The Catholic Imagination in JRR Tolkien and Flannery O'Connor | Prof. Raymond Hain

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 27 July 2020

⏱️ 61 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given at Queen's University on February 5, 2020.

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Professor Raymond Hain is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Providence College and Associate Director of the Providence College Humanities Program. He received his BA in Philosophy from Christendom College and his MA and PhD in Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame, where he studied under Ralph McInerny and David Solomon. He works primarily in moral philosophy in the Thomistic tradition, as well as topics in applied ethics (especially bioethics and the ethics of architecture) and connections between philosophy and literature. As part of the Humanities Program, he directs the Providence College Humanities Forum and the Providence College Humanities Reading Seminars.

Transcript

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0:00.0	My title this evening is the Catholic imagination in J.R.R. Tolkien and Flannery O'Connor.
0:08.0	Pope Benedict X.1.1.
0:11.0	Art and the Saints are the greatest apologetics for our faith.
0:17.0	I don't think it's too hard to see why this might be true. Traditionally, the three deepest experiences of human knowing are mystical, moral, and poetic.
0:31.6	Mystical knowledge remains in the soul, tending towards silence, as the great 20th century Catholic and
0:39.6	Thomistic philosopher Jacques Merrittin once wrote.
0:43.7	But moral knowledge expresses itself in a life and poetic knowledge in a work.
0:50.1	Things that others can reach out and touch and through them find their way back to the mysterious source of that knowledge,
0:57.0	and then back out again to the created world and its creator.
1:01.0	Goodness and beauty, the gifts of artists and saints, offer us in a special way an invitation to God himself.
1:10.0	The Church's 1992 Catechism also in a special way an invitation to God himself.
1:17.2	The church's 1992 Catechism also recognizes the special role of the artist.
1:21.7	Let me read a beautiful paragraph on artistic creativity,
1:26.5	a paragraph that comes at the end of the Catechism's discussion of the Eighth Commandment,
1:27.4	prohibiting lying.
1:28.3	Art for Catholicism is inseparable from truth.
1:32.3	Here's the passage.
1:34.3	Created in the image of God, man also expresses the truth of his relationship with God, the Creator,
1:42.3	by the beauty of his artistic works.
1:45.6	Indeed, art is a distinctively human form of expression.
1:50.3	Beyond the search for the necessities of life,
1:53.3	which is common to all living creatures,
	...

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