St. Thomas Aquinas on Pleasure and the Good Life – Dr. Erik Dempsey

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 873 Ratings

🗓️ 18 March 2026

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dr. Erik Dempsey explains how St. Thomas Aquinas sees pleasure as a natural and God-given part of the good life, one that both signals our true human ends and yet must be disciplined by temperance in a fallen world.

This lecture was given on December 4th, 2025, at Southern Methodist University.

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

About the Speakers:

Professor Erik Dempsey an Associate Professor of Instruction in the Departments of Government, Classics, and Religious Studies, and is the Assistant Director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas. He has taught at the University of Texas at Austin for over ten years, during which time he has offered classes in the history of political philosophy, on the Bible and its interpreters, on American political thought, on classical philosophy and literature, and others. His favorite classes to teach are Jerusalem and Athens, a class comparing the political, moral, and theological ideas of the Hebrew Bible to Aristotle's, and the Question of Relativism, a class on what he considers the central quandary of our time. He writes primarily about Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, and he is currently studying John Locke's commentaries on St. Paul's epistles. Last but not least, he is an Eagle Scout.

Keywords: Asceticism and Grace, Desire, Natural Law, Original Sin, Pleasure and Temperance, Screwtape Letters, Virtue and the Good Life

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tumistic Institute podcast.
0:05.9	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:12.3	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Tumistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:18.2	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at
0:21.7	Thomisticinstitute.org. I'll begin today's lecture, not with Thomas Aquinas directly,
0:29.6	but with a line from C.S. Lewis's screw tape letters. It's the first on your handout. I just
0:35.6	have a couple of, yeah, you can pass them down. I just have a couple of lines that I wanted to highlight for you all.
0:42.7	If you know the text, Scrut tape, you know that it consists of a series of letters from a senior devil named Screwtape to his nephew, Wormwood, trying to explain to him how to win for the devil,
0:58.6	the soul of a man whom he refers to in the book only as the patient. The ninth letter contains
1:05.7	some very striking advice, which I'll read now. Never forget, so screw tape, when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal
1:16.4	and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the enemy's ground. Remember, the enemy here is
1:23.5	God himself. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is his invention,
1:31.7	not ours. He made the pleasures. All our research so far has not enabled us to produce one.
1:40.0	All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our enemy has produced at times,
1:46.7	or in ways or in degrees, which he has forbidden.
1:52.1	Hence, we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure
1:56.4	to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its maker, and least pleasurable.
2:05.4	It's a nice kicker at the end, right?
2:08.4	What Scrutep sees is, in my judgment, something he could have learned from Thomas Aquinas.
2:15.2	Pleasure is an important part of a naturally good human life, and more than that, that the right kind of experience of pleasure is crucial to keeping us in touch with our natural ends.
2:31.3	Now, I chose this topic. I thought this is a topic that I like to speak about to Tumistic Institute audiences, not only because it's a theme of Thomas Aquinas' work, although I take that to be a sufficient reason to look at it, but also because it's something I fear we've lost sight of, especially in the modern world. It's not that
2:54.6	we don't have our pleasures far from it, but that there is something unhealthy about the way that
	...

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