- "...Gilson makes his own the
position of Kant that existence is not a predicate... Gilson
wrote...'Being,' Kant says 'is evidently not a predicate or a concept
of something that can be added to a thing'... What is the
Thomististicity of Gilson's claim..."
"... [W]hat he
[Gilson] is attributing to Thomas
is not found in Thomas... 'No Thomist,' Gilson concedes, 'aiming to
express it, should write that existence (esse) is not known by a
concept.' Coming from a historian [Gilson] who has been so severe on
other interpreters of Thomas [such as
Cajetan and Garrigou-Lagrange], it is somewhat disarming to be told that
'historically speaking, our [Gilson's] formulas are inaccurate' and
that he should have made clear that he was not
using the language of Saint Thomas." - Thomist Ralph McInerny, "praeambula fidei: Thomism and
the God of the Philosophers"
- "Father
Wojtyla lived at the Belgian college in Rome and the center for...
Transcendental Thomism... so called because its approach to the thought
of St. Thomas is influenced by the transcendental system of philosophy
of Immanuel Kant..."
" ... After earning a second doctorate with a thesis on the ethics
of the [Kantian] phenomenologist Max Scheler, Father Wojtyla was appointed in
1954 to the philosophy department of the Catholic University of Lublin..." [https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=8105]
Scholar
Douglas Flippen gives an exact time when Wojtyla (the future Pope John Paul II) started thinking that Kantian
subjectivistic philosophy became possibly as important as Thomism. He thought that
Scheler's Kantian thought could make up for "a certain lack in the approach of " Thomism. The supposedly solid Thomist Etienne Gilson so-called "historic or existential
Thomis[m]," it appears, may have helped turned him towards Kant through Scheler:
"It seems likely that at this time Father Wojtyla would have become more
aware of different approaches to the thought of St. Thomas. The reason
for this is not only the fact that he was studying at the Angelicum with
Father Garrigou-Lagrange, called a traditionalist Thomist for his
approach to Thomas through the tradition of the commentaries of Cajetan
and John of St. Thomas, but also because Jacques Maritain and Etienne
Gilson, the two most famous [supposed] Thomists of the twentieth century, had been
active in promoting the thought of Thomas since the 1920s, and this
would hardly have escaped notice at the Angelicum. Both Gilson and
Maritain, but especially Gilson, could be called historic or existential
Thomists because of their interest in recovering the authentic thought
of Thomas and because of their conviction that the historic thought of
Thomas centered itself on the act of existing as being at the heart of
reality..."
"... Father, and then Bishop, Wojtyla lectured at Lublin from 1954 until
1961. In this period of time his understanding and appreciation of the
metaphysical approach of St. Thomas increased. This was due not only to
his own continuing work on St. Thomas, but also to his interaction with a
colleague named Stefan Swiezawski. As George Weigel notes in his
biography of John Paul II, "Through faculty colleagues at KUL, and
especially Stefan Swiezawski, Wojtyla had his first serious encounter
with Etienne Gilson's historical rereading of Thomas Aquinas and with
Jacques Maritain's modern Thomistic reading of Catholic social ethics."8
During this period, Father Wojtyla published a number of essays, many
of them taking into account the thought of St. Thomas and comparing it
favorably with modern thinkers. And yet there is a change of tone in his
treatment of the thought of St. Thomas during this period. In the
beginning, his praise of Thomas seems unqualified. Toward the end we
find criticisms of a certain lack in the approach of Thomas and an
emphasis on a positive contribution coming from the phenomenological
movement. [Was John Paul II a Thomist or a Phenomenologist?: https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=8105] - Catholic Monitor
In my opinion, one of intellectual giants in the Catholic Church in the United States is philosopher Edward Feser.
I have seen Feser totally destroy, with a devastating intellectual knock
out Mark Shea (which is pretty easy), theologian Massimo Faggioli (a
bit harder) and on YouTube win an impressive victory over a very
intelligent Atheist scholar.
