So What's New About Scholasticism?: How Neo-Thomism Helped Shape the Twentieth Century 9783110588255, 9783110586282

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So What’s New About Scholasticism?

So What’s New About Scholasticism? How Neo-Thomism Helped Shape the Twentieth Century Edited by Rajesh Heynickx and Stéphane Symons Assisted by Samuel O’Connor Perks

ISBN 978-3-11-058628-2 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-058825-5 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-058658-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018937271 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com.

SCHOLASTICISM This is the earth’s most ancient dialogue: the rhetoric of water explodes on the dogma of stone. But the invisible outcome is known only to the poet. He dips his pen in the rocks and writes on a tablet of foam. Cees Nooteboom, SCHOLASTICISM, in: Light Everywhere: Selected Poems, transl. David Colmer, Chicago 2014.

To say that Thomas was great, that he was a revolutionary, it is necessary to understand in what sense he was one. For, though no one can say he was a reactionary, he is stil a man who raised a construction so solid that no subsequent revolutionary has been able to shake it from within – and the most that could be done to it, from Descartes to Hegel to Marx and to Teilhard de Chardin, was to speak of it “from outside.” Umberto Eco, “In Praise of Thomas Aquinas,” in: The Wilson Quarterly, X/4 (1986): 79.

Acknowledgments This volume started from the international workshop ‘Reassessing a Thought System. Ideas on Twentieth Century Neo-Thomism’ held at KADOC-KU Leuven (Belgium) on June 29 & 30, 2015. For the organization of this event, three units of the KU Leuven did join forces: KADOC (Documentation and Research Center on Religion Culture and Society), the Institute of Philosophy and the Department of Architecture. Financial support was provided by: the Research Fund KU Leuven (OT project ‘Apocryphal and Apostolic Modernism’), the Joseph Van de Wiele Fund, the Albert Dondeyne Fund and the KU Leuven Research Lab MDRN. After the workshop, Rajesh Heynickx and Stéphane Symons selected and corrected the papers and also invited new contributions. They want to thank Elke Couchez, Samuel O’Connor Perks, Dirk de Geest, Jan De Maeyer, Bart Raymaekers and Kaat Wils for their invaluable advice, surprising tips and practical support.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110588255-001

Table of Contents Rajesh Heynickx and Stéphane Symons Into Neo-Thomism: Reading the Fabric of an Intellectual Movement

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Part I Shaping A New Society James Chappel The Thomist Debate over Inequality and Property Rights in Depression-Era 21 Europe Wim Weymans Religion, human rights and democracy in post-1940 France in theory and practice: from Maritain’s Thomism to Vignaux’s secular realism 39 Rajesh Heynickx Epistemological Tracks: On Religion, Words, and Buildings in 1950’s Belgium 59 John Carter Wood When Personalism Met Planning: Jacques Maritain and a British Christian Intellectual Circle, 1937 – 1949 77

Part II. Encountering Phenomenology, Existentialism, and Aesthetics Edward Baring Neo-Scholasticism, Phenomenology, and the Problem of Conversion Dries Bosschaert A Great Deal of Controversy? A Case Study of Dondeyne, Grégoire, and Moeller Integrating Phenomenology and Existentialism in Louvain Neo-Thomism 131 Adi Efal-Lautenschläger Gilson’s Poietics 159

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Part III. Reconciling Science and Religion Sigrid Leyssen and Annette Mülberger Psychology from a Neo-Thomist Perspective. The Louvain-Madrid Connection. 181 Jaume Navarro Science contra Science. The Battle for Legitimate Knowledge in the Spanish 205 Catholic Journals in the Early Twentieth Century

Part IV. Mediating Tradition Christopher S. Morrissey The Analogy of Marshall McLuhan

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Herman Paul Vetera Novis Augere: Neo-Scholastic Philosophers and Their Concepts of Tradition 255 Karim Schelkens Thomas Aquinas or John Henry Newman? The Intellectual Itinerary of 281 Johannes Willebrands About the Authors Index of Persons

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Picture of the inside of the Centro Automzione Analisi Linguistic (CAAL), led by Roberto Busa. The picture was taken on June 29, 1967.

The images shown here are kindly made available under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC license by permission of CIRCSE Research Centre, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy. For further information, or to request permission for reuse, please contact Marco Passarotti, on [email protected], or by post: Largo Gemelli 1, 20123 Milan, Italy

Rajesh Heynickx and Stéphane Symons

Into Neo-Thomism: Reading the Fabric of an Intellectual Movement June 29, 1967. Gallarate, Italy. Stiff paper cards, magnetic tapes, silver-green colored machines, ladies in white dustcoats: these elements enacted the first mechanically generated textual oeuvre. From the early 1950s on, 11 million words were processed in this former textile factory. Put together, these are the words that constitute the texts of a Saint who has been dead for 7 centuries: the Dominican friar Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274), an influential philosopher, theologian, and jurist. Remarkably enough, this endeavor started from one single person’s quest. At the end of the 1940s, the Jesuit Roberto Busa wanted to study the vocabulary coined by Aquinas to express the topic of interiority. But how to perform a text search? A 1949 trip to New York offered a solution. Busa was able to persuade Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM, to sponsor the recording of Aquinas’s work in a format that would be readable by a machine. The project lasted about 30 years, and eventually lead in the 1970s to the 56 printed volumes of the Index Thomisticus which was put online in 2005. The mastering of Aquinas’s massive corpus, so goes the founding myth, indicated the birth of digital humanities. Busa has even been credited for being the inventor of hypertext.¹ Notwithstanding that reputation within the field of media archeology, the pioneering Gallarate data storage was rooted in a very tactile encounter with the work of the Doctor Angelicus. The female collaborators who manually turned Aquinas’ words into punch cards, that is, the presence or absence of holes in paper cards – see the cover of this book –, were indispensable. This tactility reminds us of the thin line that separates the manual from the intellectual. The mastering of texts, even in our present digital age, requires vibrant hands. Subsequently, the workers in Busa’s manufactory have something in common with the twentieth century theologians, philosophers, scientists, literators, politicians and artists who are studied in the present volume. All of them have touched Thomas’s textual fabric. Directed by various mindsets, they have turned the many pages on which Aquinas’s words, or a derivate of them, were noted or printed. In a critical and even reluctant way or, on the contrary, zealous in their efforts to reform society, they have talked and written about Aquinas. It was this mixed group of lovers and haters that, from the late nineteenth century onwards,  For a critical view on all that: Jones, Steve E., Roberto Busa, S.J. and the Emergence of Humanities Computing, London 2016. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110588255-002

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would give birth to the phenomenon known as Neo-Thomism, the revival of the study of the principles and methodology of Aquinas. It is definitely tempting to describe Busa’s project as a factory and, more specifically, to interpret his data-processing as a root metaphor of the Thomistic revival in the twentieth century. Firstly, in the same way as Busa’s factory converted Aquinas’ oeuvre into punch cards, all thinkers appearing in this volume rearranged and thus somehow repackaged Thomas’ thoughts. They have all, so to speak, punched Thomas. Secondly, in the same way as Busa was considering the need to (re)assemble the thoughts of one man, told to have mastered all knowledge available in his own time, many thinkers studied in this volume were either hunting for a cultural synthesis or reflecting on the validity of such a search. When considering both these parallels, the goal of this volume lights up: it will offer insight in a translatio studiorum by focusing on how certain thought factories (universities, intellectual circles, editorial boards, individuals) and their assembly lines (journal articles, brochures, monographical studies) reproduced or rejected Aquinas’ ideas during the twentieth century. Such ambition, all authors in this volume claim, cannot be restricted to a quick mapping of an intellectual infrastructure, nor to a simple inventory of the intellectual backgrounds of those who loved or hated Aquinas. Most of all, it demands a secure analysis of how textual fabrics, some bearing a Neo-Thomistic trademark, others explicitly contesting such a recognizable sign, responded to a changing world. But, the question remains: how to do that and why has it not yet been done?

I Dissecting a Thought System In his 1985 essay Postmortem of a Rebirth: the Catholic Intellectual Renaissance, James Hitchcock explained how twentieth century Neo-Thomism provided the program for a bold Catholic intellectuality. Indeed, he admitted, the appropriation of the thirteenth century theologian Thomas Aquinas for modern use dated essentially from the authoritative exhortations of Pope Leo XIII. With the Encyclical Aeterni Patris, issued on August 4, 1879, Pope Leo had given support to NeoThomist or Neo-Scholastic philosophy,² as the foundation for a theology envi Scholasticism was a method of critical thought which dominated teaching by the academics (“scholastics”, or “schoolmen”) of medieval universities in Europe from about 1100 to 1700. Thomas Aquinas was active in this tradition. Neo-Thomists copied Scholasticism’s rationalized interpretation of religious belief. They used the same modes of argumentation – expositive, deductive, inductive, axiomatic, analogical, and more. Therefore, Neo-Scholasticism is also known as

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sioning an objective and immutable order in a post-Enlightenment world. Yet, Hitchcock argued, the dream of an invincible bulwark of faith that was enshrined in this Magna Charta of Neo-Thomism, had not obliterated intellectual flexibility. During the following century, numerous, often converted intellectuals had (in)directly relied on it when attempting to survive in “the flux of change.” While doing so, Neo-Thomism’s agenda had been realized: tailoring an old message to the modern world in order to counter the corrosive effects of modernity. And, so Hitchkock wondered, living in an age of total challenge, shouldn’t that be the ideal of every modern (Catholic) intellectual?³ The autopsy of Neo-Thomism undertaken by Hitchkock, resulting in a pathology report with the title ‘emancipation through restoration,’ aptly illustrates how historiography can easily be dominated and molded by a compelling narrative. Similar to how the secularization theory (probably one of the most powerful master narratives in history⁴) has been formative for the whole field of religious studies, the history of twentieth century Neo-Thomism has been anchored in a series of all too narrow portrayals. For a one-dimensional status has largely been rendered on this system of thought on account of the connections between methods of argument striking the balance between reason and faith, and a restorative pope, docile Catholic students or tribal wars in Neo-Scholastic periodicals. It has not been sufficiently taken into account that Neo-Thomism also became part of contingent social contexts and varying intellectual domains. Consequently, the exact way in which it tried to resolve disparities, to annul contradictions, and to reconcile incongruent, new developments, has been largely eclipsed from view. Neo-Thomism’s operative mechanism ended up being concealed rather than revealed. This volume will break with that dominant tendency. Instead of sewing the body of Neo-Thomism back together after an external, quick examination of its occurrence, popularity or the cause and manner of its (presumed) death as Hitchkock and others did,⁵ it will develop an outspoken internal dissection. Neo-Scholastic Thomism. See on this development: Peitz, Detlef, Die Anfänge der Neuscholastik in Deutschland und Italien (1818 – 1870), Bonn 2006.  Hitchcock, James, “Postmortem on a rebirth: The Catholic Intellectual Renaissance” in: id., Years of Crisis: Collected Essays, 1970 – 1983, ed. James Hitchcock, San Francisco 1985, 203 – 216.  Weidner, Daniel, “The Rhetoric of Secularization,” in: New German Critique, 41/1 (2014): 1– 31. This is also discussed in the introductory chapter of: Chapman, Alister/Coffey, John/Gregory, Brad S., Seeing Things Their Way. Intellectual History and the Return of Religion, Notre Dame 2009.  For example: van Melsen, A.G.M., “Wat maakt het neothomisme zo attractief? Beschouwingen over universaliteit, systematiek en inzichtelijkheid” in: De wijsgerige Thomas. Terugblik op het Neothomisme, Bernard Delgauw, Baarn 1984, 28 – 48.

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All contributing authors will concentrate on the conceptual tissue of ‘the NeoThomistic body’ and how it was shaped and became reshaped over time. How were Neo-Thomist concepts and models, with some whittling and squeezing, made fit for Christian doctrine? Which theoretical assumptions and intellectual norms played a role in that process? And is it correct, as the Italian thinker Guido Morpurgo-Tagliabue contended, to state that Neo-Thomist concepts were deliberately kept “generic and ambiguous” to generate multiple meanings and to facilitate accordance with various ontological systems?⁶ Answering these types of questions demands a thorough understanding of the “micrologics”⁷ of texts in which Neo-Thomist terms and models were launched and gradually modified. Yet, it would be wrong to focus solely on the circulation and adaptation of concepts among those who propagated it as the most suitable set of ideas. There was also, as mentioned earlier, another “interpretative community”⁸ at work in the history of Neo-Thomism, one formed by those fiercely contesting its schematic nature and all-subsuming worldview. “Turning back the wheel of worldhistory,” that was what Neo-Thomism tried to do, the German philosopher Rudolf Eucken (and with him many others) declared at the turn of the twentieth century.⁹ However, the persistent comment on Neo-Thomism’s “static conception of philosophical truth,”¹⁰ could never extirpate all sympathy. Even for the French philosopher Maurice Blondel, renowned for disliking the rigidly scholastic cast of mind that cramped the Catholic theology of his day, Aquinas was a source of inspiration. As he wrote in a letter to his fellow-traveler Lucien Laberthonière in 1921: “I do not say that I owe a lot to St. Thomas, but he finally helped me to realize better just what to do and not to do. Although his way of thinking often

 Morpurgo-Tagliabue, Guido, L’esthétique contemporaine. Une enquête, transl. Marcelle Bourrette Serre, Milan 1960, 488.  This notion stands central in this tiny book: Verhoeven, Cornelis, Lof van de micrologie: een voetnoot bij Plato’s Politeia, Baarn 1982, 6 – 7.  A theoretical concept invented by Stanley Fish, denoting the fact that readings of a text are culturally constructed. Fish, Stanley, Is There a Text in This Class, New Haven 1980, 147– 174.  “das Rad der Weltgeschichte zurückdrehen” Eucken, Rudolf, Thomas von Aquino und Kant. Ein Kampf zweier Welten, Berlin 1901, 10 – 11 and 18.  Gény, Paul, “Scholastic philosophy and modern mentality” in: Present-day thinkers and the New Scholasticism. An international symposium, John S. Zybura, St. Louis et al 1926, 168. In 1926, this was already an old trope. See the critical comments on neo-Thomism listed up in: La Piana, George, “Recent Tendencies in Roman Catholic Theology,” in: The Harvard Theological Review, vol. 15/No. 3 (July 1922): 233 – 292.

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extremely irritates me, I admit that I also get from him some lightning stimulation.”¹¹ As it would be totally wrong to define Neo-Thomism as a parochial project of like-minded believers, it would be equally incorrect to consider it to be a homogeneous phenomenon. From its very beginning the “Rückgriff auf Scholastisches Erbe”¹² encompassed factions. The dividing question was as urgent as simple: how should one relate to Thomas’s texts? Those who stressed the importance of historical study of Thomas were portrayed as ‘paleo-Thomists’ by those who situated their engagement with Aquinas’ oeuvre in the context of contemporary, especially ideological agenda’s.¹³ And to make things even more complex: the latter camp also witnessed complex ramifications. For Emmanuel Mounier, the theologian and essayist who was the guiding spirit in the French personalist movement of the interwar period, the manifold possible meanings of being-aThomist were paramount. In a 1939 letter to his intimate friend Jacques Maritain, also a preeminent interpreter of Aquinas, he summed up the multiple prefixes Thomists could attach to: “We – how to say? – hemithomists, parathomists, propinquextrathomists.”¹⁴ Mounier’s self-irony was spot on. His remark that Thomists could be at the same time ‘at one side,’ ‘beyond’ or ‘nearby/out of’ Thomas, points at what Bernard McGinn has called the “contested varieties of Thomism in the twentieth century.”¹⁵ Pope Leo’s ambition to overcome intellectual fragmentation by uniting all Catholics under the umbrella of Neo-Thomism, never became a full reality during the twentieth century. Despite the rapid diffusion of standardized textbooks and journals, manuals and translations via a powerful network of seminars and

 “Je n’irai pas jusqu’à dire que je dois beaucoup à Saint Thomas, mais enfin il m’a aidé à mieux me rendre compte de ce qu’il ya à faire et à ne pas faire. Si très souvent sa forme de pensée m’irrite à l’extrème, j’avoue que je rencontre aussi chez lui des lumières et des stimulations.” Letter by Maurice Blondel to Lucien Laberthonière, august 9 1921. Published in: Tresmontant, Claude (ed.) Maurice Blondel. Lucien Laberthonnière. Correspondance Philosophique, Paris 1961, 296.  This is the title of the second volume of the following three volume history of Catholic philosophy: Coreth, Emerich/Neidl W.M./Pfligersdorffer G. (ed.), Christliche Philosophie im katholischen Denken des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, Graz et al. 1988.  For this term, one should look at the discussions gathered in: Janssens, E., Comment suivrons-nous Saint Thomas? Vrai Thomisme et faux Thomisme, Brussels et al. 1925.  Letter written by Emmanuel Mounier to Jacques Maritain, dating from 1939. Published in the following edited correspondance: Petit, Jacques (ed.), Jacques Maritain-Emmanuel Mounier (1929 – 1939), Paris 1973, p. 102.  McGinn, Bernard, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae. A Biography, Princeton et al. 2014, 186. Essential reading is chapter five of this study: ‘The rise and Fall of Neothomism.’

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universities, greater unity was often more far away than nearby. That is a remarkable thing. As the intellectual historian Ed Baring recently wrote: “Neo-Scholasticism is certainly unusual. Few other schools of thought in the modern period could reach its international reach, few defined themselves by the appeal to such a distant past, and few enjoyed the level of institutional support that the Catholic Church offered neo-scholasticism.” The archive of old texts the neoscholasticists capitalized on, Baring explains, only contained the possibility of a coherent whole. As these texts were never read or commented on in one and the same way everywhere, Neo-Thomism’s project of international intellectual exchange rooting in an old tradition, was condemned to face diverging interpretations causing inner contestation. ¹⁶

II Connecting the Dots When overseeing its internal fissures, and considering its amazing topicality – for Jacques Maritain Thomas was simply the all-around ‘apostle of modern times’¹⁷ –, marking Neo-Thomism as a free-floating and even empty signifier would probably be the easiest option. Trying to understand it as a bewildering, yet decipherable maze would form a more daring alternative. This volume opts for the latter. It will work a way out of the labyrinthine intellectual movement that Neo-Thomism was, by circling deeper into it. In the first place, this volume will concentrate on the purpose of ideas and arguments. That implies the development of a ‘why question’ focusing on actors, their agendas and (re)formulations. Secondly, this book will pay attention to how ideas and arguments were transferred. Which were the vehicles, namely artistic media or scientific disciplines, mobilized to spread (some version of) Aquinas’ words? The combination of these two perspectives will not result in a well-delineated history of the rise and decline of Neo-Thomism in the twentieth century – assuming it would be possible to write one anyway. What will arise is a sharper insight in a recalibration of what Nils Gilman once termed as the “macrohistorical quantum known as modernity.”¹⁸ As we will see, this recalibration was highly variegated: apart from a full or partial engagement with modern developments, attempts to reverse

 Baring, Edward, “Ideas on the Move: Context in Transnational Intellectual History,” in: Journal of the History of Ideas, LXXVII/4 (October 2016): 583.  Gottier, G., “Thomisme et modernité,” in: S. Bonino (ed.), Saint Thomas au XXe siècle, Paris 1995, 352– 361.  Gilman, Nils, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America, Baltimore 2003, 25.

