Etienne Gilson: God and Philosophy

God and Philosophy (Paperback, 2) - Etienne Gilson/Yale Univ Pr

Foreword by Jaroslav Pelikan
PREFACE
I. God and Greek Philosophy
II. God and Christian Philosophy
III. God and Modern Philosophy
IV. God and Contemporary Thought

 

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FOREWORD

ETIENNE GILSON (1884-1978) was a magisterial scholar, perhaps a slightly old fashioned one, but in the grand manner; and, as the vernacular saying goes, "They don't make them like that any more." He was capable of a kind of close reading and a philological explication de texte, especially of a Latin text, that could, for example, parse in various footnotes Augustine's use of such terms as reatus or memoria almost as though he were writing a lexicon entry rather than a philosophical mono graph. Alternately, he could, and did several times, notably in his History of Christian Philos ophy in the Middle Ages (1955), present a full length connected narrative of the history of medieval thought during the millennium between Augustine of Hippo and Nicholas of Cusa, largely avoiding a triumphalist or Whig interpretation and supplying a surprisingly small number of hints about his own identification with the thirteenth century of Thomas Aquinas as the golden age of that millennium. As if to prove that same fairness of mind in yet another context, he could also undertake, while a Ger man prisoner of war, a remarkably comprehensive and balanced monograph, eventually pub lished in 1924, on the thought of the friendly opponent of Thomas Aquinas, the Franciscan theologian Bonaventure-who died in 1274, the same year as Thomas-or could even publish, in 1952, a seven-hundred-page study of one of Thomas's most severe medieval critics, John Duns Scotus (which he anticipates in a footnote on page 69 of this book)-and, in 1938, a tender and deeply touching account of the tragic love of Heloise and Abélard and its philosophical (and other) consequences. 

But in addition to all these scholarly genres, he also paused several times in his literary career, often on the occasion of a named lectureship at some university in Europe, Canada, or the United States, for systematic reflections and summary formulations on major themes and problems. One of my favorites in that genre, a book to which his friend, Professor Richard P. McKeon of the University of Chica go, first called my attention when I was a graduate student in the mid-1940s, were his William James Lectures at Harvard in 1936-37, The Unity of Philosophical Experience, which were obviously intended to be a response to the enormously influential Gifford Lectures of William James, Varieties of Religious Experience. It is to that style of doing philosophy that we also owe God and Philosophy, which came out of the Mahlon Powell Lectures on Philosophy that he delivered at Indiana University in 1939-40. In a series of four chapters organized chrono logically, he leads us through the development of the philosophical doctrines of God, always with the caveat that for Christian revelation and Christian faith the question of the existence of God is decided not chiefly by the functioning of reason but by the divine initiative and illumination, because "taken in itself, Christianity was not a philosophy." I like to quote from Werner Jaeger the reminder, which Gilson does not quote but with which he clearly sympathizes, that "the Greek spirit reached its highest religious development, not in the cults of the gods ... but chiefly in philosophy, assisted by the Greek gift for constructing systematic theories of the universe." Therefore the reader will do well in reviewing these chapters of God and Philosophy to read the first, on "God and Greek Philosophy," with special care, because it is here that the foundation is laid for most of what follows, including the critiques of modern philosophy and of contemporary thought. The historical sweep is breathtaking, the one-liners arresting, and the style, both intellectual and literary, is altogether engaging. 

As this book shows yet again, Gilson was, perhaps above all, a philosopher who─at time when so many of his philosophical colleagues particularly in the English-speaking world seemed to him to have undergone a frontal lobotomy as part of their graduate training─followed the otherwise contrasting models of Aristotle and of G. W. F. Hegel by carrying on his philosophical discourse as an ongoing conversation with the entire history of Western philosophy. Without, as far as I know, quoting Samuel Taylor Coleridge's celebrated commendation of "the suspension of disbelief" that constitutes the essence of poetic faith as well as a methodological technique for the history of ideas, he was able, by a powerful combination of imagination with intellect, to enter into the thought world and the philosophical presuppositions of thinkers with whom he disagreed in a fundamental way, and to recognize the totality of a system rather than this or that individual thesis of the system. For he was convinced, as he said in an interview with Frédéric Lefevre, that "the actual philosophy of a Descartes, a St. Thomas, or a St. Bonaventure is always a system of theses in which each thesis, taken in isolation, would destroy the equilibrium of the doctrine if the thesis were left to develop on its own account." That capacity for understanding makes it all the more poignant that although he did not have the linguistic equipment to undertake the assignment─as, alas, I do not have, either─be knew that our histories of medieval philosophy and science will remain seriously truncated until we learn to read, in their own languages and on their own terms, Malmonides and the other Jewish philosophers, and above all Averroes and other Arabic philosophers. Here in God and Philosophy that historical seriousness required an engagement, not, as might superficially have been expected, with the usual array of the "God slayers" of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud, plus of course Friedrich Nietzsche), but especially with Kant and his critiques; for as Gilson says, "the present-day position of the problem of God is wholly dominated by the thought of Immanuel Kant and of Auguste Comte," so that if Kant was right, much of the enterprise in these chapters is an exercise in futility. 

