4.8 • 729 Ratings
🗓️ 26 February 2025
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Fr. Dominic Verner explores Aquinas' definition of honor as reverence exhibited in testimony to someone's excellence, explaining its importance for personal virtue, self-knowledge, friendship, and fostering a community that values true goodness.
This lecture was given on March 9th, 2024, at Our Lady of Corpus Christi Retreat Center.
For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events
About the Speaker:
Fr. Dominic Verner, O.P. (Providence College) after earning a B.S. in electrical engineering from Purdue University and an M.A. in philosophical studies from Mount St. Mary's University, Fr. Dominic Verner, O.P. entered the Order of Preachers and was ordained to the priesthood in 2016. He has an S.T.L. from the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception and a Ph.D. in moral theology/Christian ethics from the University of Notre Dame, where he wrote his dissertation "Saving Honor: A Thomistic Ethics of Honor." He joined the Theology Faculty at Providence College as an Assistant Professor in the Fall of 2022. His research and teaching interests especially concern Thomistic moral theory and the role that honor, friendship, and glory play in practical reason and the quest for beatitude.
Keywords: Excellence, Fear of the Lord, Friendship, Honor, Imitation, Reverence, Self-Love, Testimony, Virtue
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
0:00.0 | Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast. |
0:06.2 | Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square. |
0:13.1 | The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world. |
0:19.5 | To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at |
0:22.5 | to mystic institute.org. So today we're going to explore a little, in a little bit more detail, |
0:31.3 | what is honor, according to St. Thomas Aquinas? Why is honor such a great good? And how should we seek honor? And then why is |
0:42.4 | giving true honor so important? All right. So we're going to kind of work through those four |
0:48.2 | questions. So beginning first, what is honor? So Aquinas defines honor. He takes his definition of honor from the |
0:57.3 | University of Paris. We don't know exactly where this definition came from actually. It's not, |
1:01.2 | it's nowhere in Aristotle. It's always attributed to Aristotle, some attribute to Cicero. We don't |
1:05.2 | know where it comes from, but University of Paris, we first read it. That honor is reverence exhibited |
1:10.5 | in testimony to someone's excellence. |
1:15.2 | Reverence exhibited in testimony to someone's excellence. |
1:21.6 | So honor is an act of testimony. |
1:24.6 | This is really interesting. |
1:27.0 | This already tells us something about what honor does. |
1:32.5 | Think about when might you need testimony for something? Oftentimes we think of testimony |
1:38.9 | in the legal context. Someone testifies to something that they've witnessed where they're providing evidence |
1:49.5 | that someone did something, that something exists, where, you know, there's some doubt. There's |
1:57.8 | some doubt. You need a witness to testify to the truth of the matter. All right. |
2:04.5 | In some sense, we can consider divine revelation itself as a testimony by God to tell us things that we couldn't know about God on our own. |
2:18.6 | Right? God testifies that he is three and one. |
... |
Transcript will be available on the free plan in -28 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Thomistic Institute, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Thomistic Institute and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.