Feser apparently affirms Thomist Ralph McInerny's scholarship which shows the wrongheadedness of the seemingly dishonest Etienne Gilson’s endorsement Pope John Paul II's collaborator Henri de Lubac who the pope honored by making him into a cardinal after Vatican II.
The deceptive Gilson who is called by many "the chief scholar of Aquinas in the 20th century" not only apparently mislead
John Paul II, but most of the orthodox conservatives (even seemingly
some traditionalists) Catholics to accept the equally dishonest or simply poor scholar Henri de Lubac who made the false claim that Thomas Aquinas didn't make a distinction between nature and the supernatural grace.
As
one reads the scholar McInerny's "praeambula fidei" it is obvious that
he considers Gilson a real scholar who was dishonest in his discourses
on Cajetan and Aquinas while he doesn't, it seems, appear to consider de Lubac "orthodox" or much of a scholar:
"'Supernatural'
brought de Lubac... silenced... eventually De Lubac learned that it had
been other Jesuits, not Dominicans, who had questioned the the
orthodoxy of his views... If de Lubac got Cajetan's reading of St.
Thomas wrong, what is to be said of De Lubac's own understanding of
Thomas." ("praeambula fidei," Pages 70, 84)
The point is, as
McInerny shows in his book, that Gilson and de Lubac were a team who
worked to discredit Cajetan and ultimately St. Thomas' real teachings.
The poor scholar de Lubac needed Gilson's reputation as a honest
scholar to cover for his "question[able]... orthodoxy" and dishonest or
poor scholarship. [https://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2020/09/was-pope-john-paul-ii-thomist-or.html]
It can be argued that part of what the nouvelle
theologian de Lubac's teaching has done is replace the infallible
teachings of the Church with Kantian teaching in which all human experience
(pagan, heretical, mundane, etc...) is equal to the redemption, grace
and teachings given to us by Jesus Christ's Incarnation, Passion and
Resurrection as taught and administered through the Sacraments by the Church He established:
"The
rejection of the proportionate human nature separate de Lubac more
decisively from St. Thomas than anything else, doubtless because this
rejection is at the basis of his thought... Grace, as the words
suggests, is gratuitous, unowed, above and beyond what our nature is
naturally ordered to. The supernatural, as the word suggests, is added
onto natural... In de Lubac's account... [it] is almost as if for him
the supernatural replaces the natural." ( "praeambula fidei," Pages
85-86)
Below, Feser seemingly affirms McInerny's scholarship against the Gilson/de Lubac philosophy which leads to the "fideistic,
subjectivist Christian who would dismiss the atheist’s demand that faith
be given an objective, rational defense, and who thereby makes of
Christianity a laughingstock":
Related
to this is Etienne Gilson’s tendency to deemphasize the Aristotelian
core of Aquinas’s system and to present it instead as a distinctively
“Christian philosophy.” As Ralph McInerny argued in Praeambula Fidei: Thomism and the God of the Philosophers,
Gilson’s position, like de Lubac’s, threatens to undermine the
traditional Thomistic view that philosophy must be clearly distinguished
from theology and can arrive at knowledge of God apart from
revelation. Such views thereby “unwittingly [erode] the notion of
praeambula fidei” and “lead us along paths that end in something akin to
fideism” (p. ix).
McInerny’s book, along with other recent works like Lawrence Feingold’s The Natural Desire to See God according to St. Thomas Aquinas and His Interpreters and Steven A. Long’s Natura Pura,
mark a long-overdue recovery within mainstream Catholic thought of an
understanding of nature and grace that was once common coin, and apart
from which the possibility of natural theology and natural law cannot
properly be understood. Nor, I would say, can other crucial matters
properly be understood apart from it (such as original sin, as I argue
in the post linked to above). The blurring of the natural and the
supernatural may also lie behind a tendency in some contemporary
Catholic writing to overemphasize the distinctively theological aspects
of some moral issues. For example, an exposition of traditional sexual
morality that appeals primarily to the Book of Genesis, the analogy of
Christ’s love for the Church, or the relationship between the Persons of
the Trinity may seem more profound than an appeal to (say) the natural
end of our sexual faculties. But the result of such a lopsided
theological emphasis is that to the non-believer, Catholic morality can
(again to use Bruce Charlton’s words) falsely “seem to rely on diktat of
scripture and the Church” and thus appeal only to the relatively “tiny,
shrinking realm” of those willing to accept such diktat.
