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When Peter Kreeft spoke about the beauty of marriage on Matt Fradd’s podcast “Pints with Aquinas” in July, he brought the podcaster to tears, and the clip of Kreeft went viral.
Hillsdale College should invite Kreeft to speak at a Drummond Lecture in Christ Chapel.
“Do you think that when you are very old, and your wife is very old and ugly and wrinkled and fat and not very bright or even nasty, that you will still find her beautiful? If so, marry her,” he said on the podcast. Kreeft’s words were striking because he spoke with the love of a man who was married for 63 years until his wife died in May. But it was also because he spoke with the wisdom of a philosopher who knows the writings of Thomas Aquinas so well that he wrote a book called “Summa of the Summa.”
I read Kreeft’s book in my high school philosophy class, and I remember how remarkable Aquinas’ writings were. But I remember Kreeft’s brilliant commentary on Aquinas even more vividly. I knew then that he was a genius if his footnotes to Aquinas were sometimes more striking than Aquinas himself was.
Kreeft has also written more than a hundred other books about philosophy and theology that include a collection of letters he exchanged with an atheist, a guide to the meaning of life, and a philosophy of surfing.
Drummond Lectures are meant to help students connect faith to “the life of our own times.” That’s been the focus of Kreeft’s work.
The 89-year-old philosopher has spent decades thinking about how people should live and what’s beyond this life. His thoughts always revolve around the fact that we are mere mortals and that someday things must come to an end. But for Kreeft, death isn’t really the end.
It marks the beginning of eternity.
Students are immersed in the throes of college life for a brief four years before they graduate from college and experience a tiny death. For most people, it means goodbye to being a student, living under your parents’ roof, and eating meals someone else made. For athletes, it often means the end of formal competition in sports. And for everyone, it means leaving behind a place that became home and entering the real world.
Kreeft thinks and speaks about how to pursue “the higher things” in life, which is exactly what students crave as they realize their college days will only continue to dwindle and that the joy of winning homecoming will only last so long. And the higher things only become more relevant after graduation, when we must continue to pursue them for the rest of our lives without the help of the college.
People might wonder if a man approaching 90 is too old to relate to college students, but his job isn’t to relate to us. It’s to teach us the wisdom that’s impossible to acquire in 20 years of life.
Besides, it seems that Kreeft has a fine time relating to college students. He’s teaching philosophy classes to students at Boston College, and he went viral on social media, which is my generation’s medium. If you’re above the age of 50, you probably won’t go viral unless a buffalo in Yellowstone National Park attacks you.
Kreeft doesn’t just know the great philosophers. He is a great philosopher. He knows how to break down the most complex subjects into readable books and bite-sized videos. We’d get to hear a mini “Summa” on a Monday afternoon.
And as the viral clip of him speaking about his wife revealed, Kreeft is a man with a great heart. He understands love, and how to teach others to love well. It doesn’t matter what comes after college or what the state of the world is — we all will need to know how to love. The college should invite a speaker who can teach us that.
Francesca Cella is a senior studying English.
