Chesterton on Saints Francis and Thomas Aquinas | Dr. Thomas Hibbs

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 5 January 2021

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This lecture was given at the University of Virginia on November 18, 2020. Dr. Hibbs' lecture concludes at 43:22. The rest of the recording is Q&A with him and the students of the chapter.

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Speaker Bio:

Thomas Hibbs has been President of the University of Dallas since 2019. Previously, he served as distinguished Professor of Ethics & Culture and Dean of the Honors College at Baylor University. He is the author of books including Virtue's Splendor: Wisdom, Prudence, and the Human Good and Shows About Nothing, one of two books of his about film. He has nearly completed a book on Pascal, tentatively entitled Divine Irony and is at work on a book on Nihilism, Beauty, and God, an application of Jacques Maritain’s aesthetic theory to the arts of poetry and painting in the 20th century. He also has written on film, culture, books and higher education in publications including Books and Culture, Christianity Today, First Things, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute.
0:03.3	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:11.1	This talk actually had a longer title, which we cut for the sake of economy.
0:19.1	And that longer title is the two friars, Chesterton and Pope Francis
0:25.1	on the affinities between Saints Francis and Thomas. And I had, it's not a real long paper. It's
0:33.9	about a 16-page paper that I'm going to read. And I'll make some asides. It should take me 35 minutes or so to read it, and then I'm happy to take questions.
0:42.1	But I had read Chesterton's two little biographies of Francis and Thomas many years ago.
0:51.6	And then when I was reading a few years back, Pope Francis encyclical Laudato C,
0:59.1	I was struck by a similar approach to yoking together these two saints who are, of course,
1:08.2	contemporaneous, roughly, but who are not typically paired.
1:13.4	And I was very struck by this sort of Chestertonian set of themes that I discovered,
1:19.5	and you can tell me whether you think my discovery is accurate or not.
1:23.1	But so let me begin with this, and I'll be going back and forth between the encyclical and the
1:32.0	texts of Thomas and the remarks and comments of Chesterton as I go through this.
1:38.8	And then I want to say some things about art at the end and talk a little bit about one contemporary film just briefly.
1:47.6	So in the two consecutive paragraphs, 86 and 87, in the encyclical Laudato C, Pope Francis cites
1:58.5	at length, first Thomas Aquinas and then St. Francis at length.
2:04.4	He cites Aquinas on the fittingness of God, creating a multiplicity and variety of creatures.
2:12.3	Here's the quote.
2:13.7	The universe as a whole in all its manifold relationships shows forth the inexhaustible riches of God.
2:23.1	St. Thomas Aquinas wisely noted that multiplicity and variety, and here's a quote, come from the
2:29.7	intention of the first agent who will that what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine
	...

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