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these same developments and, equally, explicit endeavors to contest them, will be analyzed. The first part of the book already brings together four different essays that bring to the surface that Neo-Thomism was in many ways more concerned with the future than with the past. For numerous influential intellectuals, the Neo-Thomist framework served as a crucial point of reference, not merely for the attempt to come to terms with an increasingly modern society, but also, and even, for the active quest for renewal and modernization. The first part of this book therefore starts with an expansion of the conceptual reach of Neo-Thomist thought beyond its epistemological and religious scope, exploring its relevance for the political, social and architectural endeavor to give shape to a world in rapid transition. In the first essay of this collection, “The Thomist Debate over Inequality and Property Rights in Depression-Era Europe,” James Chappel discovers, within the very heart of the return to the Summa, not only a fully fleshed out, social philosophy but even a social-political project with a distinctly anti-capitalist dimension. Analyzing the response to the economic crisis during the Depression era (1928 – 1931), Chappel zooms in on the work of thinkers like Sándor Horváth and Jacques Maritain and reconstructs both their plea in favor of a restriction of the right to poverty and their account of the moral obligation to distribute wealth. While some of these ideas are marked with a potentially revolutionary implication, each can be retraced to important conceptual distinctions in the Summa (such as the distinctions between property and use, law and love). Pitting this anti-capitalist rhetoric against defenders of capitalism such as Johannes Messner and Oswald von Nell-Breuning who take recourse of the very same religious source, Chappel thus casts light on a debate about property and modern economics that divided Neo-Thomist thought from within. In “Religion, human rights and democracy in post-1940 France in theory and practice: from Maritain’s Thomism to Vignaux’s secular realism,” Wim Weymans turns to the political repercussions of Neo-Thomist thought. Starting off with Jacques Maritain’s take on the relationship between politics, democracy and religion, Weymans examines how the appeal to modern ideals such as human rights and democracy could at the time be inspired by Thomistic, natural law and eternal, Christian values. In spite of the Church’s earlier defense of collective rather than individual rights, Maritain was able to reconcile a modern attitude vis-à-vis human rights with a pre-modern, religious and philosophical inspiration. Weymans compares Maritain’s Neo-Thomistic blend of religious and political thought with the perspective of the French Christian trade unionist Paul Vignaux who, as a student of Neo-Thomist scholar Etienne Gilson, was equally versed in medieval philosophy. Vignaux’s own attempt to find inspiration in religion for contempo-

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rary political issues was, however, much more cautionary than Maritain’s. Influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr’s stern warning against the sinful “pretension to knowledge” Vignaux combines a plea for political commitment with a criticism of self-righteousness and dogmatism. With the third contribution to this section, “Epistemological Tracks. On Religion, Words and Buildings in 1950’s Belgium,” Rajesh Heynickx dissects how in 1950’s Belgium, diverse aesthetic theories were developed to tackle the modernizing architecture of religious buildings. These theories tried to offer an operative intellectual language by indicating how to merge traditional values with modern architectural forms. In doing so, they were often essential for combining a rationalist functionalism with religious emotions. They enabled architects and intellectuals to absorb, ventilate and legitimize concepts and, by doing so, (in)directly shaped architectural practice. Heynickx focuses on the battle between two art philosophical paradigms mobilized to strengthen those theories, namely NeoThomism and phenomenology. An analysis of these conflicting modes of thought shows how form and meaning, emotion and religion became linked in the Belgian cultural field of the 1950’s. On the other hand, such analysis also demonstrates that although the opposition between ‘Left’ and ‘Right,’ ‘existentialists’ versus ‘Thomists’ really existed, architects and theorists could also defend an ‘open Thomism’ or become fascinated by ‘Christian existentialism,’ both based on an interplay of feeling and knowing. The growth of those hybrid theories, used to keep the relation between cognition and affectivity under the scope of the radar, reveals a lasting epistemological clash in Belgian philosophy. John Carter Wood’s text “When Personalism Met Planning: Jacques Maritain and a British Christian Intellectual Circle, 1937– 1949” looks into the influence of Maritain’s ideas about pluralism, personalism and a novel, secular but Christian society on a group of British church-organizers, intellectuals and publicists who went under the name of the Oldham group and were active from the late 1930s until the late 1940s. The connection with Neo-Thomism has often been an equivocal and ambiguous one, with intellectuals and policy-makers borrowing bits and pieces from a system of thought that they were not willing to adopt in its entirety. The members of the Oldham group, for instance, did not consider themselves as Thomists (in fact, the group was almost entirely protestant) but they exemplify the complexity of cultural exchange and interaction in that the impact of Maritain’s “true humanism” was both fundamental and selective (and at times even contradictory). In Maritain’s work, the Oldham group not only found a shared diagnosis of the dangers of amoral liberalism, shallow individualism and totalitarianism, but also a convincing solution that overcomes the unique emphasis on the individual.

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In the second section of the volume, we explore some of the many interactions between Neo-Thomism and other prominent philosophies and schools of thought of the Twentieth Century. Neo-Thomism, that is to say, not only fashioned an intellectual response to society’s changes and challenges but also entered into debate with some of the relatively new philosophical systems of thought, such as phenomenology or existentialism, that gave color to the intellectual climate of the Twentieth Century. In his essay “Neo-Scholasticism, Phenomenology, and the Problem of Conversion” Edward Baring investigates the reception of phenomenology by Neo-Thomist thought. In countries like France, Belgium, Italy and Spain, the Neo-Thomist reaction to the phenomenological study of the human faculties of experience was oftentimes a welcoming and supportive one. Charmed by phenomenology’s interest in intuition, the epistemology that underlies phenomenology came together with implications for religion and faith, thereby at times growing, as it were, into a conversion machine. Philosophers like Désiré Mercier, Joseph Geyser or Léon Noël played a pivotal role in the attempt to win over the analyses of Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900) for the Neo-Scholastic cause. With the publication of Husserl’s Ideas in 1913, however, the turn towards a transcendental idealism brought about an emphasis on the world-constituting powers of the ego, which was increasingly hard to reconcile with more traditional and strict accounts of Thomism. This turn towards subjectivity necessitated philosophers like Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain to problematize the link between phenomenology and Neo-Scholasticism while at the same time leaving open a space for more nuanced negotiations (René Kremer, Erich Przywara, Sofia Vanni Rovighi, Daniel Feuling). Dries Bosschaert’s contribution to his volume, “A Great Deal of Controversy? A Case Study of Dondeyne, Grégoire, and Moeller Integrating Phenomenology and Existentialism in Louvain Neo-Thomism” continues this argument and focuses on the “open” Neo-Thomism that was conceived in the Ecclesial Faculties of the University of Louvain. With the encyclical Humani Generis (1950), NeoThomism was once again confirmed as the solid frame of reference for all religious and moral matters. The critical remarks against existentialism and phenomenology that were included in Humani Generis, however, opened up the debate about the possibility to dissolve these more recent schools of thought from atheism and the dangerous type of epistemology they were frequently associated with. With case-studies that focus on the Louvain professors Albert Dondeyne, Franz Grégoire, and Charles Moeller, Bosschaert presents three different strategies of mediation between Neo-Thomism, existentialism and phenomenology. Dondeyne discovered existentialism and phenomenology as welcome additions to a Neo-Thomism that was in need of self-renewal because it assisted in the recognition of the historicity of human subjectivity, the fight against relativism, and

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the attempt to overcome the duality between reason and irrationality. Grégoire’s interaction with phenomenology and existentialism, however, was a more careful one in that he emphasized that Neo-Thomism’s universalist and metaphysical underpinnings could not but result in tensions with the more recent account of human existence and experience. Still, even Grégoire was convinced that the phenomenological analysis of pre-reflexive intuition could, while not being a sufficient answer in itself, be a source of inspiration for the Neo-Thomist understanding of the human being’s lumen naturale. Charles Moeller, for his part, treated the recent waves of existentialist and phenomenological thought foremost as a cultural phenomenon that, through literature, painted an interesting view of the human condition of responsibility and fragility. The question that underlies Adi Efal-Lautenschläger’s contribution to this section, “Gilson’s Poietics,” is to what extent this famous Neo-Scholastic’s writings on art can be termed Thomistic, given that the Summa does not even include a systematic analysis of art and aesthetics to begin with. In pitting Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain’s philosophies of art against one another, Efal-Lautenschläger uncovers opposing views on realism, creation, art and, not at all insignificant to these debates, Henri Bergson’s L’évolution créatrice. More accurately labelled Neo-Aristotelian than Neo-Thomistic, Gilson’s views on art are nevertheless wedded to the overarching Neo-Scholastic framework of his overall philosophy, though not without thereby counterbalancing some the deeply religious presuppositions that underlie Maritain’s writings on art.

III A Newly Folded Tradition In the early decades of the Twentieth Century, Jacques Maritain was present at a lecture delivered by Einstein in the Sorbonne in Paris. He also wrote a study on Relativity. That reveals the Neo-Thomist desire to continue to engage with the most novel evolutions and recent discoveries in science. Of course, the post-medieval condition had opened up a gap between religion and modern science that necessitated Scholastic thought to reconsider its own epistemological status in the centuries that followed. In the third section of this volume, we bring together essays that reflect on three different cases in which Twentieth Century NeoThomism actively sought a conceptual discussion with modern science. While the Summa could at the time of its writing in a way even be considered a form of science, its adaptations in the Twentieth Century resulted in the urge for a more subtle and nuanced approach. Sigrid Leyssen and Annette Mülberger’s contribution to this volume, “Psychology from a Neo-Thomist Perspective: The Louvain-Madrid Connection,” con-

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siders the interaction between Neo-Thomism and modern psychology. Looking at the connection between Louvain and Madrid, two periods of increased contact are singled out, the first around 1900 and the second after the Spanish Civil War. Leyssen and Mülberger paint the picture of a smooth dialogue between Neo-Thomism and modern psychology on account of the Neo-Thomist distinction between empirical and rational psychology. In Louvain as well as in Madrid, Désiré Mercier, Marcelino Arnáiz or Juan Zaragüeta combine a rationalist and metaphysical foundation that was borrowed from Aristotle and Thomas with an appreciation of empirical data. This stand was capable of arguing against positivist and Kraussist tendencies within modern psychology and prepared the path for the experimental work of Catholic lay psychologists such as Albert Michotte, José Germain and Mariano Yela. While leaving behind the religious and metaphysical presuppositions of their predecessors, these thinkers stretched the domain of empirical research to such an extent that they could accommodate some of the main concerns of the Neo-Thomistic framework. In “Science contra Science: The Battle for Legitimate Knowledge in the Spanish Catholic Journals in the Early Twentieth Century,” Jaume Navarro extends the analysis of the Spanish context by shifting the focus on the response of Neo-Thomist intellectuals to the accusation that Catholicism would be inimical to modern science and progress. Taking two prominent, Jesuit journals, Razón y Fe and Ibérica, as points of departure, Navarro recovers the view of what true science was or had to be under the influence of Neo-Thomistic convictions. Razón y Fe, for instance, actively engaged with scientific discoveries such as radioactivity and atomism and oftentimes accepted the provisional nature of modern science, albeit while opposing it to the absolute truth of traditional (i. e., Scholastic) metaphysics. Ibérica’s tone was less apologetic in that it largely avoided overarching and far-reaching discussions, emphasizing instead the religious and patriotic contributions of the Jesuits and Christians at large to the national natural sciences, technology and industry. Still, Neo-Thomism’s involvement with the most novel types and forms of science not only lights up in outspoken missionary projects like the one conducted by Jesuits and Dominicans. It also surfaces where one would not expect it. In Christopher Morrissey’s article “The Analogy of Marshall McLuhan” the volume turns to one of the founders of media theory. Throughout his entire career, McLuhan’s thoughts about logic were indebted to Thomism. Morrissey zooms in on McLuhan’s concept of analogy and his criticism of the “realist” views of the Neo-Thomists of his day. McLuhan’s recourse to analogy was in his view closer to Thomas than Neo-Thomism itself and it prepared the groundwork for his idea that the laws of media can be considered as a “universal grammar.” Morrissey argues that McLuhan’s convictions about the existence of such a “universal

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grammar” ultimately rests on the Thomist idea that intellectual cognition can be traced back to its analogical origin in the senses. Laying out the remarkable influence of Thomas, John of Salisbury and Etienne Gilson, Morrissey reconstructs the Thomist framework behind McLuhan’s analysis of modern media and his argument that a kind of analogical thinking is required to understand the action of signs. As mentioned above, the revival of Thomism was launched in 1879 by Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris arguing that the true response to modern, secular society needed to be mediated through a careful revisiting of the writings of Thomas. This volume closes with two articles that pay close attention to the NeoThomist ambition to mediate tradition while keeping a sharp eye on the present and the future. Herman Paul’s “Vetera Novis Augere: Neo-Scholastic Philosophers and Their Concepts of Tradition” examines the oft-heard argument that Neo-Scholasticism lacks historical sensitivity on account of an over-emphasis on systematic and eternal truths. Singling out the case of the Institute of Philosophy at the KU Leuven, Paul argues that philosophers from Mercier to Van Steenberghen tried to avoid both an exaggerated form of historicity, as if the distance between past and present would be too large to still find inspiration in Thomist philosophy, and an exaggerated denial of historicity (as if traditional Thomism could simply be recovered in full). In Paul’s account, the Louvain philosophers framed this attitude through various conceptions of the notion of “tradition” thus salvaging it from dogmatism and static-mindedness and discovering it, instead, as a tool for a dynamic and innovative engagement with the past. In his text, “Thomas Aquinas or John Henry Newman? The Intellectual Itinerary of Johannes Willebrands,” Karim Schelkens describes the intellectual journey of the Dutch clergyman Johannes Willebrands (1909 – 2006) as an exemplification of the increased inability of Neo-Thomism to engage with lived, religious experience in a modernizing society. Caught between the modernist crisis and the renewals of Vatican II, Willebrands gradually moved away from the NeoScholastic framework in which he was brought up. Willebrands began reading Newman’s work before the start of his doctoral project, initially conceived as a Neo-Thomist refutation of Newman’s philosophical writings. Before long, however, Willebrands found himself in an intellectual impasse because he believed that Neo-Thomism could not sufficiently deal with the complex manner in which concrete individuals arrive at religious experiences. This ultimately led to a doctoral thesis that was deemed insufficiently loyal to the Neo-Thomist cause and hardly fit for publication. In the same way as Willebrands’s doctoral dissertation resulted from a set of shifting thought systems, the present volume entails a stratification of multiple layers. Far more than offering a thematically ordered compendium of the modern

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reception of a medieval thinker known for his rational investigation or discernment of conditions, this book traces the various possibilities which were retrieved in Aquinas’ completed system and dissects their absorption in different international and disciplinary environments. Therefore, all authors evoke an intricate network of forgotten conceptual relations. They interweave texts and understudied contexts. They add new contacts and links to twentieth century intellectual history. In many ways, they produce a new fabric, another set of punch cards. It is up to the reader to place these cards.

References Baring, Edward, “Ideas on the Move: Context in Transnational Intellectual History,” in: Journal of the History of Ideas, 77/4 (October 2016): 567 – 587. Chapman, Alister/Coffey, John/Gregory, Brad S., Seeing Things Their Way. Intellectual History and the Return of Religion, Notre Dame 2009. Coreth, Emerich/Neidl, W.M./Pfligersdorffer, G. (ed.), Christliche Philosophie im katholischen Denken des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, Graz et al 1988. Eucken, Rudolf, Thomas von Aquino und Kant. Ein Kampf zweier Welten, Berlin 1901. Fish, Stanley, Is There a Text in This Class, New Haven 1980. Gény, Paul, “Scholastic philosophy and modern mentality,” in: Present-day thinkers and the New Scholasticism. An international symposium, John S. Zybura, St. Louis et al 1926. Gilman, Nils, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America, Baltimore 2003. Gottier, G., “Thomisme et modernité,” in: S. Bonino (ed.), Saint Thomas au XXe siècle, Paris 1995. Hitchcock, James, “Postmortem on a rebirth: The Catholic Intellectual Renaissance,” in: id., Years of Crisis: Collected Essays, 1970 – 1983, ed. James Hitchcock, San Francisco 1985. Janssens, E., Comment suivrons-nous Saint Thomas? Vrai Thomisme et faux Thomisme, Brussels et al. 1925. Jones, Steve E., Roberto Busa, S.J. and the Emergence of Humanities Computing, London 2016. McGinn, Bernard, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae. A Biography, Princeton et al 2014. van Melsen, A.G.M., “Wat maakt het neothomisme zo attractief? Beschouwingen over universaliteit, systematiek en inzichtelijkheid,” in: De wijsgerige Thomas. Terugblik op het Neothomisme, Bernard Delgauw, Baarn 1984. Morpurgo-Tagliabue, Guido, L’esthétique contemporaine. Une enquête, transl. Marcelle Bourrette Serre, Milan 1960. Peitz, Detlef, Die Anfänge der Neuscholastik in Deutschland und Italien (1818 – 1870), Bonn 2006. Petit, Jacques (ed.), Jacques Maritain-Emmanuel Mounier (1929 – 1939), Paris 1973. La Piana, George, “Recent Tendencies in Roman Catholic Theology,” in: The Harvard Theological Review, 15/No. 3 (July 1922): 233 – 292.

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Tresmontant, Claude (ed.) Maurice Blondel. Lucien Laberthonnière. Correspondance Philosophique, Paris 1961. Verhoeven, Cornelis, Lof van de micrologie: een voetnoot bij Plato’s Politeia, Baarn 1982. Weidner, Daniel, “The Rhetoric of Secularization,” in: New German Critique, 41/1 (2014): 1 – 31.

