Why Leisure Is Necessary For Human Beings | Zena Hitz

The Thomistic Institute

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

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 18 November 2019

⏱️ 63 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given by Dr. Zena Hitz (St. John's College (Annapolis) at Tulane University on 3 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.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	So I want to begin with Augustine's Confessions.
0:05.0	And the first passage I'm going to read out is the second on the handout.
0:10.0	There's a lot of bonus material on here.
0:12.0	I always like to throw in a little extra so that you can keep the handout as a souvenir and read it, you know, repeatedly.
0:20.0	I mean, many times. I'm hoping this will be a
0:22.7	lifetime resource for you. I'm just being silly. I'm sorry. Okay. So in his confessions,
0:30.5	St. Augustine describes a fascinating moment in his conversion to the Catholic faith.
0:41.9	At this time, he's a successful teacher of rhetoric in Milan.
0:45.7	He lives with his longtime concubine in their son.
0:49.6	He has a group of close friends with whom he talks about philosophy.
0:59.0	He is breaking or has already broken with the Manichaeans, which are the Gnostic cult he has spent many years with studying and teaching. He's overwhelmed by the limits of human knowledge and skeptical that anyone could come to know the truth about how to live.
1:08.0	So he oscillates back and forth between skepticism that anything certain can be
1:13.8	known and his budding interest in the Catholic faith, which the latter is nurtured by his hearing
1:19.8	of the preaching of Ambrose, who's the Bishop of Milan. So here is how he describes, this is
1:26.4	the second passage on the front, here is how he describes a dialogue that he has with himself at this time in his life.
1:34.7	Tomorrow I shall find it. I think that's the key to life, the meaning of life. It will be perfectly clear and I shall have no more doubts.
1:42.9	Faustus, that's the great Manichaean intellectual, will come and explain everything.
1:48.7	So he wants, on the one hand, someone to come and explain everything.
1:51.1	Then he goes back in a different direction.
1:53.0	What great men the academic skeptic philosophers were.
1:56.3	Nothing for the conduct of life can be a matter of assured knowledge.
1:59.3	So he's just gone back from waiting for someone to tell him the answer to be certain that
	...

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