The Catholic Imagination of Oscar Wilde – Prof. Guiseppe Pezzini
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
4.8 • 873 Ratings
🗓️ 12 May 2026
⏱️ 57 minutes
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Summary
Prof. Giuseppe Pezzini argues that Oscar Wilde's aestheticism and life journey reveal a Catholic imagination, where art confronts suffering and beauty leads to embracing the full reality of pain, culminating in his final reconciliation with faith.
This lecture was given on March 23rd, 2026, at University of Galway.
For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.
About the Speakers:
Prof. Guiseppe Pezzini is an Associate Professor of Latin Language and Literature at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, specializing in Early Latin (3rd–1st c. BC). A linguist and philologist by training, he explores the period's crucial role in shaping Roman-Greek cultural identity, applying expertise in ancient metre, textual criticism, and digital humanities to his research.
His career has included teaching at the University of St Andrews and research fellowships at Magdalen College Oxford and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and earned his D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. From 2010 to 2013, he also served as an Assistant Editor for the Oxford Dictionary of Medieval Latin.
Professor Pezzini's interests extend to the classical ancestry of modern English literature. This is seen in his forthcoming monograph, Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation (Cambridge University Press 2025). Other recent and forthcoming books include volumes on Early Latin (Cambridge 2023), Roman Cultural History (Oxford 2025), and an edition and commentary on Terence's Heauton Timorumenos (forthcoming in the Cambridge ‘Orange Series’).
Keywords: Aestheticism, Beauty, Conversion, De Profundis, Dorian Gray, Suffering, Happy Prince, Prison, Prophecy, Wounded Humanity
Transcript
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| 0:23.6 | Before I start, I just want to stress that I'm not going to talk about the Catholic |
| 0:28.9 | imagination in a theoretical way. So this is not going to be a lecture of philosophy or theology. |
| 0:35.9 | It will be more of a journey into the human experience of |
| 0:39.7 | Oscar Wilde and I think in general it's not it's good to talk about the life of our author |
| 0:46.0 | to understand the work but I think especially this is the case for Oscar Wilde whose life |
| 0:52.4 | and work were deep intertwined and who always framed, if you want, |
| 0:57.2 | his life as a work of art and his art as his life work. So in a sense, life and work are really |
| 1:03.8 | together for Oscar Wilde. And I like to talk about Oscar Wilde because I do think that Oscar Wilde is |
| 1:10.0 | a prophetic writer. |
| 1:11.9 | And as you're going to hear soon, that's also a way to introduce the content of the Catholic imagination, the idea of prophecy. |
| 1:18.8 | Literature is somehow prophetic. |
| 1:20.7 | And certainly Oscar Wilde is a prophetic because he anticipates in many ways the post-Christian world, or at least the world that we are living. |
| 1:29.3 | I think now with the war that happened in the past couple of years where I think we have lost a bit of our optimism. |
| 1:35.3 | But certainly there is still a lot of glitter in the world that we live, especially in the West. |
| 1:39.3 | And Oscar Weil has been heralded as ill the prophet by many quarters of that. |
| 1:45.0 | And to a certain extent, this is true. |
| 1:47.0 | But at the same time, there is another side of Oscar Wilde to complete, if you want, not to oppose the other side, |
... |
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