Affliction, Sorrow and Human Flourishing | Prof. Thomas Hibbs

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 21 October 2024

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on November 30th, 2023, at North Carolina State University.

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About the Speaker:

Thomas Hibbs is currently J. Newton Rayzor Sr. Professor of Philosophy at Baylor where he is also Dean Emeritus, having served for 16 years as the inaugural Dean of the Honors College. At Baylor he was also the inaugural director of Baylor in Washington, D.C. where he currently runs a summer program on Religion and Social Life. He has served as department chair at Boston College and as president of the University of Dallas. Hibbs has published more than thirty scholarly articles, the most recent of which is “Aquinas and Black Natural Law.” He has published eight books, the most recent of which is Theology of Creation: Ecology, Art, and Laudato Si’ (University of Notre Dame Press, 2023). He has also published two books on film and philosophy and one book on art. He has published more than 100 reviews and discussion articles on film, theater, art, and higher education in a variety of venues including First Things, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Wall Street Journal, and National Review. He writes regularly for The Dallas Morning News.

Hibbs’ lectures have been protested by nihilists at Boston University and by communists in Palermo, Sicily.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:06.8	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:13.1	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.1	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us
0:22.3	at to mystic institute.org. I'm going to talk about sorrow and human flourishing. And I'll get to
0:30.0	sorrow in a moment. And I'll talk about what Aquinas has to say about sorrow. One of the ways that Aquinas might suggest to us that
0:40.1	we think about the state of our souls morally and spiritually, there are lots of ways to begin to do
0:46.2	this. One way I think for Aquinas would be to ask ourselves what makes us sad and how do we
0:53.5	respond to it. And we'll get to that in a moment.
0:56.5	I want to start with a few broader comments about how Aquinas in particular, but also Aristotle,
1:03.6	who he's influenced by, think about human flourishing. So, and I want to focus on a couple things.
1:10.5	I want to focus on what they mean by happiness. And then I want to focus on a couple things. I want to focus on what they mean by
1:11.9	happiness, and then I want to focus on the role of the passions or the emotions in human
1:18.6	flourishing. So Aristotle, in his ethics, which Aquinas follows pretty closely on this,
1:25.9	asked the question, is there an end or a goal to human life?
1:31.2	And Aristotle says, if there is such a thing, it would have to be something that we desire
1:36.1	for its own sake. We don't desire it merely as a means to something else. It would have to be
1:42.1	in a sense complete. It would have to describe in a sense what it would mean to be fully satisfied as a human being.
1:51.0	And as he talks about the criteria for the end of human life or goal, he says that some
1:58.6	people say that the end is money or pleasure or honor.
2:04.9	And it's pretty clear that money can't be an end because mainly we want money so that we can do things with it.
2:11.2	So it's not desired for its own sake.
	...

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