Part I Shaping A New Society

The manuscript of Le Docteur Angélique (1930) [translated in 1931 as ‘The Angelic Doctor’] in which Jacques Maritain described the life and thought of Thomas Aquinas. In the text, Maritain argued that precisely because Thomas needed to develop his ideas when the Aristotelian corpus in Latin translation arrived, this reopened the question of the relation between faith and reason. Accordingly, Thomas’ insights could form a cultural resource in the rapidly changing world of the twentieth century. Once again, Maritain argued, western culture was at a critical juncture. [Kolbsheim (France), Cercle d’études Jacques & Raïssa Maritain]

James Chappel

The Thomist Debate over Inequality and Property Rights in Depression-Era Europe In recent years, inequality has become a topic of burning moral and political concern. The notion that a rising tide will lift all ships is increasingly implausible in a world of shipwrecks. Many agree that property relations will have to be reformed, perhaps radically so, in the interest of social justice. But what is “property” in the first place—does it mean anything beyond a bundle of legal claims? Curiously, the interest in inequality has not led to a revival of interest in this question. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, for instance, treats the theme of inequality in encyclopedic detail but has no theory of property. Piketty is not alone. As Thomas Merrill and Henry Smith have pointed out, “property has fallen out of fashion,” as philosophers and theorists have ceased paying much attention to the issue.¹ The history of philosophy, of course, provides immense resources to answer this question: until not long ago, it was a major theme of reflection across the human sciences. Thinkers like Locke, Hume, and Mill have pondered the origins of property rights, while Marx, Proudhon, and their followers attacked the institution of property at its root. Jedediah Purdy has recently looked to early American law and Enlightenment thought, showing that there exist critical appreciations of property that seek to reform but not abolish the institution.² In a kindred spirit, this essay will focus on Thomism: a theory that, like American jurisprudence and unlike anarchism or even Marxism, has access to institutional resources that make it a living tradition for hundreds of millions of people. Most histories of modern Thomism have focused on its epistemological and ontological dimensions in lieu of its social or ethical ones.³ The story of the Thomist theological revival is by now quite well known, as are the many conflicts that pitted traditionalists like Jacques Maritain against transcendental Thomists like Joseph Maréchal. Thomism, however, was always more than a theological

 Merrill, Thomas W./Smith, Henry E., “What Happened to Property in Law and Economics?” in: The Yale Law Journal 111 (2001): 357– 98, 357.  Purdy, Jedediah, The Meaning of Property: Freedom, Community, and the Legal Imagination, New Haven 2010.  See, for instance, the excellent McCool, Gerald A., Catholic Theology in the Nineteenth Century: The Quest for a Unitary Method, New York 1977. For a recent exception, see Misner, Paul, Catholic Labor Movements in Europe: Social Thought and Action, 1914 – 1965, Washington, D.C. 2015. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110588255-003

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doctrine: it was a social one, too, and Thomist theories of the economy were just as widely debated as Thomist theories of the intellect were. This tradition has had an immense impact on the social teachings of Pope John Paul II, Pope Francis, and legions of priests and missionaries across the world. It is one of the most vibrant and influential traditions of social thinking and social justice in existence, and yet its history is poorly understood. This essay will treat a particularly important episode in that history. Between 1928 and 1931, as the Depression rolled across the continent, a furious debate broke out over Catholic theories of property. At the time, the Church had not yet spoken definitely about capitalism, and Catholics across the continent struggled to articulate what the Church had to say about the crisis. This led to an anticapitalist form of Thomist ethics, which specifically took aim at the sanctity of private property by arguing that state-led redistribution, and not merely charity, was required by natural law. Theologically, this was primarily the work of those influenced by classical Dominican commentators like Cajetan; socially, it took advantage of the widespread critique of capitalism that was commonplace in Catholic circles (and non-Catholic ones, too). This coincided with a separate tradition—largely Jesuit, and less concerned with the intricacies of Thomist texts— according to which Catholic social teaching could make peace with any economic system, including capitalism and its attendant doctrines of property. From this perspective, the rich should share their excess wealth under the rubric of voluntary charity, not involuntary law. This debate largely came to a close with Quadragesimo anno (1931), drafted by German Jesuits. The encyclical placed the sanctity of private property at the heart of a healthy social order, said nothing about capitalism (a loud silence), and enjoined the rich to share out of beneficence, not out of legal duty. Henceforth, the most radical interpretations of Thomist property doctrines fell out of favor in Catholic circles, and most Catholic social thinkers from 1931 onwards pursued a “third way” that accepted the basic class structure of the capitalist order as a given while subjecting private property to the dictates of the common good in various ways.

I The Thomist Assault on Private Property For the many Catholics interested in questioning the pieties of liberal capitalism in the era of the Great Depression, Aquinas was a useful source to think with. In his Summa Theologica, he had provided a theory of property that differed from anarchist, Marxist, and liberal views alike. The section on property is short and somewhat ambiguous. According to one plausible reading, at least, Aquinas did not dispute private property as an institution, but he did refuse to legitimate

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any particular property holding with the imprimatur of natural law. Nature, he insisted, is the dominion of God, who has commanded mankind as a species to make use of it. According to natural law, then, nature belongs to us in common. However, private property, a creation of human law and not natural law, was a reasonable addition insofar as men take best care of what is their own. Rights to property are legitimate but limited by the superior fact of common dominion. This had two consequences. First, whatever the wealthy have in “superabundance is due, by natural law, to the purpose of succoring the poor.” Secondly, those in urgent need are within their rights to take, openly or secretly, the property of another, which does not technically constitute theft, robbery, or a sin.⁴ Aquinas did not provide ammunition for critiques of private property as such, but for the use and distribution of that property. Other resources for property-critique existed in the Catholic tradition, as Charly Coleman has recently shown. Those earlier and more mystical traditions attacking the very notion of property, building upon a call for the dispossession of the self. This doctrine held little sway amongst Catholic social thinkers in the Thomist tradition, committed as they were to the dominion over the self as the antecedent to the valid ownership of property.⁵ Thomas, however, was radical enough on his own: as the short gloss of the Summa’s position indicates, the possible ramifications were explosive. This potential was exploited across the continent in an era when Thomism had, as Raïssa Maritain wrote in her journal, “a large entry into the world of culture” for the “first time.”⁶ In Britain, Thomist intellectuals like G.K. Chesterton mobilized scholasticism in the name of “distributism,” an economic theory that sought to dismantle usury, and even currency, in the name of a drastically reformed and more equitable economic system.⁷ The British sociologist R.H. Tawney argued that capitalism and its property relations were rooted firmly in Prot-

 Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologica II, 2, 66, 1; II, 2, 66, 2. 1947 Benziger Bros. edition (translation by English Dominican Province) available online here: https://www.ccel.org/ccel/aqui nas/summa/SS/SS066.html#SSQ66OUTP1. Accessed August 2016.  On this tradition, see Coleman, Charly, The Virtues of Abandon: An Anti-Individualist History of the French Enlightenment, Palo Alto, CA 2014; for an explicit linkage between self-ownership and property ownership, see Spicq, C. O.P., “La notion analogique de dominium et le droit de propriété,” in: Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques 20 (1931): 52– 76.  Philipp Chenaux has admirably traced all of this in Chenaux, Philippe, Entre Maurras et Maritain. Une génération intellectuelle catholique (1920 – 1930), Paris 1999, Chapter 1. Raïssa quoted on page 34.  Corrin, Jay, Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy, Notre Dame, IN 2002.

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estantism, a conclusion expanded upon by one of his students, a German Jesuit named J.B. Kraus.⁸ The most penetrating of the anti-capitalist Thomists were on the continent, and especially in Vienna, where they found support from a crusading anti-capitalist 1925 manifesto from the Austrian bishops.⁹ While the Christian Socials under Ignaz Seipel were trying to save the rump Austrian state from economic ruin by appealing to the League of Nations, Vienna harbored a robust collection of revolutionary Catholic writers, who could not bear to see their ancient faith utilized in the name of a center-right, essentially pro-capitalist party.¹⁰ To be sure, most of the anti-capitalist rhetoric in Catholic Vienna came from the epigones of Karl von Vogelsang, whose writings predated the Thomist revival. Othmar Spann, Anton Orel, Eugen Kogon, Franz Xaver Landmesser, and other anticapitalist writers were more interested in his Romantic tradition of Catholic sociology than they were in neo-Thomism. Winter, a student of both Hans Kelsen and Othmar Spann, was positively critical of scholastic social thinking, arguing that its obsession with natural law was keeping Catholics from understanding the nature of modern societies.¹¹ That said, the most prominent Thomist assault on private property and capitalism came from this milieu: Sándor Horváth’s Property Rights According to Saint Thomas Aquinas (1929). Horváth, a Hungarian Dominican living in Rome, published constantly in Eberle’s journals, and his work was celebrated there. His little book launched an international debate about Thomism and private property. Like other Dominicans, he was uninterested in updating Thomas for the present or finding linkages between Thomism and the secular sciences: he drew exclusively on Thomas and Cajetan, (1469-1534) as his sources, neglecting modern economics and sociology. The basic argument of Horváth’s work was simple. Christianity, he held, has a coherent economic philosophy to match its moral teachings, and there is no reason why it would change with economic or technological development any more than the prohibition against murder  Kraus, J.B., Scholastik, Puritanismus und Kapitalismus. Eine vergleichende dogmengeschichtliche Übergangsstudie, Leipzig 1930.  Piffl, Friedrich Gustav, et al., Lehren und Weisungen der österreichische Bischöfe über soziale Fragen der Gegenwart, Wien 1926, 5.  Wassermann, Janek, Black Vienna: The Radical Right in the Red City, 1918 – 1938, Ithaca, NY 2014.  This is how Aquinas is treated in, for instance, Orel, Anton, Oeconomia perennis. Die Wirtschaftslehre der Menschheitsüberlieferung im Wandel der Zeiten und in ihrer umwandelbaren Bedeutung, Mainz 1930; he is not mentioned in Landmesser, Franz Xaver, “Christliches Eigentumsrecht,” in: Schönere Zukunft IV (1928 – 9), 6 – 8. For Winter’s rejection of social Thomism, see Winter, Ernst Karl, Die Sozialmetaphysik der Scholastik, Wien 1929.

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was modified by the invention of the handgun. Modern societies have forgotten that in the name of heretical capitalism, but this in itself was no reason to ignore ancient verities. “The Christian economic system,” Horváth reasoned, “can only be built on the ruins of capitalism,” which is itself built upon a concept of human flourishing incompatible with true Christianity. When it came to private property, Aquinas had a clear lesson: “The centerpiece of our investigation concerns those statements of Aquinas in which he not implicitly, but explicitly and with full clarity, asserts that worldly goods may only be pursued rationally, within the limits of justice, and according to the measure of personal needs.”¹² Horváth begins with the traditional Thomist idea that man has been charged by God to make use of the natural world. Resources exist not only to fulfill our animal needs but also to help us pursue our rational nature. Private property is a legitimate institution, to be sure, but only within these limits: “the possession of earthly goods without meaning, ends, or boundaries is a sin against justice.” Just as reason is the common patrimony of mankind, the created world is, too: Aquinas, Horváth insists, is committed to the ius utendi [right to use] of all men, which cannot be abrogated by the legal articulation of unjust property relations. Man, after all, is merely “a caretaker of God’s goods.” Therefore, the delivery of our superfluous goods to the social whole is not at all like giving alms to the poor, which is a command of love, but is in fact a “duty of law.”¹³ This distinction between love and law is central to Horváth’s enterprise. In his view, there are “two active powers” in “our moral life.” The first is love, which orients us towards the supernatural on the individual level. Giving alms to the poor, in accordance with scriptural commands, is an example of love. The second, “social justice,” places “the common good at the center of our earthly interests.” This sphere of our moral life is intimately bound up with law and the social order. Crucially, Horváth insists that questions of property distribution are firmly in this second category of moral affairs. In other words, charity is not enough. For Aquinas, “law and morality depend on one another, and are indeed inseparable.” The just use of property, that is, can be required by the law, and the state therefore has the duty to seize and distribute property that is not being used for the well-being of mankind. He was of course well aware of the difficulties of mandating just property relations using “positive political law,” but he nonetheless held that the state should at least be aware that men do not have untrammeled right to rob “the treasury of the Lord” at the expense

 Horváth, Sándor, Eigentumsrecht nach dem h. Thomas von Aquin, Graz 1929, 10, iv. For Cajetan citations, see 83n, 156n, 1891, 198n, 201n, 215n.  Ibid. 72, 83, 98, 180.

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of other men. “The delivery [of superfluous goods],” Horváth concludes, “is a pre-political right of men, but the determination of that delivery is the sovereign right of the state.”¹⁴ Horváth’s book created a firestorm of debate across the continent.¹⁵ Anticapitalist Catholics like Eberle and Landmesser rose to his defense, even though his Thomist language was not their own. Josef Pieper, one of the most influential German-speaking Thomist theologians of the twentieth century, weighed in on the Horváth controversy in one of his first publications: a lengthy, glowing review called simply “Thomas of Aquinas and the Right to Property.” Horváth’s work, Pieper judged, was “extremely timely and radical,” hidings its “almost revolutionary” ideas “under the brush” of scholastic terminology. Pieper, like other commenters, was especially impressed by Horváth’s distinction between law and love, and his location of the property issue in the former category.¹⁶ Even if they did not mention Horváth, the employment of Thomas against bourgeois private property became commonplace between 1929 and 1931. In Hochland, one of the most prestigious and widely-read journals in Catholic Europe, a prominent Jesuit theologian named Matthias Laros wrote a long article in 1930 called “Property and Income Without Labor.” Like Horváth, Laros argued for a rethinking of private property using the Catholic tradition; like him, he believed that charity and almsgiving were far from sufficient to meet the challenge of the present. “Contemporary questions of property,” he concluded, “cannot be solved through love, as everyone senses who has any social-economic or sociological insight.”¹⁷ Only law could do that, as Heinrich Mertens, a German Catholic socialist, also concluded in his “The Natural Law Principle of Property and Socialization” (1930). Like Horváth, Mertens was furious that Catholic social thinkers had allowed themselves to be bamboozled into supporting capitalist notions of private property. “The phrase ‘private property,’” he pointed out, “is nowhere to be found in the [medieval] tradition of Catholic social teaching.” Of course, Thomas was a strict defender of property, but not of private property in its bourgeois form. “Ever time has its own unique emergencies,” and in the Europe of 1930, Catholic social thought must not allow itself to be marshaled in the defense of one kind of property—private property—which had no basis in natural law, and the protection of which was manifestly harming the men

 Ibid. 12, 11, 64, 96, 180.  For a bibliography, see A.M, “Driot de propriété,” in: Bulletin Thomiste 9 (1932): 602– 606.  Pieper, Josef, “Thomas von Aquin und das Eigentumsrecht,” in: Berthold Wald (ed.) Frühe soziologistche Schriften, Hamburg 2004, 53 – 60.  Laros, Matthias, “Eigentum und arbeitsloses Einkommen. Auseinandersetzung zwischen den christlichen Soziallehren und dem Sozialismus,” in: Hochland 27 (1929 – 1930): 120 – 34, 126.

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whose “freedom” and “conditions of existence” were the true telos of earthly goods.¹⁸ Horváth and the Thomist critique of private property found an airing in France, too, where the Dominican version of Thomism reigned supreme. As a 1932 article in the Bulletin Thomiste put it, Horváth was at “the center of debate,” while an earlier review of Horváth in the same journal had admitted that, while his solutions seemed a bit far-fetched, he had done an admirable job summarizing Aquinas’s stridently anti-capitalist notions of private property.¹⁹ His ideas about property found their way into the social theorizing of the most influential and pioneering social Catholic thinkers of 1930s France: Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier. Maritain, possibly the most influential Thomist intellect of the twentieth century, will be our focus here.²⁰ In an appendix to his 1933 volume, Du régime temporel et de la liberté, Maritain reflected at length on “person and property,” positively citing Horváth and coming to similar conclusions from a different direction. While most other commentators focused on the sections of the Summa specifically treating private property (Part II, Section 2, question 66), Maritain was more interested in Aquinas’s notion of the human person and on the relationship between natural and human law. While Horváth oriented his discussion around the distinction between property and use, or law and love, Maritain mobilized the more fundamental Thomist distinction between our “poetic” or “fabricating” functions and our moral ones. This division in human nature leads to the problems of private property: our “fabricating” nature seems to require private property, based in the dominion over the self, but our “moral” nature seems to require common usage. Like Horváth, he believed that these could both be satisfied in a new world, with a new economy that would be neither capitalist nor Communist (again like Horváth, Maritain wrote freely of “the capitalist deviation”).²¹ When it came to political implications, Maritain was basically at one with Laros and Horváth. He believed that the state had the duty to regulate property relations, even if this stood in the way of growth and especially if individuals were not properly utilizing their property. He, too, was convinced that property

 Mertens, Heinrich, “Das naturrechclichte Eigentumsprinzip und die Sozialisierung,” in: Das rote Blatt 2 (1930): 313 – 17, 314, 315.  A.M, “Driot de propriété,” in: Bulletin Thomiste 9 (1932): 602– 606, 602; Tonneau, J., “Review of Horváth,” in: Bulletin Thomiste 8 (1931): 373 – 6  For Mounier, see Mounier, Emmanuel, “De la propriété capitaliste à la propriété humaine,” Esprit 2 (1934): 5 – 70  Maritain, “Personne et propriéte,” appendix to Du régime temporel et de la liberté, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 5, ed. Cercle d’études Jacques et Raïssa Maritain, Fribourg, 1982, 487– 507, 498.

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relations clashed so vehemently with natural law that “a revolution of the social body” was bound to happen.²² They belonged to the large group of intellectuals —Catholic, socialist, and fascist alike—who thought, especially once the Great Depression was in full swing, that the capitalist order of private property and free markets was in its death throes. But like socialism and fascism, Catholicism was internally divided about these issues. Prominent as Maritain, Eberle, and Horváth were, they confronted another equally prominent group of social Catholic thinkers who believed that capitalism could be saved—and its attendant, unequal private property relations with it.

II Catholicism, Capitalism, and Quadragesimo Anno The short section on property in the Summa was ambiguous and, as with many Thomist precepts, capable of multiple interpretations. For centuries, Thomists like the sixteenth-century Jesuit Francisco Suaréz had been using Thomism primarily to defend private property, not to argue for its limitations.²³ As this tradition survived into the twentieth-century, revived in the Neo-Thomist movement that took Suarez as its patron saint, a generation of Thomists began to argue that the Church’s role was to inject the spirit of Christ into the existing capitalist system rather than to lay out an abstract schema of the economy (in other words, the doctrine of accidentalism should apply to the economy as much as it did to the state). This approach had textual support from Leo XIII, the pope who had summoned the Thomist revival. Rerum novarum, his epochal 1891 encyclical on the economy, had already hinted at a more moderate approach to property than the one Horváth would pursue. Thomas, in Horváth’s reading, had argued that the institution of private property came from human law, and the delivery of ones’ superabundance to the poor was a command of natural law. This stemmed from a legitimate but particular reading of Thomas, and one that did not interest Leo XIII. According to Rerum, the right to property stemmed from natural law while the delivery of ones’ superabundance to the poor becomes “a duty, not of justice (save in extreme cases), but of Christian charity—a duty not enforced by human law.”²⁴ Thomas, after all, was not reacting to a socialist threat the

 Ibid., 496, 503.  Skinner, Quentin, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 2, New York 1978.  Rerum novarum, section 6, available here: http://w2.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/en cyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html. Accessed 15 August 2016.

