Two Cities, Two Standards, Two Loves | Dr. Chad Pecknold

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 873 Ratings

🗓️ 15 August 2019

⏱️ 74 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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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)

You can access the hand out for this lecture here: tinyurl.com/ydhqk476

For more information about upcoming TI events, visit: www.thomisticinstitute.org/events

Transcript

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0:00.0	I ask you to read book 15.
0:05.3	Not mindful that in the middle of book 15 there's a long digression, which we won't talk about.
0:13.0	And so if you want to talk about the genealogies a bit more, we can.
0:19.8	But I won't have remarks on that.
0:23.6	I can tell you why it exists in the middle of 15, but hopefully you've got something out of that.
0:31.0	But mainly I'll address the first eight chapters of book 15 and then some of the later parts of book 15.
0:39.1	But like before, I want to give a little bit of background
0:41.7	to where this is situated in Augustine's larger nest of arguments.
0:52.6	Augustine turns in books 11 through 22 to a different, shall we say, epistemological frame.
1:04.5	He opens book 11 with a task, as he often does.
1:13.1	He often begins with, my task is now.
1:17.2	And his task, he says, is to describe the rise and development and destined ends of two cities.
1:28.2	So this rise, development, destined ends of two cities basically corresponds to four books each, right?
1:37.5	The rise of the two cities through books 11 through 14, the development of the two cities through books 15 and 18 to 18, and then the
1:46.4	destined ends the teleology in books 19 through 22.
1:52.1	He says the two cities are interwoven, commingled in this present life, and we'll talk more
1:58.6	about that.
2:00.6	The other thing that he wants to do is... life, and we'll talk more about that.
2:04.0	The other thing that he wants to do right from the outset of book 11
2:06.9	is to tell the reader why the epistemic frame is shifting.
2:12.9	Epistemic frame is shifting from Roman history,
2:16.6	philosophy, to scripture.
	...

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