Aquinas on the Cardinal & Theological Virtues | Prof. Jonathan Sanford

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 11 April 2022

⏱️ 108 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on February 17, 2022 at Trinity Western University via Zoom. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Jonathan J. Sanford, PhD, is Professor of Philosophy and Provost at the University of Dallas. He graduated summa cum laude from Xavier University in Classics and Philosophy in 1997, received his PhD from University at Buffalo, The State University of New York in 2001, and received a postdoctoral fellowship from Fordham University in 2001-2002. He has published on particular figures in the history of philosophy, including Aristotle, Anselm, Aquinas, Newman, and Scheler, as well as on topics in both metaphysics and ethics. He is especially interested in drawing from the tradition to solve contemporary problems. Sanford’s most recent book is Before Virtue: Assessing Contemporary Virtue Ethics (CUA Press, 2015). The University of Dallas is well known for the undergraduate Catholic liberal education it provides, and as Provost, Sanford oversees all aspects of it. He is currently writing a book on the virtues of liberal education. He and his wife Rebecca live in Irving, Texas, and are blessed with eight children.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Thomistic Institute.
0:03.6	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:11.5	So I'm going to focus on the cardinal virtues for a good chunk of this talk, and then I'll talk about the theological virtues.
0:20.2	And I'm following the pattern that you can find in St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae,
0:27.0	where in the first part, he treats the virtues, the moral and the intellectual virtues,
0:34.3	the cardinal virtues as a special class.
0:41.3	And as he gets to the end of his first part, he then transitions to look at the return of the human being to God.
0:48.3	So the work as a whole, the Sumo Theologiae,
0:51.3	is a reflection upon how everything in one sense has come forth from God.
0:58.0	And so the first questions deal with some distinctions between philosophy and theology, but then the created order and how the created order has issued from God.
1:10.2	So first questions about God himself.
1:12.4	And then ultimately, why did he create?
1:14.4	And what's the nature of his creation, the structure of the human person after treating the angels?
1:20.5	And then he gets into considerations of our return to God and takes on questions related to that that deal with our natural
1:32.0	ability to return to God. So he looks at our yearning for fulfillment, happiness, and how
1:40.1	we are oriented ultimately towards God, but we don't know that from the outset. Certainly don't
1:47.3	know that without the special help that grace provides in order to define our end. He reflects
1:54.0	upon the structure of the human person, which is really pivotal for a full account of the
1:58.7	virtues, and the very nature of the human act,
2:02.6	the moral act, and analyzes its structure, reflects upon our passions.
2:08.9	And he has a lot to say about our passions, a very rich account.
2:12.5	Those of you who are interested in psychology, interested in the emotions and how they
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