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way Leo XIII was, which helps to explain the encyclical’s contention that “the first and most fundamental principle, therefore, if one would undertake to alleviate the condition of the masses, must be the inviolability of private property.”²⁵ In the late 1920s, as the capitalist reconstruction of the post-WWI moment was called into question, ecclesiastical leaders sent mixed signals while the papacy remained silent. While in Austria, the bishops had come out strongly against capitalism, the Archbishop of Cologne, Karl Joseph Schulte, instructed his clergymen in 1926 that capitalism was no heresy in itself, as any economic system that aimed to increase the prosperity of the nation and the believer was to be welcomed. Of course, the sin of “Mammonism” was a moral failure was properly to be condemned by the Church, but it was not directly correlated with “capitalism.”²⁶ This distinction between ethically neutral capitalism and morally spurious “Mammonism,” or “the capitalistic spirit,” became something of a commonplace in some Catholic circles, leading Horváth to devote an entire section of his volume to dismantling it.²⁷ These two interpretations circulated throughout Europe, but not randomly. For one thing, the more hardline position tended to be pursued by Dominicans like Horváth, while Jesuits were more likely to adopt Leo’s evolutionary platform. For another, the hardline position dominated in Central Europe while the more evolutionary one found a home base in the Rhineland and in Belgium. While Vienna was at the center of an economically imploding rump state created by the postwar peace negotiations, Cologne was located in the industrially prosperous and confessionally mixed Rhineland. Schulte’s environs were the home base of the Center Party, the People’s Union for a Catholic Germany, and a number of flourishing Catholic industrialists (notably Fritz Thyssen).²⁸ Unsurprisingly, then, it produced a number of Catholic economic thinkers who tried to cohere capitalism and Catholic social teachings. In 1912, Franz Keller’s Enterprise and Profit had defended “true capitalism” from a Catholic perspective.²⁹ Keller had many

Some commentators, including the eminent French historian Robert Talmy, have criticized Leo for being so worried about socialism that he failed to emphasize the social character of property. Habiger, Matthew H., “Papal Teaching on Private Property: 1891 to 1981,” Dissertation, Catholic University of America 1986, 27– 32.  Ibid., paragraph 15. For more on this see Habiger, “Papal Teaching on Private Property.”  Schulte, Karl Joseph, “Richtlinien über Kapital und Arbeit,” in: Soziale Kultur 47 (1927): 81– 3.  Horváth, Eigentumsrecht nach dem h. Thomas von Aquin, 8 – 11.  For more on this tradition and its legacy, see Chappel, James, “An Economy of Miracles: Catholicism, Social Science, and Capitalism in West Germany,” in: New German Critique 42 (2015): 9 – 40.  Keller, Franz, Unternehmung und Mehrwert; eine sozial-ethische Studie zur Geschä ftsmoral, Köln 1912.

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followers, notably Heinrich Pesch and Victor Cathrein, who made similar claims about the possibility of integrating Catholicismwith essentially bourgeois forms of private property. After World War I, in the face of socialist assaults on private property, many argued, as did Franz Xaver Kiefl in 1919, that private property is “holy and inviolable.”³⁰ Otto Schilling’s The Church’s Concept of Property (1919) and Johannes Haessle’s 1923 Investigations into the Economic Spirit of Catholicism (1923) gave theological rationale to Kiefle’s contention. Schilling argued that Thomas never would have viewed the secular state as a legitimate source of property-redistributing law, and that anyway the notion of “superabundance” only applied to resources that were unnecessary to maintain a standard of living appropriate to one’s class. Haessle, for his part, drew primarily on Leo XIII to argue that capitalism and unequal property relations were not necessarily problematic (Haessle was aware that Leo went far further than Thomas on the issue of private property, judging merely that Leo “finished what Thomas began”).³¹ In a textbook on “Christian social teachings” commissioned by a leading member of the Center Party, Schilling reminded readers that “clearly the Church does not condemn the capitalist economy in itself, because it has accepted the taking of interest in modern times.”³² In the Locarno era of the mid-1920s, when it seemed that capitalism had at last been stabilized, two German Jesuits with sparkling future careers began to pursue these arguments further. Each of them were followers of the great Jesuit social scientist Heinrich Pesch, who had long labored to treat economic issues in light of Thomist metaphysics and anthropology. Like Pesch, they each had training in secular economics and were concerned to show how the Church’s social teachings might evolve to remain relevant in an era of finance capitalism. Gustav Gundlach inveighed against those who desired “a return to the economic system of the Middle Ages.” They were, he thought, naive and, in fact, “not harmless” in that they misled believers as to how our economic life might in fact be Christianized. “Catholic principles are compatible with any economic system,” including “a capitalist commercial economy.”³³ His friend Oswald von Nell-Breuning’s Fea-

 Dietz, Eduard, Das heilige Eigentum und die Arbeiter-Encyclica des Papstes Leo XIII, Karlsruhe 1927, 4.  Schilling, Otto, Der kirchliche Eigentumsbegriff, Freiburg 1920, 50, 53 – 4; Haessle, Johannes, Das Arbeitsethos der Kirche nach Thomas von Aquin und Leo XIII. Untersuchungen über den Wirtschaftsgeist des Katholizismus, Freiburg 1923, 252– 57 on capitalism, 201 for this quotation.  Schilling, Otto, Christliche Gesellschaftslehre, Freiburg 1926, 91. Commissioned, and in a series edited by, Georg Schreiber.  Gundlach, S.J., Gustav, “Zur Christianisierung unseres Wirtschaftslebens,” in: Stimmen der Zeit 109 (1925), 268 – 80, here 270 – 1.

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tures of Market Morality (1928) was a staunch defense of capitalism, too. For NellBreuning, as for Schulte, capitalism simply referred to a situation in which the ownership of capital was concentrated among a certain class, who used it in the name of profit and growth. Rerum novarum, Nell-Breuning reasoned, had implicitly given the imprimatur to this economic system in that it had assumed the existence of different classes and the reimbursement of labor through wages.³⁴ In Austria, they found common cause with a young priest named Johannes Messner. His 1927 Social Economics and Social Ethics was recognizably in the Nell-Breuning vein, and he freely quoted from a number of Rhenish social Catholics like Theodor Brauer and Götz Briefs. “Our task cannot be to suddenly break out of capitalism as a historically constituted form of social economy,” Messner judged, “because we cannot simply shed historically-constituted social formations like a set of clothes. Our task, instead, is to assign to ourselves today’s economy, itself, as an ethical task.” Messner, like Schulte and Nell-Breuning, believed that Catholicism does not provide an eternal social ethics the way it provides an eternal individual ethic: “economic ethics,” he insisted, is “truly the ethic of a historically given social economy.”³⁵ At the end of the 1920s this Rhenish and largely Jesuit tradition collided with Horváth’s provocations. The prestigious Theologisch-praktische Quartalschrift printed at least two rejections of Horváth’s theses by important Catholic intellectuals (both Jesuits). In 1928, the Belgian theologian Arthur Vermeersch argued that, while surely the rich had a duty in some sense to help the poor, this should not be understood as an immediate and legally-binding social claim on their excess wealth. Two years later, Joseph Biederlack, who belonged to the same Solidarist school as Gundlach and Nell-Breuning, lambasted Horváth for misreading Aquinas: in his view, Horváth read “common use” rights into Aquinas when they simply weren’t there, bringing him into “accommodation with reprehensible socialism.”³⁶ Nell-Breuning, for his part, took Leo XIII’s position against Horváth’s, too. He was utterly convinced that we have a “natural right to property,” which he claimed to find in both the papal and the Thomistic traditions: “One wants to make a contrast between Leo’s grounding of private property and that of St. Tho-

 von Nell-Breuning, Oswald, S.J., Grundzüge der Börsenmoral, Freiburg, 1928, 4.  Messner, Johannes, Sozialökonomik und Sozialethik. Studie zur Grundlegung einer systematischen Wirtschaftsethik, Paderborn 1927, 54, 33.  Vermeersch, Arthur, S.J., “Soziale Krise und Reformtheorien,” Theologisch-praktische Quartalschrift 82 (1928): 687– 724, 702– 3; Biederlack, Joseph, S.J., “Zu P. Horvath’s Buch ‘Eigentumsrecht nach dem heiligen Thomas,” in: Theologisch-praktische Quartalschrift 83 (1930): 524– 35, 526 – 8.

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mas,” Nell-Breuning remarked in a 1929 pamphlet on “The Church and Property. “That,” he concluded, “is from the start completely improbable! As a matter of fact Leo advances beyond Thomas.” He does so by demonstrating the “legitimacy of private property” from the individual, and not merely the social, perspective.³⁷ Nell-Breuning, that is, recognized that Leo’s doctrine of property differed from that of Thomas, but he chose to view this as a supplement and an improvement, not an alteration, as Haessle had done before him. In a harsh two-part review of Horváth that he published in Messner’s Das Neue Reich called “Property Before God,” Nell-Breuning took this argument even further: far be it from me, he concluded, to enter into polemics with a learned scholar like Horváth over the nature of Thomism, but at the same time, we must follow papal doctrine “where Leo XIII clearly differs [from Horváth] and more or less explicitly claims to be in accordance with Thomas.”³⁸ It is true, he conceded, that we have no property rights against God, who retains dominion over all things while designating us as his steward. That does not mean, though, that we have no property rights against other men: “Property,” after all, “indicates a legal relationship among men” more than it does a relationship between a man and a thing (here Nell-Breuning draws close to contemporary legal notions of property as a bundle of rights rather than a metaphysical connection between man and object). Drawing more on Leo XIII than on Aquinas, Nell-Breuning argued that Horváth drastically overestimated the extent of the “right to use,” which for all practical matters was governed by human law—the “community of goods,” is “absolutely not” a principle to be derived from Leo XIII’s social thought.³⁹ What these people had to say mattered immensely, for they had the ear of the Vatican. As Nell-Breuning remembered, years later, his early views on property were mere opinion, but after the Vatican released Quadragesimo anno in 1931, they had the force of dogma: Nell-Breuning had, after all, been the primary drafter of the document, and in his own telling, Pius XI must have chosen him precisely in order to bring an end to the debates over property and capitalism that were splitting Catholic intellectual life in two.⁴⁰ Quadragesimo anno was a sweeping social encyclical, meant as an update to Rerum novarum on its fortieth anniversary. It also cemented a particular interpretation of that mercurial encyclical’s positions on multiple issues.

 Habiger, “Papal Teaching on Private Property,” 94, 98, emphasis added.  von Nell-Breuning, Oswald, “Eigentum vor Gott,” in: Das Neue Reich 12 (1929 – 30): 295 – 7, 321.  Ibid., 295, 297.  Habiger, “Papal Teaching on Private Property,” 77; von Nell-Breuning, S.J., Oswald, Wie sozial ist die Kirche. Leistung und Versagen der katholischen Soziallehre, Düsseldorf 1972, 128.

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Papal doctrine must always be read carefully. One methodological tool to read papal encyclicals intelligently is to think about what they do not say. From this perspective, the most remarkable feature of Quadragesimo anno is that it pointedly refused to criticize or condemn capitalism by name. Pius XI’s hand was free in this regard: Leo XIII had said nothing at all about capitalism, a concept that had yet to fully crystallize when Rerum appeared. But in 1931, when debates over capitalism were raging, Pius XI and Nell-Breuning chose to remain silent on the issue, implicitly siding with Schulte, the Rhenish bishop who accepted capitalism, over Horváth and the Austrian bishops who could not. When it comes to the development of doctrine, papal encyclicals, due to their nature, progress through nuance and emphasis rather than clear reversals. While claiming to do no more than reiterate Leo XIII’s ideas, Quadragesimo clearly solidified one particular interpretation of them, and simultaneously intervened into the debate over property rights. The all-important section on that topic begins with the classic distinction between the right to property and the right to use that property. The question, as always, was whether or not positive law could govern both of those categories, or only the first. The encyclical firmly sided with those who viewed the distribution of superabundance to fall under the rubric of charity, not law: justice, the text reads, “forbids invasion of others’ rights through the exceeding of the limits of one’s own property; but the duty of owners to use their property only in a right way does not come under this type of justice, but under other virtues, obligations of which ‘cannot be enforced by legal action.’” A “right to property,” the paragraph concludes, cannot be abused even if the holder is guilty of “abuse or non-use.” ⁴¹ While those who held property in superabundance were charged to give alms for the poor as testament to their own virtue, Quadragesimo anno was less open than Rerum novarum towards state-led redistribution efforts (Leo had concluded that in “extreme cases,” the law could intervene and redistribute property).⁴² Quadragesimo anno did not put an end to the Catholic debate about private property, but it did shift its grounds by cementing the right to private property more securely at the center of the Catholic social vision. Nell-Breuning confirmed this reading in his long, and quasi-official, explication of the encyclical he had done so much to author. “The law of property,” he explains, “requires the establishment of strict boundaries between Mine and Thine.” It may be that I use my property in un-virtuous ways, but this gives no body, public or private, the right  Quadragesimo anno, paragraph 47, available here: http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/ encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19310515_quadragesimo-anno.html. Accessed 15 August 2016.  Rerum Novarum paragraph 22.

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to abrogate that property right.⁴³ Nell-Breuning’s position was not necessarily less “Thomist” than Horváth’s: as Gerald McCool and others have argued, the meaning of Thomism is always in flux. Nonetheless, his position became dominant more for historical and institutional reasons than purely intellectual ones.

III Conclusion: Legacies This property debate did not pit Thomists against non-Thomists: the issue, rather, was how Catholics should relate to Aquinas in a modern, capitalist world. “Saint Thomas,” as Vermeersch put it, “did not know our social condition.”⁴⁴ As numerous scholars have shown, this debate took a variety of forms between 1890 and 1950, as Thomists and neo-Thomists waged war over epistemology, theology, sexuality, ethics, and more. And as this essay has shown, economic theory and particularly theories of property were one of the most important sites of this confrontation—which explains why Pius XI intervened so dramatically. Quadragesimo and the conclusion of this debate helped prepare Catholic intellectuals, social theorists, and politicians for the role they were to play in the 1930s. Alongside fascists and New Deal democrats, and against Communists and socialists, Catholics thought through ways to salvage and reform the capitalist system without fundamentally dismantling it.⁴⁵ Franklin Roosevelt was able to quote from the encyclical to defend his New Deal policies (and angle for Catholic votes). John Ryan, a Jesuit and one of FDR’s greatest Catholic supporters, drew on Aquinas and a number of more recent European thinkers to claim that a private proprietor is a mere “trustee, responsible to God,” and that the State has the right to step in if the world of physical things is not able to provide its divinelyappointed task of sustaining the human race. “Individual liberty in the use of private property ceases to be morally valid,” Ryan judged, “as soon as it begins to violate either charity or justice.”⁴⁶ At the same time, a number of German and Austrian thinkers, including Johannes Messner, drew on the encyclical to defend fascist or authoritarian forms of corporatism.⁴⁷

 von Nell-Breuning, Oswald, Reorganization of Social Economy: The Social Encyclical Developed and Explained, transl. Bernard W. Dempsey, New York 1936, 101– 5.  Vermeersch, “Soziale Krise und Reformtheorien,” 47.  For more on this, see James Chappel, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church, Cambridge MA 2018.  Ryan, John, A Better Economic Order, New York 1935, 150 – 153.  Messner, Johannes, Dollfuss: An Austrian Patriot, Norfolk, VA 2004, 108. Many German Catholics cited Quadragesimo Anno in their attempts to defend the Nazi economic order, especially in

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This reformist urge in Catholic social thinking might, from a radical perspective, be viewed as a weakness. To be sure, the Holy See has continued to police those, like the French chrétiens progressistes in the 1950s or the Liberation Theologians later, who saw in Catholic teaching a brief for immediate, state-led economic transformation in the interest of social justice. But it has also opened the door for Catholics to collaborate with those in other traditions who seek to reform private property without abolishing it. To take just one example, Catholic social thinkers in a position to advise Christian Democratic parties, Nell-Breuning included, theorized forms of firm-based codetermination that gave workers ownership or management stakes in their companies.⁴⁸ Theorists like Jacques Maritain continued to deploy Thomist theories of property in the name of reducing inequality; indeed, the essay described above appeared after Quadragesimo anno (Maritain’s flexibility may have come from his decision to focus on Thomist anthropology more than on the specific Summa passages on property). More recently, Luke Bretherton has drawn on Thomist notions of property to craft an interconfessional vision of political and economic democracy. Papal doctrine, too, has evolved since 1931: Laudato si’, Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical on the environment, revives a more robust Catholic critique of property than that allowed for in Quadragesimo Anno. ⁴⁹ After all, Francis is attempting to pivot the Church in a new direction, one in which Communism is no longer the primary enemy, as it was for both Leo XIII and Pius XI. In a post-Cold War world of austerity politics and yawning inequality, theorists of property can escape the penumbra of the Red Scare and approach the question of property anew. Thomas Aquinas, the medieval Church Doctor, might turn out to be exceptionally relevant in our neomedieval present.⁵⁰

the first year of the regime. For one of the most notorious examples, see Pieper, Josef, Das Arbeitsrecht des Neuen Reiches und die Enzyklika Quadragesimo anno, Münster 1934. On NellBreuning’s criticism of these interpretations, see von Nell-Breuning, Oswald, “Die politische Verwirklichung der katholischen Soziallehre,” in: Stimmen der Zeit 161 (1957/8): 346 – 59.  For a fascinating contemporary take on Nell-Breuning, see Emunds, Bernhard/Hockerts, Hans Günter (ed.) Den Kapitalismus bändigen. Oswald von Nell-Breunings Impulse für die Sozialpolitik, Paderborn 2015.  Bretherton, Luke, Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship, and the Politics of a Common Life, New York 2015; Laudato si’ available here: http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/en cyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html. Accessed 15 August 2016.  The classic account of “neo-medievalism,” referring to the fracturing of sovereignty in contemporary economics and international relations, is Bull, Hedley, The Anarchical Society, New York 1977.

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References [n/a], Quadragesimo anno, paragraph 47, available here: http://w2.vatican.va/content/piusxi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19310515_quadragesimo-anno.html. Accessed 15 August 2016. [n/a], Rerum novarum, section 6, available here: http://w2.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/en cyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html. Accessed 15 August 2016. A.M, “Driot de propriété,” in: Bulletin Thomiste 9 (1932): 602 – 606. Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologica II, 2, 66, 1; II, 2, 66, 2. 1947 Benziger Bros. edition (translation by English Dominican Province) available online here: https://www.ccel.org/ ccel/aquinas/summa/SS/SS066.html#SSQ66OUTP1. Accessed August 2016. Biederlack, Joseph, S.J., “Zu P. Horvath’s Buch ‘Eigentumsrecht nach dem heiligen Thomas,” in: Theologisch-praktische Quartalschrift 83 (1930): 524 – 35. Bretherton, Luke, Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship, and the Politics of a Common Life, New York 2015. [n/a], Laudato si’ available here: http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/docu ments/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html. Accessed 15 August 2016. Bull, Hedley, The Anarchical Society, New York 1977. Coleman, Charly, The Virtues of Abandon: An Anti-Individualist History of the French Enlightenment, Palo Alto, CA 2014. Chappel, James, “An Economy of Miracles: Catholicism, Social Science, and Capitalism in West Germany,” in: New German Critique, 42 (2015): 9 – 40. Chappel, James, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church, Cambridge MA 2018. Chenaux, Philippe, Entre Maurras et Maritain. Une génération intellectuelle catholique (1920 – 1930), Paris 1999. Corrin, Jay, Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy, Notre Dame, IN 2002. Dietz, Eduard, Das heilige Eigentum und die Arbeiter-Encyclica des Papstes Leo XIII, Karlsruhe 1927. Emunds, Bernhard/Hockerts, Hans Günter (ed.) Den Kapitalismus bändigen. Oswald von Nell-Breunings Impulse für die Sozialpolitik, Paderborn 2015. Gundlach, S.J., Gustav, “Zur Christianisierung unseres Wirtschaftslebens,” in: Stimmen der Zeit 109 (1925), 268 – 80. Habiger, Matthew H., Papal Teaching on Private Property: 1891 to 1981, Dissertation, Catholic University of America (1986). Haessle, Johannes, Das Arbeitsethos der Kirche nach Thomas von Aquin und Leo XIII. Untersuchungen über den Wirtschaftsgeist des Katholizismus, Freiburg 1923. Horváth, Sándor, Eigentumsrecht nach dem h. Thomas von Aquin, Graz 1929. Keller, Franz, Unternehmung und Mehrwert; eine sozial-ethische Studie zur Geschä ftsmoral, Köln 1912. Kraus, J.B., Scholastik, Puritanismus und Kapitalismus. Eine vergleichende dogmengeschichtliche Übergangsstudie, Leipzig 1930. Landmesser, Franz Xaver, “Christliches Eigentumsrecht,” in: Schönere Zukunft IV (1928 – 9): 6 – 8.