That habit of referring philosophical points to their historical expressions became, here in the introduction to God and Philosophy, the occasion for one of the most notable pieces of intellectual autobiography anywhere in Étienne Gilson's writings. (Although he was often urged by his colleagues and students to do so, he never wrote a full-length autobiography or memoirs as such.) From this introduction we learn the origins of what his biographer, Father Lawrence K. Shook, once called his lifelong "soft spot" for Henri Bergson, who had been his teacher and continued to be, as he says here with deep feeling, "the genius whose lectures still remain in my memory as so many hours of intellectual transfiguration... the only living master in philosophy I have ever had," even though he spent much of that lifetime distancing himself and his readers from some of the central implications of Bergson's élan vital. But we are also reminded of how, in the latter part of the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth century, the teaching of the history of philosophy, in a France that may have been postrevolutionary in its political and intellectual life but was still identifiably Roman Catholic in its spirituality, was able to leap with utter insouciance from the ancient to the modern period, without (as he tells us) even a mention of Thomas Aquinas. After Gilson, it has probably become impossible for any professor of the history of philosophy ever to get away with that again! 

As the very title of this book suggests, Gilson also set himself apart from many of his philosophical contemporaries-he was born twelve years after Bertrand Russell-by another and even more fundamental tendency: his preoccupation with what another deceptively modest book published by Yale University Press identified as The Problem of God Yesterday and Today (by John Courtney Murray, S.J., 1964). With various self-deprecatory formulas that I have heard him use on more than one occasion, Gilson used to explain, even when he did not have to do so, that he was "only" a philosopher, not a theologian. His delightful little book Dante et la philosophie (1939) was a critique of facile efforts by various Neo-Thomists to make Dante Alighieri into a "theologian," and a Thomistic theologian at that. And here in God and Philosophy he insisted: "The fact that some scholars eliminate god from texts where god is, does not authorize us to put god in texts where god is not." But he also complained no less strongly that, as he put it in a formulation that I have used to good advantage several times "during the past hundred years the general tendency among historians of medieval thought seems to have been to imagine the middle ages as peopled by philosophers rather than theologians," a situation that he, as a philosopher and a historian of philosophy, was dedicated to correcting. And in a letter to mon cher Tony, his dear friend Anton C. Pegis, editor of The Basic Writings of Thomas Aquinas in two stout volumes as well as of the compact edition of Thomas Aquinas in the Modern Library and of A Gilson Reader (1957), he wrote that it had become necessary, after stressing the technical autonomy of medieval philosophy for so long, to reemphasize the role of theology in Thomas Aquinas. 

A personal word from me will not, I trust, be seen as malapropos, but as a kind of credential in conclusion. I never sat in Professor Gilson's classroom, though as a junior partner I did share various conference platforms and symposium volumes with him, so that I could be called, I suppose, more a groupie than his student. Nevertheless, the combination I have described, of close attention to primary sources with a quest for intellectual leitmotivs and themes, and the various literary formats he employed for articulating it, did create a pattern of scholarship that I have emulated in my work, sometimes perhaps even unconsciously. That was why Father Shook who had been Gilson's good friend and who was mine, honored me by soliciting my detailed critical comments on successive drafts of the manuscript of his biography, published in 1984, and why Margaret McGrath inscribed a copy of her Etienne Gilson: A Bibliography: "To Jaroslav Pelikan, Gilsoniste incomparable." As it turned out, I have been privileged to follow Etienne Gilson in several major lectureships here and abroad. The emulation became evident most of all when I presented my Gifford Lectures on Christianity and Classical Culture at the University of Aberdeen in 1992-93, where he had given his Gifford Lectures, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, in 1931: as I said in the introductory lecture, I was trying to do for the history of "natural theology" (a term I dislike, as did Gilson) in proto-Byzantine Eastern Christian thought something analogous to what he had done for the medieval Latin West. The echo was much less audible, but the awareness of an apostolic succession was no less profound, when in 1987 I gave the Andrew W. Melon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art, Imago Del: The Byzantine Apologia for Icons, following his Mellon Lectures for 1955, Painting and Reality. The request to deliver the Richard Lectures at the University of Virginia in 1984 provided me with the splendid opportunity, not only to follow in the train of Gilson's Richard Lectures there, but even to dedicate The Mystery of Continuity: Time and History, Memory and Eternity in the Thought of Saint Augustine: "For the centenary of the birth of Étienne Gilson (1884-1978), Richard Lecturer for 1937." And I was, I am told by my colleagues in Canada, the first scholar to be invited twice to present the celebratory Étienne Gilson Memorial Lecture at his beloved Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, in 1985 (under the Gilsonesque title The Spirit of Mediaeval Theology), and then again in 1998, once more borrowing the title from one of his works: Doctrinal History and Its Interpretation. 

With this Foreword, then, I hope I have been able to fashion a fitting memorial wreath expressing my personal and scholarly gratitude for what the work of Étienne Gilson has meant to me for more than half a century, and to commend to yet another generation of seekers and students this deeply earnest and yet wistfully gentle little essay on the most important (and often, at least nowadays, the most neglected) of all metaphysical-and existential-questions.

Jaroslav Pelikan