Gregory the Great on Reading Scripture for Wisdom [VIDEO]

Gregory the Great on Reading Scripture for Wisdom

Tuesday, April 7, 2020
7:00PM CDT
Registration required

How can scripture guide our search for wisdom? Bernard McGinn, professor emeritus in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, began the Lumen Christi Institute’s webinar series on Reason and Wisdom in Medieval Christian Thought by presenting on “Gregory the Great on Reading Scripture for Wisdom.” The Saint Benedict Institute was a cosponsor of this event.

Pope Saint Gregory the Great lived in an age of tumult--war, waves of disease, economic depression, and civil deterioration. Alongside his administrative reforms and leadership, Gregory described a spirituality that centered around meditative and contemplative reading of sacred scripture. Gregory's practice of reading scripture, particularly the Book of Job, and his description of the practice had great influence upon medieval meditative and contemplative practices of reading the Word of God. 

Bernard McGinn is the Naomi Shenstone Donnelley Professor Emeritus of Historical Theology and of the History of Christianity in the Divinity School and the Committees on Medieval Studies and on General Studies at the University of Chicago. He has written extensively about the history of apocalyptic thought, spirituality, and mysticism. McGinn's many books include Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil, The Presence of God, a multivolume history of Western Christian mysticism, and most recently Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae: A Biography.