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Laros, Matthias, “Eigentum und arbeitsloses Einkommen. Auseinandersetzung zwischen den christlichen Soziallehren und dem Sozialismus,” in: Hochland 27 (1929 – 1930), 120 – 34. Maritain, Jacques, “Personne et propriéte,” appendix to Du régime temporel et de la liberté, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 5, ed. Cercle d’études Jacques et Raïssa Maritain, Fribourg 1982: 487 – 507. McCool, Gerald A., Catholic Theology in the Nineteenth Century: The Quest for a Unitary Method, New York 1977. Merrill, Thomas W./Smith, Henry E., “What Happened to Property in Law and Economics?” in: The Yale Law Journal 111 (2001): 357 – 98. Mertens, Heinrich, “Das naturrechclichte Eigentumsprinzip und die Sozialisierung,” in: Das rote Blatt 2 (1930): 313 – 17. Messner, Johannes, Sozialökonomik und Sozialethik. Studie zur Grundlegung einer systematischen Wirtschaftsethik, Paderborn 1927. Messner, Johannes, Dollfuss: An Austrian Patriot, Norfolk, VA 2004. Misner, Paul, Catholic Labor Movements in Europe: Social Thought and Action, 1914 – 1965, Washington, D.C. 2015. Mounier, Emmanuel, “De la propriété capitaliste à la propriété humaine,” in: Esprit 2 (1934): 5 – 70. von Nell-Breuning, Oswald, S.J., Grundzüge der Börsenmoral, Freiburg, 1928. von Nell-Breuning, Oswald, “Eigentum vor Gott,” in: Das Neue Reich 12 (1929 – 30): 295 – 7. von Nell-Breuning, Oswald, S.J., “Eigentum vor Gott,” in: Das Neue Reich 12 (1929 – 1930): 319 – 21. von Nell-Breuning, Oswald, Reorganization of Social Economy: The Social Encyclical Developed and Explained, transl. Bernard W. Dempsey, New York 1936. von Nell-Breuning, Oswald, “Die politische Verwirklichung der katholischen Soziallehre,” in: Stimmen der Zeit 161 (1957/8): 346 – 59. von Nell-Breuning, Oswald, Wie sozial ist die Kirche. Leistung und Versagen der katholischen Soziallehre, Düsseldorf 1972. Orel, Anton, Oeconomia perennis. Die Wirtschaftslehre der Menschheitsüberlieferung im Wandel der Zeiten und in ihrer umwandelbaren Bedeutung, Mainz 1930. Pieper, Josef, “Thomas von Aquin und das Eigentumsrecht,” in: Berthold Wald (ed.), Frühe soziologistche Schriften, Hamburg 2004, 53 – 60. Pieper, Josef, Das Arbeitsrecht des Neuen Reiches und die Enzyklika Quadragesimo Anno, Münster 1934. Piffl, Friedrich Gustav, et al., Lehren und Weisungen der österreichische Bischöfe über soziale Fragen der Gegenwart, Wien 1926. Purdy, Jedediah, The Meaning of Property: Freedom, Community, and the Legal Imagination, New Haven 2010 Ryan, John, A Better Economic Order, New York 1935. Schilling, Otto, Der kirchliche Eigentumsbegriff, Freiburg 1920. Schilling, Otto, Christliche Gesellschaftslehre, Freiburg 1926. Schulte, Karl Joseph, “Richtlinien über Kapital und Arbeit,” in: Soziale Kultur 47 (1927): 81 – 3. Skinner, Quentin, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 2, New York 1978. Spicq, C. O.P., “La notion analogique de dominium et le droit de propriété,” in: Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques 20 (1931): 52 – 76.

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Tonneau, J., Review of Horváth, in: Bulletin Thomiste 8 (1931): 373 – 6. Vermeersch, Arthur, S.J., “Soziale Krise und Reformtheorien,” in: Theologisch-praktische Quartalschrift 82 (1928): 687 – 724. Wassermann, Janek, Black Vienna: The Radical Right in the Red City, 1918 – 1938, Ithaca, NY 2014. Winter, Ernst Karl, Die Sozialmetaphysik der Scholastik, Wien 1929.

Wim Weymans

Religion, human rights and democracy in post-1940 France in theory and practice: from Maritain’s Thomism to Vignaux’s secular realism The revival of Thomistic ideas that began in the 19th century – through a movement also known as Neo-Thomism – was influential in many fields, and politics was no exception. One thinker who thought hard about the relationship between Catholic religion and modern politics and rights was the philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882– 1973). As a neo-Thomist he sought to show that Thomism was compatible with – and could contribute to – modern democracy and human rights. To show that in Maritain’s time alternatives existed for his Thomistic views on religion, rights and democracy, I will confront his ideas with those of his younger compatriot Paul Vignaux (1904 – 1987), who was both an expert in medieval philosophy and an influential union-leader.¹ At first sight, Maritain and Vignaux appear to have a lot in common. A first commonality was personal. Just as Maritain’s wife Raïssa Maritain (1883 – 1960) was as much as an intellectual and writer as her husband, so Vignaux’s partner Georgette Vignaux, née Barrion (1912– 1993) was a scholar who shared her spouse’s research-interests and often published with him. Even more important were the intellectual similarities. Both Frenchmen studied philosophy, especially mediaeval philosophy. They were convinced Catholics, but remained wary of Support for the research underlying this chapter came in part from the Fund for Scientific Research – Flanders (Belgium) and a Career Integration Grant (CIG) of the Marie Curie Actions. Earlier parts of this paper were already presented at workshops in Brussels (May 2012) and Leuven (June 2015). Thanks are owed to James Chappel for his suggestions during the latter workshop. I also thank Jean Lecuir for providing me with information about Georgette Vignaux.  On Vignaux’s biography see Georgi, Frank, “Paul Vignaux,” in: Jacques Julliard/Michel Winock (ed.), Dictionnaire des intellectuels français, Paris 1996, 1161– 1162; Lecuir, Jean, “Paul Vignaux à Toulouse: résistance spirituelle et politique en zone non occupée (juin 1940-juin 1941),” in: Jacques Boulnois (ed.), Paul Vignaux, citoyen et philosophe (1904 – 1987), Turnhout 2013, 51– 120; Jean-Pierre, Laurent, “Paul Vignaux; inspirateur de la ‘Deuxième Gauche’: récits d’un exil français aux Etats-Unis pendant la Second Guerre Mondiale,” in: Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps 60 (2000): 48 – 56; Rosanvallon, Pierre, “De la C.F.D.T. et la laïcité,” in: Esprit 4– 5 (1977): 142– 148; Vignaux, Paul, De la CFTC à la CFDT: syndicalisme et socialisme. “Reconstruction” (1946 – 1972), Paris 1980. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110588255-004

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Christian-Democracy. Politically they were stridently anti-totalitarian, condemning not only communism but also Nazism and both supported the republican camp during the Spanish CIVIL WAR. It thus came as no surprise that these two Catholic intellectuals had to leave France during the Second World War and ended up supporting the Résistance from abroad (although Vignaux remained critical of De Gaulle and Gaullism). They both fled to the US, Maritain in 1940 and Vignaux a year later, where they played a very active part in the French wartime expat community. Maritain and Vignaux knew each other quite well: they reviewed or prefaced each other’s works and Maritain even helped Vignaux several times in getting a visa for the US. It finally worked out thanks to the Rockefeller foundation, which invited Vignaux to teach at Notre Dame University in the Chicago area. In 1942 Vignaux moved to New York where he taught at the École Libre des Hautes Etudes, which was co-founded by Alexandre Koyré and led by Maritain. During their exile Maritain and Vignaux were also active in delivering radio-speeches in French on the BBC and the Voice of America against the Nazi-occupation and collaboration.² Despite these similarities and personal connections they did end up interpreting the relation between religion and politics quite differently. Vignaux was active as a mediaevalist and union-leader and in both domains he initiated a secularization that would put him at odds with Maritain. This may in part be because Vignaux came from a region in the South of France around Toulouse where even amongst Christian leftists, political ideals were seen in strongly secular and republican terms. Maritain instead represented a Thomistic attempt to reconcile modern ideals such as human rights and democracy with eternal Christian values and Thomistic natural law. Yet, Paul and Georgette Vignaux ironically legitimized their political secularism by invoking medieval or theological sources. While Maritain turned to Thomas (1225 – 1274) for inspiration, Paul Vignaux referred in part to Duns Scotus (1266 – 1308), a mediaeval philosopher who criticized Thomas. And rather than looking for answers within her own Catholic tradition (as Maritain did), Georgette Vignaux was inspired by the contemporary Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892– 1971), whose work she wrote her PhD on. Like Neo-Scholastics, Paul and Georgette Vignaux used mediaeval or theological sources to interpret modernity, but unlike them they used it to le-

 On Maritain’s and Vignaux’s time in the US, see Loyer, Emmanuelle, Paris à New York. Intellectuels et artistes français en exil 1940 – 1947, Paris 2005, especially 249, 298 – 304, 321– 325, Fourcade, Michel, “Jacques Maritain et l’Europe en exil (1940 – 1945),” in: Bernard Hubert (ed.), Jacques Maritain en Europe, Paris 1996, 281– 320, and on Vignaux’s time in the US, see Jean-Pierre, “Paul Vignaux; inspirateur de la ‘Deuxième Gauche’,” 48 – 56. On Georgette Vignaux see also Lecuir, Jean, “Vignaux Georgette ou Georgette Paul-Vignaux, née Barrion,” 2018.

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gitimize secularism. By exploring these differences it will become clear that there were various ways to reconcile religion and modern politics in post-war Europe and that Thomism was only one of them. I also hope that Vignaux’s case – a thinker who was influential yet remains under-researched – invites intellectual historians to rethink the concept of influence. Intellectual historians and philosophers typically measure a thinkers’ importance by the intrinsic quality of their ideas or by the influence on other thinkers. Yet, in so doing, they often forget the concrete impact some intellectuals had – or failed to have – on society. When it comes to real impact on institutions the influence of a now forgotten scholar such as Vignaux was arguably bigger than Maritain’s or other well-known philosophers. While Maritain is commonly seen as a major Catholic thinker that influenced post-war politics, in reality his institutional legacy was fairly limited and short-lived, especially in politics and society.³ In contrast, Vignaux’s ideas had a real impact on one of the biggest French unions in the 1950s and 1960s, although he did not publish as many theoretical works as Maritain. According to some French historians Vignaux’s intuitions even “disrupted” French history, adding that Vignaux ranks “without a doubt amongst the very rare who profoundly remodeled the society in which they were born.”⁴ We shall see that Paul and Georgette Vignaux’s ideas still proved influential in the late 1970s when they inspired a new generation of political thinkers that remain important today.

I Vignaux’s contextualized secularism against Maritain’s (and Gilson’s) “Christian Philosophy” Vignaux was first and foremost a well-regarded scholar, who taught medieval philosophy at the renowned École Pratique des Hautes Études as the student of the famous mediaevalist and Neo-Thomist Étienne Gilson, who was also a friend of Maritain and who likewise fled to the US during the war. When Gilson became a professor at the prestigious Collège de France in 1934, the then 30-year-

 As Jan-Werner Müller admits in his Contesting Democracy. Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe, New Haven et al. 2013, 137– 138. Yet in that book Vignaux is not even mentioned, despite his real influence.  Hamon, Hervé/Rotman, Patrick, La deuxième gauche. Histoire intellectuelle et politique de la CFDT, Paris 2002, 13, 21 (my translation).

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old Vignaux succeeded him at the École Pratique des Hautes Études where he stayed until his retirement in 1976. As experts in mediaeval philosophy Maritain and Vignaux both reflected on the role mediaeval philosophy ought to play in contemporary society. This became clear in the 1930s when Gilson made the case for what he called “Christian philosophy” whereby Christianity was seen as an indispensable help to philosophical reason. This prompted a debate in which Maritain also advocated such a Christian philosophy. Others, by contrast, sharply criticized this concept. Consider Fernand van Steenberghen (1904 – 1993), the Thomist from Leuven who saw philosophy as a purely rational enterprise that should be kept separate from religion.⁵ In this debate Vignaux defended an interesting “third way.” As a staunch secularist, he rejects Gilson’s and Maritain’s idea of Christian philosophy and instead advocated the right of philosophers to look at medieval texts in a philosophical non-religious way. Yet, at the same time, Vignaux also disagrees with Van Steenberghen’s artificial and ahistorical distinction between philosophical and theological texts. Instead, Vignaux acknowledges that most medieval texts were theological in nature, yet he defends philosophers who wish to read these texts in a purely philosophical way. That way, Vignaux tries to do justice to mediaeval philosophy in all its dimensions without denying its philosophical nature. He thus avoids not only theological temptations by Gilson and Maritain but also a rigid ahistorical rationalism by Neo-Scholastics like Van Steenberghen.⁶ Although it would be tempting to make a sharp distinction between Vignaux’s academic and his political work, it remains important to highlight the connections. Firstly, Vignaux’s staunch secularism was present in both his research (as we just saw) and his politics. His academic and political work also met in his role as a leader and co-founder of the secular teacher’s union SGEN, where Vignaux would defend a secular university.⁷ Moreover, as we shall see, his political plea for a secular society (which Maritain and Gilson deplored) was based in part on his research in mediaeval philosophy.⁸

 For a reconstruction of this debate see Imbach, Ruedi, “Paul Vignaux et la philosophie Chrétienne,” in: Jacques Boulnois (ed.) Paul Vignaux, citoyen et philosophe (1904 – 1987), Turnhout 2013, 131– 135.  Ibid., 137– 138.  The SGEN (Syndicat général de l’éducation nationale), founded in 1937 as a secular union long before the secularization of the SFTC of which it was a part, see also Hamon/Rotman, La deuxième gauche, 20 – 21.  See Imbach, “Paul Vignaux et la philosophie Chrétienne,” 139 – 140.

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II Maritain’s revival of Thomism and human rights Before we can understand Vignaux’s political alternative to Maritain, we first need to focus on Maritain’s views on democracy and human rights. Today it seems self-evident to assume that the Catholic Church, by and large, respects modern democracy and human rights. Yet it is worth recalling that until the Second World War that same Catholic Church mostly condemned democracy and rights. One reason why the Church decided to embrace the rights it had condemned for so long was surely its negative experiences with totalitarian regimes on the left and the right. But this decision was also in large part inspired by Maritain’s plea to take a new look at modern democracy and rights. Fittingly for a Thomist, this new look was inspired by old ideas. Although Maritain acknowledges the modern post-medieval condition – where no single church can pretend to embody society – he still finds his inspiration in pre-modern thinkers such as Thomas and Aristotle. As historians such as Samuel Moyn have recently pointed out, Maritain not only invented a new way for the Church to relate to human rights and democracy but he also simultaneously concealed the novelty of this invention by pretending that the Church had always been a staunch defender of rights and democracy, which was not true. In fact, modern individual rights historically emerged as the new foundation of the modern state that replaced the Church’s waning political power. Thomism and its belief in a natural law had to die first before the idea of modern individual rights could be born. As Moyn summarizes: “nearly all histories (…) concur that the rise of rights in political theory occurred after and because of the destruction of the Thomistic natural law tradition.”⁹ Yet during the war Maritain instead pretended that modern rights had always been part of the Thomistic tradition. As Moyn explains: Maritain – as if the Thomistic movement had not long and unanimously rejected modern rights – claimed that the one implied the other. (…) Thanks to Maritain above all, the older view that Christianity’s political and social doctrine could not be reformulated in terms of rights was dropped in exchange for the claim that only the Christian vision placing the personal entitlements in the framework of the common good afforded a persuasive theory of rights.¹⁰

 Moyn, Samuel, Christian Human Rights, Philadelphia 2015, 83.  Ibid., 83.

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Yet even when Maritain and the Church more openly started defending rights and democracy in the 1940s, they did so in a fairly selective and specific way. For one, Maritain and the Church emphasized those rights that suited their case, such as “the right freely to believe the truth recognized by one’s conscience” which Maritain calls “the most basic and inalienable of all human rights.”¹¹ More importantly, rights are seen as attributes of the human person, that is to say, a spiritual human being embedded in a Christian community, rather than its unchristian counterpart, an individual driven by materialism. Moreover, for Maritain, a “true philosophy of the rights of the human person is based upon the true idea of natural law.”¹² Although natural law is rooted in all of us, the Gospel is still needed in order to discover it. As Maritain explains: “Only when the Gospel has penetrated to the very depth of human substance will natural law appear in its flower and perfection.”¹³ So both Maritain and the Church accept democracy and rights yet at the same time also stress that democracy needs Christianity to flourish. As Maritain argues: “Christian truths and incentives and the inspiration of the Gospel (…) are the very soul, inner strength, and spiritual stronghold of democracy.”¹⁴ Yet, this need for Christianity is also the Achilles’ heel of Maritain’s model. For how can a democracy and rights function according to this model in secularized societies?

III A voluntarist interpretation of human rights, democracy and history: Paul Vignaux’s reappraisal of Duns Scotus If Maritain’s ideal of a democracy and rights still presupposed “that the faith to which the majority of people belonged [was] the Catholic faith,”¹⁵ then what can religion contribute to a secular society in which only a minority can be called truly Catholic? To answer that question, we need to turn back to the US in the 1940s where Vignaux criticized Maritain’s view of human rights and came up

    

Maritain, Jacques, Man and the State, Washington D.C. 1998, 150. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 90. Ibid., 176. Ibid., 175.

