The Intellectual Life of The Blessed Virgin Mary | Dr. Zena Hitz

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 20 January 2022

⏱️ 48 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given at University of California, Berkeley on November 16, 2021. For more events and info visit thomisticinstitute.org/events-1. 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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute.
0:03.3	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:11.4	We're going to be talking tonight about the intellectual life of the mother of God.
0:18.1	And I'm going to, there's a bit of amateur art history that we're going to go. That's why we have
0:24.0	beautiful slides. There's also going to be an account of the tradition about Mary's intellectual life
0:31.1	from the church fathers, which is on your handout. But I will try to situate the questions that I think are raised in the
0:41.3	broader questions about learning learning for its own sake its role in human
0:47.6	flourishing which is the kind of thing I always talked about so I hope they'll be a
0:52.2	big picture but those of you who like to geek out over the fathers over our history, we'll have some stuff for you too.
1:00.0	So part of what I have been arguing for the last little while is that learning for its own sake plays a central role in human flourishing and human happiness.
1:15.2	So our flourishing as human beings, our fulfillment, our development into the kinds of human
1:24.1	beings that we want and need to be. It depends on our choices. And our choices
1:32.3	depend on our motivations, our desires. And our motivations and our desires depend on, in my view,
1:41.3	especially how we imagine ourselves. It relies very heavily on the imagination.
1:47.0	So one of my concerns in my book, Loss and Thought,
1:50.0	and I'll be dealing with tonight, is how our images of ourselves,
1:55.0	our images of human success, our images of human flourishing,
1:59.0	affect our motivation, and how we might analyze them in a way that's
2:03.6	helpful for reshaping ourselves, redirecting ourselves, becoming more of the people that were meant to be.
2:12.6	So this in particular, because it's images of Mary's intellectual life, it's images of learning and images of thinking.
2:26.3	And we'll think, so we'll talk about how we imagine the life of study, what images we have for it, how we think of study in our imagination,
2:38.0	and how that helps us to imagine our lives
	...

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