Why Leisure Is Necessary For Human Beings | Prof. Zena Hitz

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 20 November 2019

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This lecture was given at the University of South Carolina on 23 October 2019.

Dr. 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.

For more information on this and other events go to thomisticinstitute.org/events-1

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	So I want to begin with Augustine's confession, so St. Augustine's autobiography,
0:08.0	his religious autobiography, where he describes his conversion to the Catholic faith.
0:13.0	And there's a fascinating moment that you might not notice the first time through.
0:18.0	There's so much that's interesting in there.
0:20.0	So there's a moment in his conversion.
0:22.6	At the time when he's writing, he is a successful teacher of rhetoric in Milan,
0:29.1	which is a kind of important city in the Roman Empire.
0:32.5	He lives with his longtime concubine and their son.
0:36.7	He has a group of close friends who he likes a lot.
0:40.6	They have a lot of great philosophical conversations.
0:44.2	And he's about to break with a group called the Manichaeans, this ancient Gnostic cult
0:48.9	that believed the whole world consisted of a battle between good and evil in which good was not totally powerful.
1:00.0	So it was an ongoing struggle of which there would never be a victory.
1:04.2	So he's been with him for a while.
1:06.5	He's about to break with them.
1:08.7	And he's been studying and teaching with them for some years.
1:12.6	He's in this moment of intellectual transition, there's a group that he's been involved with
1:17.6	that he's leaving, he's overwhelmed by the limits of human knowledge, and he's skeptical that
1:23.3	anyone could come to know the truth about how to live.
1:33.1	So he oscillates back and forth between, on the one hand, skepticism that anything certainly could be known about how to live, whether there's any truth about how we're not to live
1:36.8	a human life.
1:38.5	And then he also has this budding interest in the Catholic faith, which was nurtured by, it's nurtured by his hearing the preaching
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in -1957 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

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.