Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.

Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.

The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.

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While Chesarton maintains that Thomas Aquinas almost certainly visited England and

probably went to Oxford and London, which I do not believe for one minute,

the major part of my lecture will be about the work that Aquinas did

at one of the great institutions of Catholic theology in the Middle Ages,

Paris.

There, Aquinas served two terms as Magister,

commenting on the Gospels of John and Matthew, and he also found time

to work on part of the Summa Theologi and preached sermons. And when I describe it like that,

it may seem that his workload was as fragmented as that of many present-day academics.

And yes, even back then they had mandatory staff meetings.

But both in the statutes of the university and in practice, there was a unity to the various tasks of the Parisian masters.

Their single task constituted of free parts, to lecture on scripture,

to have disputations with other masters, and to preach for the academy. In Latin, legere disputare,

predicate. So if you're wondering, what will we do tonight, this tripartite division structures my lecture.

And this is the first of two things I hope to clarify, how these three parts are interconnected and form one practice.

And second, I illustrate this practice by looking at how Thomas Aquinas in each of these three

tasks discusses the beatitudes.

And this will give us a more comprehensive understanding of the role the beatitudes play in

...