (Marx)
feelings (Rousseau)
nihilism (Nietzsche)
And after all that, we have a culture that cannot answer basic questions about reality—but is extremely confident while being wrong.
Meanwhile, the Catholic Church continues:
Begin with what is.
Know it as it is.
Live in accordance with it.
Which, despite 500 years of philosophical improvisation, remains undefeated.
Endnotes
John 1:14
Matthew 16:18–19
Matthew 28:19–20
Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book IV
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 3–11; I-II, q. 94
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
Jeremy Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation
G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach
Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
