A Thomistic Tapestry: Essays in Memory of Eienne Gilson
(PETER A.REDPATH (ED.))
Reviewed by Denis Bradley
Page 3
Source: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=1336
The way back to pre-modern epistemic certitudes, however, may not be so straight as Redpath hopes, even for convinced Thomists: Raymond Dennehy, rehearses—syncretizing their positions rather than clearly resolving—the exact issue between Maritain and Gilson. How should an “authentic” Thomistic realism be grounded: immediately or critically? Everything depends on how the bugbear, “critique of knowledge,” is defined. The issue inflamed neo-Thomists for almost a hundred years. Dennehy, a Maritainian partisan despite his conciliatory intent, continues to think that Thomistic realism, standing before the bottomless “epistemological trench” of modern scepticism, somehow requires and permits both an immediate and a critical grounding, thereby apparently—or coming very close to—conceding the need and the possibility of exactly what Gilson, ever the vigilant anti-Cartesian, never ceased to deny: a reflexive, second order, inferentially constructed bridge to the extra-mental world of naturally knowable things. This is not to deny that Thomists need a cognitive theory (explaining how we know the extra-mental world); it is to say that it should not be conflated with critique (essaying to demonstrate the conclusion that we do know the world). While perhaps not conflating them, Maritain—with Dennehy in tow—seems to think that the former is somehow a suitable and necessary stand-in for the latter. (For a vastly more developed and sustainable version of the latter position, which really does sublate the now rather faded neo-Thomist controversy, one can recommend total immersion in Lonergan.)
In any case, Gilson surely would never have agreed—however intense Maritain's Bergsonian inspired anxieties—that his brand of “dogmatic” realism entailed or was implicated in a dangerous “relying on intuition cut free from rationality” (p. 78): analytically, ens is the first concept that falls under the intellect's act of simple apprehension, but it is the judgment that extra-mental “Being is and non-being is not” that is the first cognitive certitude or principleof knowledge. The critical illusion, Gilson repeated incessantly, is to imagine that one can attain some greater epistemic certitude than what is actually available at the very beginning. Immediate cognitive contact with the extra-mental world is either a self-evident first principle or, as the history of modern philosophy proved to Gilson at least, a radically shaky, impossible to preserve, and, finally, utterly unreachable conclusion. To the very end, Gilson scorned Maritain's whole epistemological anxieties. In 1919, Maritain signed the apodeictic manifesto of the politically right-wing and aesthetically conservative so-called “parti de l'intelligence.” Fifty-five years later, one year after Maritain's death, Gilson wrote acerbically to Armand Maurer that Maritain's youthful “revival of realism,” once so attracted to but then so intemperately denigratory of Bergson's alleged irrationalism, was not, in fact, “the party of being.” It is hard to imagine a greater Gilsonian “put-down.” Francesca Murphy proposes, though I am disinclined to accept it, that it is through his own notion of “a vital, fluid, and energetic act of existence [that] Gilson incorporated the Bergsonian intuition into his metaphysics” (p. 99). On the contrary, Gilson always insisted that we attain the actus essendi only through judgment.
The book—I mean to say with benignity—is an in-house laudation of Gilson: genial, almost wistful in recalling the magnificent scholar, superb teacher, and deeply Christian man. Who could deny—and why would one want to?—that Gilson was an “intellectual giant” who “dwarfed and intimidated many of his contemporaries” (xvii). No mere intellectual giant though: Gilson, in his own life and in the polis, was capable of applying luminous theory to opaque practice; in 1945, he served as a member of the French delegation to the conference writing the charter for the United Nations. Desmond Fitzgerald recalls the droll incident of Gilson speaking Russian to Molotov and his fellow Soviets—slyly, and to their chagrin, only at the very end of the Conference. This profound humanist, then, was a giant in many senses.
Nonetheless, Gilson's intellectual contemporaries are not our contemporaries; ours are no longer so intimidated by the deceased giant. In a published lecture (the twenty-first in “The Étienne Gilson Series), given 3 March 2000 at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Marcia Colish provides some details about the “newer maps” of scholasticism that are being drawn, and that decenter Aquinas, who occupied the high point of the “old story-line” of the neo-Thomists, including Gilson. But lest we too quickly assimilate Gilson to other “neo-Thomists,” we might remind Colish that Gilson began his career not as a medievalist but studying Descartes, whose sources he traced back to the Middle Ages. Gilson backed into the Middle Ages and he always read the mediaevals with his eye on his contemporaries as well as the moderns—some have said with an eye too fixed on Heidegger's dubious history of the forgetfulness of being. As I mentioned, Wayne Hankey, drawing on recent French scholarship, has written a series of provocative articles about the neo-Platonist sources of Aquinas's existential metaphysics that purport to show that “Gilson's Thomism is past, being sustainable neither historically nor philosophically” (“Denys and Aquinas: Antimodern cold and postmodern hot,” in Christian Origins: Theology, Rhetoric and Community [London/New York: Routledge, 1998], 139–84; quotation p. 147). Well, I am still confident that Gilson's astonishing historical scholarship, like those of the unsurpassably erudite nineteenth-century German classicists, will remain for a very long time a touchstone for all latter-day medievalists. But it is not, of course, the ne plus ultra. Hankey's provocative judgments do call for some considered response from Gilsonians, who tend to spend too much time rehearsing the jejune neo-Thomist debates of the last century. Doubtless Gilson, if he were still with us, would respond to Hadot and Hankey and to many others: his continuous engagement with contemporary intellectual life is what made him more than just a “historian.”
As for Gilson's own philosophical views, they will have as much vitality and pertinence as the Gilsonians who espouse them. Anton Pegis, another one of Gilson's illustrious students and colleagues, continually urged his fellow Thomists not merely to repeat but to use Aquinas's principles in their own, personally constructed dialogue with contemporary philosophers. Nothing less should be asked of present-day and future Gilsonians, if there be such. To his credit, James Maroosis, in the present volume, makes valiant if somewhat convoluted efforts to find Pierce, Jean Poinsot (John of St. Thomas), and Anton Pegis concurring on the structure of cognitive intentionality: on Maroosis's reading, all affirm that knowledge is the presence of the mind-independent other but known as other solely within the knower—a paradoxical relationship of sign to signified that is trans-subjective or external world-dependent but which allows the world to be interiorly manifested and objectified only within the knower.
Nonetheless, a certain pained desire for le beau temps perdu suffuses the present book. Dare one attribute—yet one more time— this nostalgia to the vicissitudes of Catholic intellectual and cultural life since the Second Vatican Council? No matter: non-Gilsonian “externs,” who as students had intellectually powerful but not quite world-making maîtres and who as academics wear differently calibrated spectacles when looking at and evaluating modern philosophical projects, will doubtless feel less nostalgic and, likely, less convinced that the way forward is the way backward. Yet, it would be a mistake, whether one wants to go backwards or forwards, to ignore Gilson. Undoubtedly, he would have rejected so simple-minded a dichotomy and given historically and philosophically overriding reasons to do so. If for that reason alone, one can happily welcome this inaugural issue of the promised Gilson series.
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