The Intellectual Life of the Mother of God | Prof. Zena Hitz

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 19 May 2020

⏱️ 55 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given at the University of Toronto on March 3, 2020.

About the speaker: Zena Hitz is a Tutor at St. John's College where she teaches across the liberal arts. She is interested in defending intellectual activity for its own sake, as against its use for economic or political goals. Her forthcoming book, Intellectual Life, is rooted in essays that have appeared in First Things, Modern Age, and The Washington Post. Her scholarly work has focused on the political thought of Plato and Aristotle, especially the question of how law cultivates or fails to cultivate human excellence. She received an MPhil in Classics from Cambridge and studied Social Thought and Philosophy at the University of Chicago before finishing her PhD in Philosophy at Princeton.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Over the past few years, I've had the privilege of giving a number of talks for the
0:04.0	Temistic Institute on university campuses. Good universities are great ones like Toronto's,
0:10.5	are places where people come to make a grand future for themselves. Universities these days,
0:16.7	and maybe in every, all days, are for doers or achievers.
0:21.6	But part of our Catholic faith is to think of the world of grand affairs,
0:26.6	the world of doing and achieving of impact and results and making a difference.
0:31.6	All of that is something secondary.
0:34.6	We can live our grand futures and make whatever impact we choose, but we have to
0:39.9	remember all the while that we live as pilgrims in the world, that the world cannot be perfected,
0:46.8	that it can barely be improved by our efforts, and that our highest hopes lie in God alone.
0:54.7	So the most important route to remind ourselves of the reality of the purpose of our lives,
0:59.9	as not in achieving, but in reaching towards God, is prayer and, of course, the sacraments.
1:06.6	But tonight I want to talk about an additional route, not a substitute but help, which
1:12.4	is the root of study for its own sake.
1:16.5	I want to begin with how we imagine this type of study, how we imagine our lives or the
1:23.6	lives of the work of our minds.
1:26.8	We will also be thinking about study in the life of the mind,
1:31.3	but I think our imagination shape the way we live more than our thinking does.
1:36.3	So suppose that, I'm going to need to click in just a second,
1:39.3	suppose that in our imagination we see a thinker like this, or a community of thinkers like this.
1:47.0	Next one. These images are both from the corporate world, but our images of the arts
1:55.0	or of moral and political life are not much better. So the next image is Diane Keaton playing a playwright in 2001 film,
	...

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