The Lover of the Common Good| Fr. Aquinas Guilbeau, O.P.
The Thomistic Institute
The Thomistic Institute
4.8 • 873 Ratings
🗓️ 27 August 2019
⏱️ 80 minutes
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Summary
Held each summer, The Civitas Dei Summer Fellowship Program supports rising scholars seeking to better understand the Catholic intellectual tradition. Sponsored by the Thomistic Institute and the Institute for Human Ecology, Civitas Dei Fellows spend a week together in Washington DC, examining the search for happiness as a fundamental end of the person and the polis.
The week-long seminar introduced students to foundational themes in philosophy, political theory, and theology, dealing with law, personhood, political life, and the search for happiness. The focus was on an introduction to foundations of political and moral theory of Augustine, Aquinas, and modern constitutional jurisprudence.
Speakers included Dr. Adrian Vermeule (Harvard Law School), Fr. Aquinas Guilbeau, O.P. (Dominican House of Studies) and Dr. Chad C. Pecknold (Catholic University of America)
For more information about upcoming TI events, visit: www.thomisticinstitute.org/events
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | For our last discussion, I thought I would, |
| 0:02.5 | there are a few points that I want to make just to bring |
| 0:06.5 | certain parts of our discussion to an end, |
| 0:08.9 | and then we'll open it up for questions. |
| 0:11.2 | So I hope to leave a lot of time today for questions. |
| 0:14.1 | So feel free to raise those questions |
| 0:15.8 | about what we discussed today, or if they're |
| 0:17.8 | lingering questions from previous discussions, |
| 0:20.4 | I'd be happy to take those. |
| 0:23.1 | So again, just within this general theme that we've been looking at this week, the person |
| 0:26.4 | and the polis, we've been looking specifically at Aquinas' Doctrine of the Common Good |
| 0:29.9 | and seeing how it is that the person relates to the polis. As I said at the beginning, |
| 0:34.8 | there's nothing more natural in the world for the person to be a member of the polis, to be a part of the polis. |
| 0:42.3 | Um, yeah, I mean, just by using DeConnick as a guide, helping us to understand how it is that the good of the city is a natural and perfective good of the human person. |
| 0:57.5 | So again, looking at the good in general, how it's an object of desire. It bears the note of |
| 1:06.8 | final cause as the first of causes and is diffusive of itself. |
| 1:12.8 | We also looked in how for Aquinas, various goods, |
| 1:16.5 | diffuse themselves differently according to, let's say, |
| 1:21.0 | the concentration of goodness that they possess, |
| 1:23.5 | the degree to which they participate in image represent God's own goodness. |
| 1:28.4 | They diffuse themselves either to many effects at once or to few or to one. |
| 1:36.1 | And how among these various goods, according to their various extension, they are goods of the human person, according to various categories, according to various formalities of the human |
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