In the Beginning Was the Word: Augustine, Aristotle, and Aquinas – Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P.

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 2025

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Fr. Dominic Legge’s lecture traces the theological development of the concept of the Word through Augustine, Aristotle, and Aquinas, illuminating the evolution of Trinitarian analogy and the nature of human understanding in medieval philosophy.

This lecture was given on June 16th, 2025, at Schloss St. Emmeram.

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About the Speakers:

Fr. Dominic Legge is the President of the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception and Associate Professor in Systematic Theology at the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. He is an Ordinary Member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, and holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, a Ph.L. from the School of Philosophy of the Catholic University of America, and a doctorate in Sacred Theology from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. He entered the Order of Preachers in 2001, after having practiced constitutional law for several years as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice. He has also taught at The Catholic University of America Law School and at Providence College. He is the author of The Trinitarian Christology of St. Thomas Aquinas (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Keywords: Albert The Great, Aristotelian Abstraction, Bonaventure, Illumination, Intellectual Procession, Inner Word, Marius Victorinus, Medieval Trinitarian Debates, Philosophical Cognition, Plotinus

Transcript

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0:50.7	So in the beginning was the word, Augustine, Aristotle, and Aquinas.
0:57.0	What I'm going to be speaking to you about is a development in Aquinas' thought.
1:03.0	And the fact of this development is already well established, is well known,
1:09.0	and there have been a number of publications dealing with it.
1:13.6	So in a certain way, I'm simply going to be summarizing what others have said.
1:18.6	At the same time, I think there is a great profit in working through in a symposium workshop kind of way together the development in
1:32.0	Aquinas thought because this is a very important area and also one where we can
1:40.5	gain a lot by seeing how the problem developed.
1:46.2	But I thought it was especially appropriate
1:48.1	to discuss this in this conference,
1:51.4	because it also is a very important issue that
1:57.1	emerges from the thought of Augustine
2:00.0	and is received in different ways by different
2:02.9	thinkers in the 13th century. So if there's any novelty in what I'm presenting to you, it
	...

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