Aquinas on Friendship and Human Excellence | Prof. Thomas Hibbs

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 14 May 2025

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Prof. Thomas Hibbs analyzes Aquinas’ account of friendship and human excellence, drawing on Aristotle and Tocqueville to show how friendship is a necessary, intrinsically valuable common good that addresses contemporary crises of loneliness, civic animosity, and the loss of meaningful community.

This lecture was given on January 17th, 2025, at Cedarbrake Catholic Retreat Center.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

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.

Keywords: Alexis de Tocqueville, American Culture, Aristotle, Aquinas on Friendship, Civic Animosity, Common Good, Human Flourishing, Loneliness and Isolation, Virtue and Vice

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:06.0	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:12.0	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Tomistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.0	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at
0:21.9	Thomisticinstitut.org. I want to reiterate something that was said during the sermon, which is to
0:28.7	have a lot of fun. And it's just a great group to be around. And I love the way that the Dominicans do things in the Domestic Institute.
0:40.7	It is what we all need for our souls.
0:44.3	It's what we all need for our communities, which is a combination of worship, serious high-level debate and thought about important issues and then social life,
1:00.9	camaraderie what my Baptist friends at Baylor call fellowship,
1:04.1	but a chance to develop deep and lasting friendships.
1:10.7	And so just about everything that I've ever been asked to do by the
1:15.8	Semistic Institute, I do, because I think it is the most important movement, what's going
1:22.4	on in the domestic institute for college age students in the country and certainly in the
1:27.4	American church. And we could
1:28.8	use a lot. So world domination is what I pray for for the Thomistic Institute. You guys are saying,
1:36.8	no, please not. But that's what I'm open for. Bridget, thanks for all of your work, organizing all the
1:43.2	details for this.
1:46.1	So we're not in a good way culturally, really anywhere in the advanced Western world when it comes to friendship.
1:57.0	And I think the precise ways in which we're in a bad way about friendship says a lot about our culture and the kind of crisis that we're in.
2:09.7	One of the problems with the crisis that we're in is that we've lost the ability to name what's missing.
2:19.9	We have, the vast majority of Americans have the sense that there's, and this is quite bipartisan,
2:27.6	have the sense that there's something deeply wrong.
	...

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