It will fail adequately to explain to those who do not already accept
the biblical presuppositions of Pope John Paul II’s “theology of the
body” or of a “covenant theology of human sexuality,” their merits
notwithstanding, exactly how Catholic teaching is rationally
grounded in human nature rather than in arbitrary divine or
ecclesiastical command. Grace doesn’t replace nature but builds on it;
and an account which heavily emphasizes the former over the latter is
bound to seem ungrounded.
The late pope himself realized this, whether or not all of his expositors do. In Memory and Identity he says:
If
we wish to speak rationally about good and evil, we have to return to
Saint Thomas Aquinas, that is, to the philosophy of being [i.e.
traditional metaphysics]. With the phenomenological method, for
example, we can study experiences of morality, religion, or simply what
it is to be human, and draw from them a significant enrichment of our
knowledge. Yet we must not forget that all these analyses implicitly
presuppose the reality of the Absolute Being and also the reality of
being human, that is, being a creature. If we do not set out from such
“realist” presuppositions, we end up in a vacuum. (p. 12)
There
are also signs [today] of a resurgence of fideism, which fails to
recognize the importance of rational knowledge and philosophical
discourse for the understanding of faith, indeed for the very
possibility of belief in God. One currently widespread symptom of this
fideistic tendency is a “biblicism” which tends to make the reading and
exegesis of Sacred Scripture the sole criterion of truth…
Other
modes of latent fideism appear in the scant consideration accorded to
speculative theology, and in disdain for the classical philosophy from
which the terms of both the understanding of faith and the actual
formulation of dogma have been drawn. My revered Predecessor Pope Pius
XII warned against such neglect of the philosophical tradition and
against abandonment of the traditional terminology.
And the Catechism promulgated by Pope John Paul II, citing Pius XII, affirmed that:
human
reason is, strictly speaking, truly capable by its own natural power
and light of attaining to a true and certain knowledge of the one
personal God, who watches over and controls the world by his providence,
and of the natural law written in our hearts by the Creator… (par 37)
There
is a reason why the first Vatican Council, while insisting that divine
revelation teaches us things that cannot be known by natural reason
alone, also taught that:
The
same Holy mother Church holds and teaches that God, the source and end
of all things, can be known with certainty from the consideration of
created things, by the natural power of human reason…
and
Not
only can faith and reason never be at odds with one another but they
mutually support each other, for on the one hand right reason
established the foundations of the faith and, illuminated by its light,
develops the science of divine things…
and
If
anyone says that the one, true God, our creator and lord, cannot be
known with certainty from the things that have been made, by the natural
light of human reason: let him be anathema.
and
If
anyone says that divine revelation cannot be made credible by external
signs, and that therefore men and women ought to be moved to faith only
by each one's internal experience or private inspiration: let him be
anathema.
and
If
anyone says… that miracles can never be known with certainty, nor can
the divine origin of the Christian religion be proved from them: let him
be anathema.
The
point of such anathemas is not to settle by fiat the question of
whether God exists or whether miracles have actually occurred;
obviously, a skeptic will be moved, if at all, only by being given
actual arguments for these claims, not by the mere insistence that there
are such arguments. The anathemas are directed at the fideistic,
subjectivist Christian who would dismiss the atheist’s demand that faith
be given an objective, rational defense, and who thereby makes of
Christianity a laughingstock. [http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/01/point-of-contact.html?m=1]
Pray an Our Father now for the
restoration of the Mass and the Church as well as for the Triumph of the
Kingdom of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
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