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with an alternative that is more compatible with modern secular societies and their emphasis on diversity and freedom.¹⁶ Maritain, like Thomas, founds and grounds rights in “an ideal order” of essences. As he explains: “the concept of such rights (…) is only valid and rationally tenable if each existing individual has a nature or essence which is the locus of intelligible necessities and necessary truths, that is to say if (…) a constellation of facts and events envelops and reveals (…) a universe of Essences transcending the fact and the event.”¹⁷ Likewise, natural law, for him is “a divide between the suitable and the unsuitable, the proper and the improper, which depends on human nature or essence and the unchangeable necessities rooted in it.”¹⁸ Against Thomas’s and Maritain’s essentialism Vignaux defends a more practical approach to looking at politics and rights, which for example involves judging institutions by looking at historical circumstances rather than by invoking an essential definition of democracy. At the same time, Vignaux does acknowledge the universalist appeal of human rights and democracy and does not want to completely reduce them to their historical context. Like Maritain, he looks for a universal foundation of human rights in human nature, a foundation which he also finds in mediaeval sources. But rather than turning to Thomas’s essentialism for inspiration he invoked Duns Scotus, who was one of Thomas’s critics. One could perhaps say that Scotus had the same meaning for Vignaux as Thomas had for Maritain. If we want to understand human history, freedom, contingency and change, then eternal ideas – such as Aristotle’s or Plato’s – or the Thomistic idea of a human nature, are not a good place to start for Vignaux. For Thomas, God still created human beings based on the knowledge of a pre-existing model or idea of human nature. In contrast, in Scotus’s voluntarist theology, in which “God as a cause is free from restraint,”¹⁹ God is no longer bound by knowledge of a model or idea that precedes his will. Instead, God is radically free to act according to his own will and invent a world of free and contingent human beings that are able to truly write their own history. For Scotus, “at the very foundation

 See especially Vignaux’s “A propos de ‘Christianisme et démocratie,’” in: Renaissance II and III (1944– 1945): 446 – 460 as well as his “humanisme et historicité” in: Horacio Santiago Otero (ed.), Humanismo y tecnología en el mundo actual, Madrid 1979, 21– 33 in which he looked back on his earlier writings as well as his “Pour discuter de marxisme en Occident,” in: Les Quatre Fleuves 8 (1978): 46 – 51. See also Fourcade, “Jacques Maritain et l’Europe en exil,” 318 – 319.  Maritain, Man and the State, 96 – 97 (my emphasis).  Ibid., 88.  Vignaux, Paul, Philosophy in the Middle-Ages. An Introduction, Transl. E.C. Hall, Westport 1959, 152.

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of being, something escapes the necessity of natures, so dear to philosophy” and, as a result, “the world becomes free for the human-divine history recounted by Scripture.”²⁰ Contingency and freedom are thus rehabilitated, because in Scotus’s view “contingency is not reduced to a (…) simple lack of being, but constitutes a positive reality,” an “indetermination by the plenitude of a will, human or divine.”²¹ It follows that for Scotus “God treats with complete freedom the beings He has freely created.”²² In Vignaux’s secularized version of Scotus’s view of history, history no longer appears as a mere realization of an eternal idea or a natural law. Rather than being determined by his nature, man determines himself. Democracy is therefore not founded on the essence of man, but rather on mankind’s capacity to write its own history. Maritain’s Thomistic focus on necessities, knowledge, nature and essences thus gives way to Vignaux’s Scotist emphasis on contingency, will, freedom, and self-determination. ²³ In Vignaux’s voluntarist view of human nature, rights are thus no longer inferred from a predetermined human nature, essence or natural law, but they are instead founded in a “declaration of will,” i. e. in the citizens’ practice of treating each other in a specific way. For Vignaux, they result from man’s open-ended natural capacity to determine his own future and write his own history. The free will thus becomes a new principle of history. While man has the potential to write his own history, this does not automatically imply democracy and rights. Rather than being discovered at some point in time, human rights are produced by the will of the citizens, hence the declaration of the rights of man. To the extent that everyone can, in principle, determine their own future in democratic regimes, everyone has access to rights. As a result, human rights cease to require a specific (Christian) community (as was still the case in Maritain), but now become (potentially) truly universal.²⁴

 Ibid., 152.  Ibid., 152.  Ibid., 152.  See for all this Vignaux, “A propos de ‘Christianisme et démocratie,’” 449 – 457 and his “humanisme et historicité,” 25 – 27 and his “Pour discuter de marxisme en Occident,” 47– 49.  See for all this Vignaux, “A propos de ‘Christianisme et démocratie,’” 455 – 458 and his “humanisme et historicité,” 25 – 27 and his “Pour discuter de marxisme en Occident,” 48 – 49. In 1980 the leftist French philosopher Claude Lefort (1924– 2010) would write very similar things about human rights (albeit examined within a different philosophical framework and without the reference to theology or mediaeval philosophy) in his essay “Politics and human rights” (that was reprinted in his book, appropriately called, L’Invention démocratique), while (implicitly and partly) defending positions of the “Second Left” that Vignaux had already (partly) conceptualized many decades earlier. See Lefort, Claude, “Politics and human rights,” in: Id., The political forms of modern society, Cambridge 1986, 239 – 272, for example on 258 where he writes:

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Vignaux’s legitimation and definition of rights and democracy is arguably easier to reconcile with modern secularism, pluralism and individual freedom than Maritain’s conservative views. Yet, unlike Maritain, Vignaux never really developed or disseminated his views on human rights.²⁵ Where Vignaux’s few publications on human rights appear to have had only a limited direct impact (unlike Maritain’s), Paul and Georgette’s views on democracy and religion did have a real impact. It is to these views to which I now turn.

IV Niebuhr’s Christian realism and its influence on Paul and Georgette Vignaux Vignaux not only found inspiration for his secular and modern views of rights and democracy in medieval thinkers such as Duns Scotus but also in contemporary theologians. Unlike many of his French contemporaries, Vignaux and his wife wrote in English and followed contemporary debates in American society. While in the US, the French Catholics Paul and Georgette Vignaux not only discovered American sociologists but also the work of the American protestant theologian and advocate of the working class, Niebuhr, which strongly influenced them.²⁶ In this context, it is worth focusing on Niebuhr’s ideas, which have recently become popular again in the US (especially in the Obama years).²⁷ One reason for his renewed popularity is that for him religion mattered in public life and foreign affairs, not to legitimize policies or foster self-righteousness but rather as a

“From the legal recognition of strikes or trade unions, to rights relative to work (…) there has developed on the basis of the rights of man a whole history that transgressed the boundaries within which the state claimed to define itself, a history that remains open.” On the views of Lefort and his student Rosanvallon (who was active in Vignaux’s union), see my “Freedom through political representation? Lefort, Gauchet and Rosanvallon on the relationship between state and society,” in: European Journal of Political Theory, 4, 3, (2005): 263 – 282.  The fact that Vignaux mainly (and briefly) discussed his views on human rights in the 1940s and only turned to human rights again in the late 1970s, seems to confirm Samuel Moyn’s thesis (developed in The Last Utopia) that between the late 1940s and mid-1970s human rights only had a very limited impact and that they were then mostly seen as politically irrelevant.  See Hebding, Rémy, “Réalisme chrétien et CFDT,” in: Autres temps. Les cahiers du christianisme social 2 (1984): 24– 30.  In what follows I draw on Diggins’s presentation of Niebuhr’s ideas (Why Niebuhr now?). Unless stated otherwise, quotes are Diggins summarizing Niebuhr, rather than quotes from Niebuhr’s work.

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source of doubt.²⁸ Niebuhr connected skepticism with religion because for him “sin is the pretension to knowledge.”²⁹ In his view, man is “tempted to deny the limited character of his knowledge and the finiteness of his perspectives.”³⁰ Men are sinful and knowledge is limited and “the real ‘sin’ was the false assumption of the liberal reformer that his own mind could comprehend itself and the world.”³¹ For Niebuhr religion does not offer us eternal truths and certainties, as it did for Maritain. If religion has a political role to play then it is instead precisely to “teach humankind to remember what it struggles to forget: the indelible stain of sin that imprisons the self in its own finitude” and to guard against “the illusion that the human capacity for knowledge is self-sufficient.”³² While Niebuhr was skeptical about the possibility of knowing the world, he had less doubts about how humans function. His view of human nature was as clear as it was bleak, especially when it comes to individuals acting in groups. Although “individuals can [still] ‘refine and purge’ their egoistic impulses, acting responsibly and benevolently toward one another,” “whenever individuals organize themselves into groups, nations, classes, and races” then “selfishness, dishonesty, and hypocrisy invariably predominate.”³³ This explains why Niebuhr’s thought is referred to as Christian Realism. Like Marx and Nietzsche, he saw conflict and selfish interests as inevitable and was suspicious towards those who pretend to act on the basis of good will without any ulterior motifs. In his view, “human beings are motivated mainly by self-interest – all the more so when they deny it.”³⁴ While all this sounds Marxist, Niebuhr’s realism also made him very critical not only of liberal Christian reformers but also of communists because they naively thought that “they could centralize power for the proletariat without creating new sources of political oppression.”³⁵ It was mainly Vignaux’s wife Georgette who propagated ideas that came very close to Niebuhr’s. From the 1940s onwards she did research on Niebuhr, which culminated in her PhD on his ideas, which was published in 1957.³⁶ In 1957 she also published under a pseudonym an important and influential essay in her husband’s secularist union-magazine Reconstruction (an essay which is some-

        

Diggins, John Patrick, Why Niebuhr now?, Chicago et al. 2011, 4, 6. Ibid., 16. Niebuhr cited in ibid., 16. Diggins, Why Niebuhr now?., 19. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 44. Entitled La théologie de l’histoire chez Reinhold Niebuhr.

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times thought to be Paul Vignaux’s). In this essay, she shows the impact ideas such as Niebuhr’s have for the relationship between religion and politics and what lessons the union should learn from this. Her essay remains significant because of its influence and impact but also because it was exceptional that a periodical dedicated to secularism published an essay that was partly theological in its content.³⁷ Let us examine Georgette Vignaux’s view on politics, which she describes as follows: Neither as knowledge nor as action can politics ever be certain and complete. Politics is a mix of knowledge of facts and adherence to particular values. It oscillates constantly between an analysis of the present and a surge towards the future. What distinguishes politics in this sense from simple pragmatism is a concern for a better future; what distinguishes it from dogmatism is the conviction that the future will always exceed our predictions.

In her view political choices reflect the nature of “political reality, which despite certain elements of determinism, mainly is shaped by events, by wills, and by the unpredictable exercise of freedom.”³⁸ Given its unpredictable and complex nature and its own logic it would be wrong to let politics be interfered with universal values that all too often merely served and concealed particular interests. This is why Georgette Vignaux defends, in Berger’s words, “a view of politics which distinguished its moral basis from that of religion and which sharply rejected all notions, theological or Marxist, about the absolute character of the interests and values at stake in politics.”³⁹ By advocating a “conception of the proper spheres of religion, politics, and society and of the norms and institutions that could maintain the boundaries between the spheres”⁴⁰ Georgette Vignaux can be seen as part of an older tradition of liberal Catholicism, represented in the 19th century by people like Lamennais. But in all this she is clearly inspired mostly by Niebuhr’s emphasis on the limited

 Vignaux, Georgette Paul [Georgette Bérault, pseud.], “Conscience politique et conscience religieuse,” in: Cahiers Reconstruction 12, Issue 43, April (1957): 17– 24. Its impact showed in the fact that it was reprinted in 1960 and that even in the 1970s one still referred to this essay as a “reference text” (“un texte de référence”) (Rosanvallon told me this in an interview in May 2012). On the theological exception in Reconstruction see Hamon/Rotman, La deuxième gauche, 37.  Twice Georgette Vignaux as cited (in translation) in Berger, Suzanne, “Religious Transformation and the Future of Politics,” in: European Sociological review 1, 1 (1985): 23 – 45, 31.  Berger, “Religious Transformation,” 31.  Ibid., 30.

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nature of human knowledge and his pessimistic view of mankind. Like liberal Catholics and Niebuhr before her, she thus shows that it is possible to keep religion out of politics out of religious or theological grounds. The work of Paul and Georgette Vignaux also demonstrates that Christian realism was not only linked to American Protestantism,⁴¹ but that it was also picked up by secular syndicalist traditions. Moreover, especially Paul Vignaux’s writings show how one can make the case for a realist position (albeit in a secularized version) while defending human rights.⁴² Although he cites both Niebuhr and his wife’s article influenced by Niebuhr, Paul Vignaux appeared to have had some reservations about Niebuhr. He was for example rather critical of Niebuhr’s denouncement of man’s ambition, saying that it was typical for theologians to put man down once he starts to stand up in democratic societies. Here too Vignaux subscribes to radical forms of secularism, cautioning theologians that they should stop seeing man’s progress in history in competition with salvation history.⁴³ Although Vignaux’s secularism was paradoxically partly legitimized by mediaeval or theological sources, he still made them fit into his secular framework. Moreover, Paul and Georgette Vignaux’s views on politics were not, of course, only influenced by theological or mediaeval thinkers, but also by modern theorists such as Merleau-Ponty, Bergson or Hauriou.

V Vignaux versus Maritain How do the views of Paul and Georgette Vignaux compare to Maritain’s? As we know by now, both Maritain and Vignaux reject communism, albeit for different reasons and in different ways. For Maritain atheist communism should be warded off by Christianity. Although he defended a certain separation between Church and state – and was wary of Christian-Democracy⁴⁴ – he therefore still believed it necessary for politics to be inspired by Christian ideals. For Paul and Georgette Vignaux even this inspiration is problematic. For them Christianity and Marxism should both be kept out of politics. At first sight Georgette Vignaux sounds like a Marxist when she subscribes to Niebuhr’s view that particular interests try to hide behind a so-called common good and other seemingly univer See Moyn, Christian human rights, 104, 134– 135.  Something that was unlikely in the Christian realist camp where Niebuhr disdained human rights. See Moyn, Christian human rights, 135.  See for all this Vignaux, “A propos de ‘Christianisme et démocratie’,” 458.  Müller, Contesting Democracy, 137– 138.

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sal values. But the problem with Marxism for Vignaux is that it paradoxically pretends to speak in the name of a universal truth, by seeing the particular viewpoint of the working class as an absolute truth. Yet, neither a Christian nor a Marxist has any privileged insights into the common good and their attempts to transcend their historical context and condition are doomed to fail. The fallible and fragile nature of his or her political choices cannot be compensated for by any transcendent certainties, be they religious or Marxist. Instead she advocates a critical perspective that goes beyond Marxism in so far as it is not only critical vis-à-vis other groups but also towards its own perspective.⁴⁵ So while Maritain rejected communism in the name of a Christian universal truth, Vignaux rejected the political role of both Christianity and Marxism in the name of the impossibility to take ahistorical universal viewpoints in politics. Maritain still seemed to fear that without the inspiration of eternal Catholic truths, democracies would fall prey to individualism, relativism or totalitarianism. In contrast, Vignaux argues that it is possible to reject totalitarianism and defend democracy while at the same time supporting modern secular and liberal values that have increased in popularity since the 1970s. Vignaux’s secularism was indeed mostly inspired by freedom, and a resistance against attempts to be controlled by any party, be it catholic or communist.⁴⁶ Vignaux’s secular alternative also shows that it is still possible to criticize the status quo, but this time in the name of doubt rather than certainty. Paul and Georgette Vignaux developed their ideas in the 1940s and late 1950s, at a time when democracy and human rights were not universally applauded and Marxism was still very much alive in France. In that sense they were arguably very much ahead of their time.⁴⁷ Moreover, the first two decades after the Second World War saw the return and even increase of the power of the Church in politics and in society. Maritain could thus be forgiven for seeing rights and politics the way he did. After all, at that time Christian Democratic politicians reconstructed Europe based on personalist ideals and human rights, which were seen in the 1950s as part of a West-European conservative ideology. In fact, back then human rights were often identified so strongly with Christian ideology that hardly any other ideology wanted to invoke them. In those days, human rights were seen as particular rather than universal.⁴⁸ If Maritain or

 Vignaux, “Conscience politique et conscience religieuse,” 17– 24 and Hebding, “Réalisme chrétien,” 24.  Hamon/Rotman, La deuxième gauche, 44– 45, 54.  Ibid., 45.  See on all this: Moyn, Samuel, The Last Utopia. Human Rights in History, Cambridge Mass. et al. 2010 , 64– 68, 73 – 81.

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the Church had justified human rights or democracy since the 1940s we have to remember that this defense involves a very specific, “personalist,” definition of human rights and democracy that it is in many respects at odds with our views. Yet, as we now know, from the 1960s onwards the Catholic Church’s power and influence started to diminish as a result of further secularization. After its triumph in the 1950s, in the 1960s the Church in Europe rapidly saw “complex networks of values, beliefs, practices and organizations built up by the Church for centuries (…) disintegrating.”⁴⁹ From that point onwards Maritain’s ideas partly lost their relevance and new ideas, like Vignaux’s, were called for.

VI Influence and legacy: the case of the CFDT Maritain and Vignaux not only reflected upon the relationship between religion and post-war politics but also tried to shape it. As we have seen, Maritain’s writings were in tune with the Catholic Church’s “personalist” policies, that had some political impact, even when Maritain (like Vignaux) had his doubts about Christian Democracy. Yet it is one thing to reject Christian Democracy and quite another to develop a functional alternative. Unlike Maritain, Vignaux did not remain (mostly) on the sidelines but instead tried to show in practice that unions can be independent vis-à-vis political parties (be they communist or Christian) and yet still influence policy and effectively defend workers’ interests. Even more so than Maritain, Vignaux combined scholarship with political action. Alongside his passion for abstract and complex ideas from a very distant past, Vignaux was also an influential union-leader who dealt with very concrete and political matters of his time. After arriving in the US in 1941 Vignaux even became an intelligence agent (paid by the OSS, the CIA’s precursor) and took initiatives that aimed at convincing American union-members to sympathize with the French resistance, thus overcoming American isolationism. For example, he set up an anti-Gaullist magazine titled France Speaks, in which articles by members of the French resistance were translated with the aim of winning the American public over for the cause of the French resistance and to convince American unions to help finance it.⁵⁰ When returning home after the war, Vignaux continued his unionist activities in-

 Berger, “Religious Transformation,” 23.  See Jean-Pierre, “Paul Vignaux; inspirateur de la ‘Deuxième Gauche’,” 50, 53 and Loyer, Paris à New York, 200 – 201, 321– 323.

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side the Catholic CFTC union.⁵¹ In 1946 he founded the aforementioned magazine called Reconstruction, which allowed him and others to develop their ideas about the autonomy of unions vis-à-vis politics and religion, both at a practical and at a more theoretical level (hence the publication of Georgette Vignaux’s aforementioned essay). That secular minority around the periodical Reconstruction, tried to make the entire CFTC secular and in 1964 they finally succeeded when the CFTC was turned into a deconfessionalized union that still remains numerically the biggest union in France. Its new secular name became the “French Democratic Federation of Work,” in its French acronym the CFDT (La Confédération française démocratique du travail).⁵² The CFDT not only rejected totalitarianism (while criticizing capitalism) but also offered something positive instead: a radical form of socialist democracy with strong trade unions independent from the church, political parties or the state. “Democracy” (the “D” in CFDT) thus became the new label and identity that replaced Christianity (the ‘C’ in the old CFTC). As a result, the CFDT “provided fertile terrain for the germination of new ideas” and it has “come to be seen as constituting an alternative model, a “second Left,” one without the ideological rigidities of the traditional Left, one that practices a more open, democratic, pragmatic mode of representation.”⁵³ All this matters because in France many Catholics on the left were tempted by Marxist ideologies. They often left the Church by simply replacing their Christian religion by its communist secular counterpart or they stayed in the Church but preferred to be close to the proletariat as embodied by the Communist Union. By offering a non-Marxist democratic alternative to former-Christians or Leftist Christians who were dissatisfied with the Church, the CFDT limited the power of communism in France.⁵⁴ The CFDT indeed became “a haven for political syndical traditions in exile from a Left dominated by anti-clericalism and Marxism of rigidly orthodox persuasion.”⁵⁵ The CFDT thus also showed that Vignaux’s secular model did not have to lead to relativism, as thinkers like Maritain still seemed to fear. To the contrary, Vignaux and his union combined a modern critique of capitalism with a progres-

 Confédération française des travailleurs chrétiens (French Confederation of Christian Workers).  On the secularization of the CFTC see Hamon/Rotman, La deuxième gauche, Vignaux, De la CFTC à la CFDT, 15 – 39, Vignaux, Paul, “Un catholicisme républicain,” in: Esprit 4– 5 (1977): 148 – 152 and Rosanvallon, “De la C.F.D.T. et la laïcité,” 142– 148.  Berger, “Religious Transformation,” 31– 32.  Hamon/Rotman, La deuxième gauche, 369.  Berger, “Religious Transformation,” 31.

