Aquinas on the Three Wisdoms: Philosophical, Theological, and Mystical | Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P.
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
4.8 • 873 Ratings
🗓️ 27 August 2019
⏱️ 71 minutes
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Summary
On July 10th- 14th the Thomistic Institute held our first annual "Student Leadership Conference" at the Dominican House of Studies
on the theme "Faith, Reason, & the Mind’s Ascent to God"
Aquinas offers a robust account of faith and reason, and the way that human beings can come to real knowledge of the divine. Understanding these truths is central not only to the Catholic faith, but to all knowledge of reality because God is the transcendent cause of all being, the source of intelligibility, and truth itself.
PRESENTERS INCLUDED:
Fr. Dominic Legge, OP (Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception and the Thomistic Institute)
Prof. Ed Feser (Pasadena City College)
Fr. James Brent, OP (Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception)
and a keynote address by R.R. Reno (First Things)
For more info about upcoming TI events, visit: www.thomisticinstitute.org/events
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The three wisdoms, that's what this first session is about. Why are we talking about this subject? |
| 0:09.6 | Well, if you're a student and you're on a contemporary university campus, presumably you've gone to |
| 0:15.0 | university not just because of the social life you hope to have or because you are going to get a credential that will be useful, |
| 0:24.7 | but above all, because you desire to know something. |
| 0:28.2 | And, in fact, that's also what animates the spirit of the Thomistic Institute, |
| 0:34.1 | a desire to know, and to go to the great teachers of wisdom in order to acquire some of that |
| 0:42.3 | knowledge. So that's what we're beginning this summer conference talking about. What is knowledge? |
| 0:50.9 | What is wisdom? How do we find it? Where can we go to acquire it? |
| 0:57.0 | Aquinas follows Aristotle by beginning to talk about our intellectual activity with a kind of very general observation. |
| 1:08.0 | Every person, every human person by nature desires to know. |
| 1:14.8 | And we experience a kind of wonder when we encounter reality. Now, some of this may be |
| 1:20.2 | things that you've already thought about or reflected on, but it's nice to go back to the |
| 1:24.4 | beginning and reflect on it really from the starting point. |
| 1:28.0 | You can just think about your own experiences. |
| 1:30.5 | Think about, for me, growing up in Seattle, the experience of going to the seashore, going to the ocean, and looking at the ocean. |
| 1:39.6 | There's something that provokes a kind of marvel or a kind of wonder when you have that experience. |
| 1:45.6 | I don't know how often you've had that sort of experience. Why is that? I was asking myself that |
| 1:50.6 | as I was thinking about this talk. I think perhaps it's because it's so vast. We get some sense |
| 1:58.5 | of the awesome magnitude of the world that we live in. At least for me, |
| 2:05.5 | I mean, what I think I have often experienced in looking at the ocean is there's a kind of |
| 2:09.9 | yearning for the ability to grasp it all, to be able to take it all in, to comprehend it. |
| 2:18.3 | And that is very different from thinking, |
... |
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