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sive defense of democracy, freedom and rights.⁵⁶ Vignaux and his union were known for both their unorthodox critique of existing dogmas as well as for their anti-utopian realism that led to an empirical and pragmatic approach to social and political change.⁵⁷ The lack of an absolute timeless truth thus became a source of critique against the status quo and a stimulus for intellectual debate. Moreover, Vignaux’s realism could help the left criticize not just the established order, but also its idealistic or moralistic utopian visions. Vignaux’s ideals of an anti-totalitarian democratic socialism also inspired a whole generation of French unionists, who would go on to play important roles, including the later European Commission president Jacques Delors (b 1925) who was a union-member since 1945 and who met Vignaux in 1953, under whose supervision he contributed to Reconstruction. ⁵⁸ But it also influenced intellectuals such as Jacques Julliard (b 1933) or, of an even younger generation, Pierre Rosanvallon (b 1948). The latter first became active in the 1970s as a union-organizer and speechwriter of the then leading “Second Left” socialist Michel Rocard (1930 – 2016) (who was later sidelined by Mitterrand) and later, from the 1980s onwards, became a scholar and important French intellectual.⁵⁹

VII Epilogue This chapter firstly hopes to have shown that in the 1940s Thomistic political theory was just one out of many options one could choose from and already by the 1940s it was possible to defend democracy against totalitarianism without embracing Thomism or conservatism. Scholars like Moyn rightly emphasize that human rights for Maritain were still inherently Christian, conservative and partisan. Yet Vignaux’s (admittedly relatively unknown) critique of Maritain demonstrates that these rights also often transcended Christianity. It reveals that already in the 1940s secular and leftist visions of human rights and democracy were on offer that come close to our own. This chapter has also argued that even Paul and Georgette Vignaux’s strongly secularist views of modern democ-

 Hamon/Rotman, La deuxième gauche, 44, 47, 53, 57, 90 – 94, 107.  Ibid., 38, 44– 45, 54, 322, 372.  Ibid., 33, 135.  When he was appointed at the Collège de France in 2002, Rosanvallon expressed his gratitude towards Vignaux for making him realize that “a life rigorously dedicated to the comprehension of the world fully participates in creating the conditions for its change: that there is total complementarity between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa,” see Rosanvallon, Pierre, Democracy Past and Future, ed. Samuel Moyn, New York 2006, 32– 33.

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racy and human rights, were still in part legitimized by creatively using (and secularizing) theological ideas such as Niebuhr’s or pre-modern medieval views like those of Duns Scotus. Another lesson is that concepts that originated in the same context can be received very differently by later generations. While Maritain and Vignaux developed their ideas at the same place and time – the US during the Second World War – their ideas became influential during or soon after the war, but because of their staunchly secular nature, Vignaux’s views arguably remained more relevant to society for much longer. In the 1940s Vignaux already advocated ideas on rights and democracy that are similar to the French “anti-totalitarian moment” of the 1970s. While Maritain’s Thomistic view of rights still prevailed in the 1950s, Vignaux’s secular view triumphed from the 1960s till today. The reason for this is that the meaning and significance of human rights and democracy has changed in the meantime. In the 1950s human rights were still mainly a relatively unimportant Christian conservative ideology that was opposed to godless materialism. Yet in the 1970s they were invoked more widely and they became “a secular doctrine of the left,” this time to express individual and societal freedom, legitimize “new social movements” and contest state-control.⁶⁰ It was precisely this last vision of rights and democracy which Vignaux already defended from the 1940s onwards, both in theory and in practice. Yet in the 1970s the meaning of human rights changed once more. During the 1970s human rights initially still represented a political project of the left, but gradually they were increasingly seen as apolitical, moralistic and impartial. This means that the political and unionist left now had to reclaim human rights in a different way. In the 1940s and 1950s Vignaux still developed his secular views on democracy and human rights in opposition to partisan, conservative and religious views on democracy and rights (such as Maritain’s). Yet one could argue that from the 1970s onwards the challenge for the CFDT and the “Second Left” had now become to defend the political meaning of rights against an appropriation by moralistic groups and thinkers that precisely emphasized their apolitical and impartial nature. Against such a neutral and apolitical view of rights and democracy, one could defend their inherently “political” nature and stress that they remain open for contestation and debate. One further lesson one could thus draw from Paul and Georgette Vignaux’s views of democracy and rights would then be that democracy and rights should not just emancipate themselves from conservative religious timeless truths (such as Maritain’s)

 Moyn, Christian human rights, 100. See also Lefort, “Politics and human rights,” 261– 265 and Moyn, The Last Utopia, 166 – 171.

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or totalitarian political ideologies (such as communism) but also from (seemingly) apolitical and ahistorical moral human rights utopias that have become so popular since the 1970s.⁶¹

References Berger, Suzanne, “Religious Transformation and the Future of Politics,” in: European Sociological review 1, 1 (1985): 23 – 45. Diggins, John Patrick, Why Niebuhr now?, Chicago – London 2011. Fourcade, Michel, “Jacques Maritain et l’Europe en exil (1940 – 1945),” in: Bernard Hubert (ed.), Jacques Maritain en Europe, Paris 1996, 281 – 320. Georgi, Frank, “Paul Vignaux,” in: Jacques Julliard/Michel Winock (ed.), Dictionnaire des intellectuels français, Paris 1996, 1161 – 1162. Hamon, Hervé/Rotman, Patrick, La deuxième gauche. Histoire intellectuelle et politique de la CFDT, [Paris] 2002. Hebding, Rémy, “Réalisme chrétien et CFDT,” Autres temps. Les cahiers du christianisme social 2 (1984): 20 – 32. Imbach, Ruedi, “Paul Vignaux, syndicaliste et historien de la philosophie,” in: Paul Vignaux, Philosophie au Moyen Âge, Paris 2004, 9 – 30. Imbach, Ruedi, “Paul Vignaux et la philosophie Chrétienne,” in: Jacques Boulnois (ed.), Paul Vignaux, citoyen et philosophe (1904 – 1987), Turnhout 2013, 129 – 140. Jean-Pierre, Laurent, “Paul Vignaux; inspirateur de la ‘Deuxième Gauche’: récits d’un exil français aux Etats-Unis pendant la Second Guerre Mondiale,” in: Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps 60 (2000): 48 – 56. Doi: 103406/mat.2000.403240 Lecuir, Jean, “Paul Vignaux à Toulouse: résistance spirituelle et politique en zone non occupée (juin 1940-juin 1941),” in: Jacques Boulnois (ed.), Paul Vignaux, citoyen et philosophe (1904 – 1987), Turnhout 2013, 51 – 120. Lecuir, Jean, “Vignaux Georgette ou Georgette Paul-Vignaux, née Barrion,” 2018, available online: http://maitron-en-ligne.univ-paris1.fr/?article199230 Accessed 6 February 2018. Lefort, Claude, “Politics and human rights,” in: Id., The political forms of modern society, Cambridge 1986, 239 – 272. Loyer, Emmanuelle, Paris à New York. Intellectuels et artistes français en exil. 1940 – 1947, [Paris] 2005. Maritain, Jacques, Man and the State, Washington, D.C. 1998. Moyn, Samuel, The Last Utopia. Human Rights in History, Cambridge, Mass. and London 2010. Moyn, Samuel, Christian Human Rights, Philadelphia 2015. Müller, Jan-Werner, Contesting Democracy. Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe, New Haven – London 2013.

 Lefort especially was aware of this challenge (much more so than Vignaux), see Lefort, “Politics and human rights,” 240 – 245 and Weymans, “Freedom through political representation?,” 272– 276 and Moyn, The Last Utopia, 170 – 171, 227.

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Rosanvallon, Pierre, “De la C.F.D.T. et la laïcité,” in: Esprit 4 – 5 (1977): 142 – 148. Rosanvallon, Pierre, “Paul Vignaux,” in: Le Débat 50 (1988): 254 – 255. Rosanvallon, Pierre, Democracy Past and Future, edited by Samuel Moyn. New York 2006. Vignaux, Paul, “A propos de ‘Christianisme et démocratie’,” in: Renaissance II and III (1944 – 1945): 446 – 460. Vignaux, Paul, Philosophy in the Middle-Ages. An Introduction, Translated by E.C. Hall. Westport 1959. Vignaux, Paul, “Un catholicisme républicain,” in: Esprit 4 – 5 (1977): 148 – 152. Vignaux, Paul, “Pour discuter de marxisme en Occident,” in: Les Quatre Fleuves 8 (1978): 45 – 65. Vignaux, Paul, “humanisme et historicité; à propos de problèmes philosophiques posés par les Déclarations des droits de l’homme,” in: Horacio Santiago Otero (ed.), Humanismo y tecnología en el mundo actual, Madrid 1979, 21 – 33. Vignaux, Paul, De la CFTC à la CFDT: syndicalisme et socialisme. “Reconstruction” (1946 – 1972), Paris 1980. Vignaux, Georgette Paul, La théologie de l’histoire chez Reinhold Niebuhr, Neuchatel – Paris 1957. Vignaux, Georgette Paul [Georgette Bérault, pseud.], “Conscience politique et conscience religieuse,” in: Cahiers Reconstruction 12, Issue 43, April (1957): 17 – 24. Weymans, Wim, “Freedom through political representation? Lefort, Gauchet and Rosanvallon on the relationship between state and society,” in: European Journal of Political Theory, 4, 3, (2005): 263 – 282

Rajesh Heynickx

Epistemological Tracks: On Religion, Words, and Buildings in 1950’s Belgium The opening statement of a 1950 article, ‘Modernism and Religious Art’, published in the American journal Liturgical Arts, fell together with a challenge: “The word modern has always puzzled me. It contains so many implications beyond that of plain ‘contemporary.’”¹ Yet, for its author, the art critic Eric Newton, the question how religious art could become ‘modern’, seemed easily answerable. Once an appropriate balance between realist and symbolical impulses was obtained, religious expression in a contemporary idiom could be realised. Modern abstract art, so he was convinced, contained the timelessness the Church needed in a “transitional age like our own, with new traditions in the making and old ones in the melting-pot.” Where did the puzzlement then come from? The complexity, Newton wrote, did not result from religious art’s formal evolution, which parallelled art history’s constant renewal, but sprung from the opposition between clericals and artists during past centuries. From the time of Giotto, over the period of Bernini to the era of Rouault, Matisse or Léger: religious art had always suffered from the clash between clericals’ strict ethics and the innovative aesthetical forms instigated by artists. To envisage the cleavage between the clericals and artists, Newton used the metaphor of a train. As mankind was a group of passengers in an express train, unstoppably moving from “an infinitely remote past to an infinitely distant future,” churchmen and artists had always been sitting in two different compartments. Newton blamed art historians for ignoring that segregation. Too often, they had only exhibited “the works of art produced by man to various objects, thrown out of the window on to the railway track.” And of course, Newton admitted, there had been some contact between the artists and churchmen. Throughout history, the dialogue between both sections had even climbed upward, but always as a spiral. Time and time again, the spiral had passed vertically over both sections’ pet idea, that is, the artist’s claim to the autonomy of art and the clericals’ focus on the theological accuracy of artistic images. The metaphor of a train with an internal spiral offered Newton a thoughtprovoking scenario. The unstoppable train enabled him to proclaim religious art’s inevitable modernisation. The story of compartments on the train undergirded his plea for a respectful dialogue. So, with the help of one metaphor,  Newton, Eric, “Modernism and Religious Art,” in: Liturgical Arts, XIIX/4 (august 1950): 88. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110588255-005

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the question he was wrestling with, namely ‘Can religious art be modern?’ a clear example of what Hans Blumenberg called “carry-over questions,”² received a controlled answer. Many historians working on the modernisation of twentieth century religious art have come under a comparable spell. Just like Newton, they tended to reduce the epochal change religious art went through during the twentieth century to the divergence or convergence between dogmatic clergy man and autonomy driven artists. They celebrated pious artistic talents and prophetic clergy men for eliminating conservative tendencies. They described how journals, societies and exhibitions constituted a linear track of modernization. And, finally, just like Newton did when using the metaphor of a train, they were in favor of big explanations. Consequently, modern religious art of post war Europe ended up to be linked, to a large extent, to the rise of new liturgical practices, anticipating or resulting from the theological sea change caused by the Second Vatican Council (1962– 65).³ All this scholarly work certainly generated insightful perspectives. Still, one crucial point of view has been neglected: the philosophical reflections in which the modernisation of religious art was enmeshed. In this article I will attempt to fill in that lacuna. I will argue that, in the 1950s, there existed deep disagreement about the modernisation of religious art within the train section of the churchmen as well. This factionalism sprung from changing philosophical and theological conceptions. The strict conceptual apparatus of Neo-Thomistic aesthetics, for Catholic art philosophers and architects for decades the tool to safeguard a sacred understanding of art in an increasingly technocratic society, was rivalled by a sensitivity driven approach of art, one that was not anchored in dogma but in existential concerns. Both types of aesthetic reflection, so I will show, aired specific assumptions, deeply marking the way artistic practices and forms were launched and defended. In order to develop such discursive take on the modernisation of postwar religious art, I will start from one figure: the Benedictine monk Samuel Stehman  Blumenberg, Hans, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. transl. Robert M. Wallace, Cambridge 1983, 64– 65.  For a historiographical overview, have a look at the following article and especially to its footnotes: Heynickx, Rajesh/Symons, Stéphane, “A Matter of Interactions—Religion and Architectural Modernism, 1945 – 70: Introduction,” in: The European Legacy, Toward New Paradigms, 22/3 (2017): 251– 257. Two studies which give a very good look at the Belgian case: Morel, AnneFrançoise/Van de Voorde, Stéphanie, “Rethinking the twentieth-century Catholic church in Belgium: the inter-relationship between liturgy and architecture,” in: Architectural History, 55 (2012): 269 – 297; and Sterken, Sven, “A House for God or a Home for his People? The Domus Dei Church Building Action in the Belgian Archbishopric,” in: Architectural History, 56 (2013): 387– 425.

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(1912– 1970). Stehman, a converted Jew, was between 1954 and 1958 a leading editor of the prolyfic Belgian journal L’art d’église, a major voice in the debate on modern religious art. His discourse on modern religious art and architecture will offer us a vantage point to explore mid-twentieth century debates. As a devotee of a strict Neo-Thomism, at a moment when this thought system faced revision and rivalry, he articulated an increasingly contested position. Hence, by dissecting and contextualising Stehmann’s discourse, we can disclose a theoretical quarrel in which the volatility of Neo-Thomistic art philosophy lights up.

I A 1954 essay by Stehman on modern religious art proceeded with a familiar narrative. Like numerous critics had done before him, he began with exposing his disgust for the Catholic objects of piety sold in the quarter surrounding the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris. Already in the nineteenth century, these mass-produced prints, statues and crucifixes were identified with a naïve, idealized religiosity and abhorred for the fact that they killed artistic originality. Stehman joined this old criticism when he evoked in L’art d’église a performance by which two young artists had attacked the vapidness of saint-Sulpician art: in their shop window, amid pompous devotional paraphernalia, they had placed a copy of the study L’art sacré au xx siècle? written by Raymond Régamey, a French Dominican art historian who promoted abstract art as a solution. Stehman’s message was clear: ugliness does entail a lack of meaning and therefore must be replaced by a more clear order, possibly retrievable in abstract art forms. That project, already tangible in the ascetic cover of the Régamey’s publication, was essential to secure religion’s full adaptation to modern times. Stehman believed this process was a long term one. Yet, he also had confidence in the fact that his own time could form a turning point. He fully agreed with the projective baseline the two artists had added to the Dominican study: ‘Est-ce possible!’ – “It is possible!” About the fact that such answer asked for systematic instructions he left no doubt as well. That was what he saw as his personal mission. In the period between 1954 and 1958, he filled L’art d’église with numerous instructive reflections. Stehman’s articles were mostly constructed around the opposition between a ‘left’ and a ‘right’ camp, between religious artists and architects who wanted to experiment with forms and techniques, and those who chose to rely on traditional recipies. At the same time, this intellectual partioning into different camps was labeled as unproductive and ultimately wrong. According to Stehman, the division between progressive artists and traditionalists clouded the fact that

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the modernisation of religious art in the first place depended on a respect for well-reasoned principles. Yet, in modern society, the intellectual ability to develop such respect had disappeared: Already for a long time, reflections on art constitute a realm of thought where an extreme subtlety unfolds amid an extreme cloudiness. (…) Most people only consider the mystical aspect of art, and have no notion at all of its dogmatic character. To put it in another way: they build towers that depart from the sky. Sometimes, by accident, they hit the earth … Where we believe that we must focus first on foundations.⁴

Absorbed as he was in a rapidly changing world, Stehman argued, Western man had stopped with consciously making sense of things, by applying logic, establishing and verifying facts, and changing or justifying practices and beliefs based on new or existing information. Instead, he had become the play ball of a nebulous sensitivity and had lost his ability to self-consciously adopt and adapt practices and attitudes. Especially art had come in the grip of ungrounded reflections. For artists, the Aristotelian mantra “we see because we know,” Stehman complained, often no longer formed a directive. ⁵ Moreover, exactly from the moment reason had become less important for the creation and understanding of artistic creations, chaos and incoherence had become dominant. To illustrate that, Stehman commented on a series of chairs. A wooden stool that was designed by him was presented as a clear example of craftsmanship and was seen as a perfect piece of furniture. (illustration one) This artefact, Stehman argued, was based on “structural laws.” It was clear for which purpose each part of the chair was designed: a plate to sit on and legs which, in analogy to a human body, held the plate in the air. These principles were not at work in modern chairs. In an Eames Fiberglass Shell chair, he saw an “expressionist functionalism” present. In contrast to the wooden stool, not analogy or logical reason, but sensitive pleasure had been the misleading directive. “See at which fallen state we arrived,” Stehman wrote, “in the last chair there is no art at all. At the outmost, there is some eyepleasure.”⁶ With this plea for a retour à l’intelligence, Stehman showed off his philosophical dada: the objective understanding of Being. In Thomistic metaphysics, Being was seen as external to consciousness and objectively knowable thanks to the natural light of reason. Neo-Thomists, like Stehman, complained that modern society had lost this sense of the objectivity of Being. It had embraced a secular  Stehman, Samuel, “L’art dans la vie humaine,” in: L’art d’église, XXII/2 (1954): 269 – 270, 269.  Stehman, Samuel, “nous voyons parce que nous savons,” Ibid, 270. Stehman, “L’art dans la vie humaine,” 270.  Stehman, “L’art dans la vie humaine,” 272.

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Fig.1: In the margin of this article from L’art d’église one can see the series of chairs Stehman commented on. The one that is higlighted, an Eames creation, is used as an example of how things should not be designed. L’art d’église, XXII/2 (1954), p. 272.

subjectivism that was not based on deductive systematization. It is important to notice that within that frame of thought, an objective foundation of beauty was postulated. More specifically, art was seen as an intellectual virtue which could only be understood and analysed, as Stehman clearly did, by a careful

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drawing of distinctions (f. e ‘consequent’ and ‘inconsequent’ chairs). As a result of such rational investigation, the standards of art became entirely internal to the work of art. Moreover, aesthetic standards or values were not seen as human, but were comprehended as vehicles of austerity and timelessness. By using reason as a compass, they could be depicted and, later on, recreated through an artistic practice. But not only chairs could upset Stehman. Highly expressive forms of architecture dating from the mid-1950s, based on unseen combinations of materials and techniques, were not considered by him to be buildings at all. When commenting in L’art d’église on the experimental singular house presented by the Italian architects Mario Ravegnani and Antonello Vincenti at the 1954 Triennale of Milan (illustration two), Stehman revealed his stringent view on art and architecture. His idea that modern art and architecture only apparently rooted in a sound reasoning from true premises, lights up in the sarcastic caption he added to this picture: “This “experimental bungalow” was also presented at the X Triennale of Milan. It does, as we see, all it can to resemble a house as little as possible. Being a watch post, several modern forms influenced it. These are not pleasant forms; nor, above all, architectural forms. The front – because we cannot speak of a facade – tries to deny any distinction between interior and exterior. The ideal is that when one is inside, that one feels oneself outside. This ingenious casserole – it is certainly ingenious – might be arranged with great taste. But do we understand that it is neither taste, nor talent, nor technical virtuosity that justify a work?”

Fig 2: L’art d’église, XXII/2 (1954), p. 274.

Relying on his realist epistemology, Stehman fiercely reacted against what he called “the sophism of religious art.” He was convinced that writings on art only confused people. Difficult words and complicated sentences tried to ap-

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peal to audience’s emotions rather than offering the discernement of exeptional conditions artists and art lovers needed. Or, as it was once stated in an editorial of L’art d’église: much artistic work was “homeopathic.” The only true medicine, Stehman noted, was a non-subjective art, i. e. one not driven by sensitivity. And as he believed that there was a timeless set of rational principles guaranteeing the quality of artistic creations, he could easily state that buildings or chairs deviating from these rational principles were unacceptable. But how to unlock and use this timeless wisdom? For Stehman the dimension of making, the artist as a homo faber, rooting in an old tradition of well-reasoned principles, was primordial. In a brochure he wrote about the monastical life in St. Andrew’s Abbey in Bruges, the Benedictine abbey where he lived and where L’art d’église was printed, Stehman not only focused on the delightful silence of the library boasting 60000 volumes, including novels by Albert Camus. More than in that intellectual openess, he detected a modernity in the monastic practice of working and praying (‘ora et labora’). In the manual labour of two working monks, he saw how contemplation with action was ageless: “It is in the same spirit and almost with the same hand that the illustrator of the prayer book of dom Lefèvre and the one who repares bicycles (…) make great efforts for good work.”⁷ “Good work”: the idea that an old tradition revealed its usefulness in the immediate present through manual labor, so that vetera opened vistas on what the nova had to be, was a statement which often surfaced in reflections on the modernisation of religious art. The adagium innover selon la tradition, was a widely shared one. Yet, from the early 1950’s on, not everyone automatically subscribed to Stehman’s belief in an timeless monastic craftmanship and the necessity to defend it via rational investigation. Stehman’s rigorous and deductive style of thought became questioned. For example, in an 1953 article ‘Liturgy and Contemporary Sacral Art,’ published in a leading journal for liturgical art, the author was amazed, and even shocked, by Stehman’s take on art: “If we understand the writer (= Stehman) well, there is no such thing like sacred art, but only a craft, a technique, know-how.”⁸ Even bigger was the animosity which started to grow

 Stehman, Samuel, “Une journée à l’Abbaye de Saint-André,” in: Terre d’Europe, March 23 (1957): 30. The same idea is developed in: Stehman, Samuel, L’atelier des benedictines de Vanves, Bruges 1948.  Janssens, P., “Liturgie en eigentijdse sacrale kunst,” in: Tijdschrift voor Liturgie, 37– 39 (1953): 196. In his reaction to this critical comment Stehman revealed his own mindset: “He is doing psychology and undoubtedly with depth and sharpness. My intention is to do art criticism. That is why, in accordance with the objective pursued by L’art d’église, I have stated the fundamental laws governing and controlling the truth of art. Such a language may seem to be too ra-

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within the editorial board of L’art d’église, Stehman’s own platform. Other editors began to think of Stehman as a contra-productive hardliner. Among them was Fréderic Debuyst, a specialist of the theologian Romano Guardini and a proponent of the liturgical movement. For him, worship had to be felt by individuals, not only to be performed – as Stehman argued – through an authoritarian set of ecclesiastical rules. Debuyst claimed that spectatorship, visuality and participation, all aspects that could be perfectly propelled by using modern art or furniture (Eames was not put aside), were of the essence if one wanted to secure the transformation of contemporary churches into prayers in stone.⁹ And because that horizon of understanding, one clearly anchored in lived experience, was totally absent in Stehman’s vision, the opposition within the editorial board started to grow. A reorganisation became inevitable. In 1958, there was no longer room in the board for Stehman.¹⁰

II Both the critical remarks in other journals and the reshuffeling of the editorial board of L’art d’église indicate that in the 1950’s, Catholic aesthetics was not monolythic. It faced inner tension. Moreover, it was caught up in a reconfiguration. The lingering question was how openness for modern art had to be defined and defended. In that search for a remodelling of strategies, language was explicitly perceived as the ornament of thought: on many occasions, scholastic discourse and its rigorous conceptual analysis and careful drawing of distinctions were critisized. As a matter of fact, from the moment Stehman became the editor and wrote his stringent articles, many theological texts had already severely undermined the type of authoritarian stance Stehman proposed in L’art d’église. Its authors wanted to incorporate sensibility and intuitivity in their religious thinking.

tional. At least, she has no mystical tint and she does not flatter any feelings. But finally, she has the advantage that everyone knows exactly what one is talking about.” Stehman, Samuel, ‘Verbondsberichten,’ in: West-Vlaanderen, IV/1 (1955): 311.  For more information on his thinking: Debuyst, Frederic, Architecture moderne et célébration chrétienne, Saint-André 1966; Debuyst, Frédéric, L’art chrétien contemporain: de 1962 à nos jours, Paris 1988.  This conflict is mentioned in: Voet, Caroline, “Dom Hans van der Laan en zijn publicaties over kerkelijke architectuur in L’art d’église,” in: Dominique Bauer/Mikael Bauer (ed.), Cum tanta sit in amicitia vera perfectio, (Liber Amicorum for Prof. Em. Raoul Bauer). Kapellen 2009, 102– 133.

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Who were these authors? They are known under the label of the so-called Nouvelle Théology (“New Theology”). That is the name commonly used to refer to a school of thought in Catholic theology that arose in the mid-20th century, most notably among certain circles of French and German theologians.¹¹ The shared objective of these theologians was a fundamental reform of the dominance of neo-scholasticism Stehman adored so much. They wanted to replace an ontology of being, the center piece of the thomistic worldview, with an ontology of becoming. Or to paraphrase a famous Sartrean quote, for these Catholics existence apparently started to precede essence. Often directed by phenomenology, a philosophical style of thought focusing on phenomena that appear in acts of consciousness, these thinkers started to study the structures of consciousness as experienced from a first-person perspective, as a counterpoint to the rigid adherence to the thought, methods and principles of Thomas Aquinas. Consequently, they went beyond the received truths or fundamental laws of monastic traditions. They insisted that an experiential knowledge of the world had to prevail and not a standard philosophy of mind, one relying on a dualistic distinction between mind and reality.¹² Someone who, already from the early 1950’s on, had clearly assimilated phenomenological insights and methods to address theological topics in contemporary contexts, was the university of Leuven based theologian and philosopher Albert Dondeyne. In his influential 1960 Geloof en Wereld (translated as Faith and the World), resulting from groundbreaking work from the 1950’s,¹³ Dondeyne argued that Catholic faith implied a in-der-Welt-sein, a becoming part of the modern world, including all its challenges. Instead of a passively interacting with the world, Catholics had to form the world, he argued. To do so, life had to be true to what showed itself first and foremost in experience. In an age of rapid developments within diverse fields such as technology, art, literature and architecture, challenges could become opportunities. Nonetheless, Dondeyne continued to

 Mettepenningen, Jürgen, Nouvelle Théologie – New Theology: Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican II, London 2010; Flynn, Gabriel/Murray, Paul D. (ed.), Ressourcement: A Movement for Renewal in Twentieth-Century Catholic Theology, Oxford 2012.  Fouilloux, Etienne, “Nouvelle théologie’ et théologie nouvelle (1930 – 1960),” in: B. Pellistrandi (ed.), L’histoire religieuse en France et Espagne, Madrid 2004, 411– 425.  Dondeyne gained fame when he responded to the papal encyclical Humani generis that Pope Pius XII promulgated on 12 August 1950 “concerning some false opinions threatening to undermine the foundations of Catholic Doctrine”. Theological opinions and doctrines known as Nouvelle Théologie and their consequences on the Church were the primary subject of this encyclical. In his reaction Dondeyne promoted a Neo-Thomism opening its arms to the thought of the day, including phenomenology. Dondeyne, Albert, Foi chrétienne et pensée contemporaine, Leuven 1951.

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consider the work of Thomas Aquinas as a firm ground of his inspiration. He offered, as Herbert Spiegelberg rightfully noted, a “sympathetic appraisal of ‘existential phenomenology’ as a badly needed supplement to Neo-Thomism.”¹⁴ When Stehman referred to the spread of sophism, he had phenomenology in mind. At the moment Stehman published his dogmatic vision, the Higher Institute of Philosophy in Leuven, a famous Neo-Thomistic powerhouse, had become an important lab of phenomenology.¹⁵ And there seemed no way back. As the Leuven phenomenologist Louis Van Haecht enthusiastically wrote in 1959: In all fields, one can witness this questioning of received principles and supposedly obvious and canonized standards. This return to the irrational, to experience, to engaged thinking, is not a return to chaos. As we already said, it is an attempt to return to a true reason.¹⁶

“No masks and no alibi’s,” Van Haecht argued six years later, were allowed. Only the direct, experiential contact with the world mattered. And especially art offered a perfect opportunity to develop that.¹⁷ Or, as Dries Bosschaert remarked, in the 1950’s those who thought about religion in Leuven, subscribed to an “antropological turn.” Theological reflection increasingly became intimately linked with social contexts and a concrete temporal order. Belief was remodeled into being situated in a particular time frame and shaped by a specific human environment.¹⁸ Schematically put, in the mid 1950’s one can depict on the one hand the defenders of a ‘closed’ Neo-Thomism, like Stehman, who relied on a sovereign reason based on universal criteria and rejected patterns of taste based on contextual experiences. On the other hand there was a rising group, to which Dondeyne belonged, which became fascinated – to a large extent – by a phenomenological perspective, which stressed the irreducible character of concrete experiences and subscribed to an inductive path of reasoning. Their model was commonly referred to as an ‘open thomism.’ For this latter group, it was the immediate moment of contact with architecture or an art work – art’s Sitz im Leben – which mattered. Therefore, the temporality of art works, a central issue in modern

 Spiegelberg, Herbert, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction. Dordrecht et al. 2012, 444.  See the article of Edward Baring in this volume. And see also: Taminiaux, Jacques, “Le mouvement phénoménologique,” in: Revue Philosophique de Louvain, LXVIII/1990: 243 – 254.  Van Haecht, Louis, “Les racines communes de la phénoménologie, de la psychanalyse et de l’art contemporain,” in: Revue Philosophique de Louvain, LI (November 1953): 573.  Van Haecht, Louis, “Kunst en liefde,” in: Tijdschrift voor Philosophie, 21 (1959): 215.  Bosschaert, Dries D., “A House with Many Mansions: The Anthropological Turn in Louvain Theology (1942– 1962),” in: Church History and Religious Culture, 95/2– 3 (2015), 293 – 314.

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painting and architecture, fascinated them.¹⁹ Because it was precisely during the moment of experiencing religious art, the phenomenologist Eugenie de Keyzer noted in a 1973 essay, that art would offer a true initiation to a religious existence. From then on, religious art could be more than just the “illustration of a doctrine” as had been the case for so many decades.²⁰ Of course, the binary thinking I sketched above is far too simple. There is a complicated point of intersection at work here. From its very beginning, NeoThomistic art philosophy mediated between an excessive subjectivity and an excessive objectivity. In Thomas’s oeuvre, two definitions of beauty stand out: an objective and a subjective oriented one. Both were used. Although Aquinas never wrote a work on aesthetics, his few remarks about beauty were for NeoThomists enough to produce complete aesthetic theories. Firstly, one can detect among thomists a quest for an objective quality within art. Here, from a very Aristotelian perspective, the directive derived from Aquinas is the following: “for beauty three things are required: first integrity, then proper proportion or consonance, and also clarity.” On the other hand, thomists linked beauty to subjective experiences because somewhere in his monumental oeuvre, Thomas had highlighted the experiential quality of beauty: “those things are called beautiful the sight or apprehension of which pleases us.”²¹ Loaded with these contrasting views, the Neo-Thomistic position always occupied an intermediate place between an enormous subjectivity and an excessive objectivity. The subjective definition was clearly based on experience: it could offer a definition of beauty in terms of aesthetic experience. But the objective definition was also based on experience, particularly on the experience of human beauty for, as philosophers like Jacques Maritain or Edgard De Bruyne would argue, beauty is there where the beholder does not perceive a defect or deformity (‘integritas’), and where well proportioned and clear forms are present (‘claritas’).²²

 More on this in: Bosschaert, Dries D., “L’art pour la théologie. Gustave Thils’ toepassing van de ʻtheologie van het tijdelijkeʼ op kunst,” in: Tijdschrift voor Theologie, 54/1 (2014): 7– 22.  De Keyser, E., “Art religieux et signification,” in: E. De Keyzer/W. De Pater/A. De Waelhens (ed.), Miscellanea Albert Dondeyne. Godsdienstfilosofie. Philosophie de la Religion, Leuven 1974, 232.  I dissected this doubleness in the following article, where one can also find the references to the original quotes by Aquinas: Heynickx, Rajesh, “Conceptual Debts. Neothomism and Modern Architecture in Postwar America,” in: The European Legacy, Toward New Paradigms, 22/3 (2017): 258 – 277.  For more on both their art philosophy, consult my two following publications: Heynickx, Rajesh, “Le chantier de la tradition: les réflections d’Edgar De Bruyne sur la culture moderne pendant l’entre-deux-guerres,” in: Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique, 100 /1 (2005): 519 – 543. Heynickx,

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Stehman was not the first to think that upon artistic reflection, a recourse to fundamental Aristotelian and thomistic principles should prevail over subjective feelings. In his often reprinted and translated Art et Beauté from 1920, Maurice De Wulf, who was one of the founders of the Leuven Institute of Philosophy, had just one request: “admit that there exists another world than the one of our subjective states of mind.”²³ Just like Stehman, De Wulf feared that a subjectivism or psychologism would undermine the objective foundations of art. Ironically enough, the Neo-Thomist fear for a psychologistically interpreted subjectivity, had established a first link between Neo-Thomism and phenomenology. That happened before the First World War. Around 1910, the Leuven thinker Léon Noël, a close colleague of De Wulf, discovered in phenomenology a “tactical ally” against psychologism. In order to affirm a realist epistemology, the philosophical method developed by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, the founding father of phenomenology, could offer a neutral science, a propaedeutic for restoring objective foundations.²⁴ It was in this battle against subjectivism that Dondeyne was immersed when he studied in Leuven right after the First World War. But gradually, especially during the 1930s, his encounter with phenomenology would take another form. In that period, phenomenology was no longer exclusively appreciated as a criticism of psychologism. Far more than being a foundational science, a helping force in restoring objective foundations, it evolved into a popularised technique for Wesensschauung, a seeing of essences in diverse cultural or artistic tendencies. This antropological colouring went hand in hand with Dondeyne’s increasing knowledge of the philosophical current of existentialism which, as mentioned above, implied an ontology of becoming, not one of being. Hence, Dondeyne’s focus on the societal role of Christianity shifted towards the existence of the believer. Man’s personal engagement in faith was stressed and a commitment to ‘the world’ became the logical counterpart of that focus.²⁵ All that can explain why Dondeyne in a special issue devoted to the Expo 58, the first major worldfair after World War II and a transitional moment in Belgian history

Rajesh, “On the road with Maritain. European Modernist Art Circles and Neo-Thomism during the 1920’s and 1930’s,” in: Rajesh Heynickx/Jan De Maeyer (ed.), The Maritain Factor. Taking religion into Interwar Modernism. Leuven 2010, 7– 25.  De Wulf, Maurice, Art et Beauté. Conférences philosophiques, Leuven 1943, 7, 201.  Dupont, Christian, Phenomenology in French Philosophy: Early Encounters, Dordrecht et al. 2014, 104– 108. Quote on 104.  Bosschaert, Dries D., “A Brave New World: Albert Dondeyne’s Christian Humanism in the University and Society” in: Trajecta: Religion, Culture and Society in the Low Countries, 24/2 (2015), 309 – 330.

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because it introduced modern technology and architecture to a larger audience, wrote that the societal doctrine of the church was not a “magic box” full of ready-made solutions. In the same year that Stehman was kicked out of the editorial board of L’art d’église, Dondeyne knew what the author of the 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris, the charter for the revival of Thomism as the official philosophical and theological system of the Catholic Church, had in mind: “Leo XIII has repeatedly stated that God has left the management of the world and the ordering of society to man himself.”²⁶

III As the case of Stehman illustrates, the rearrangement and proliferation of certain types of religious art were not solely linked to the institutional power of church authorities which, as so often has been (re)told, appears to have been quite insensitive to artistic innovation. The story that religious art went through a series of “resurrections” resulting from unique creative talents which surpassed the limited taste of the church hierarchy,²⁷ does not offer a complete picture. As I tried to demonstrate, modern religious art must also be understood as being linked to the models of thought in which it was enmeshed. Defending specific registers of subjectivity based on different versions of neo-Thomistic thought, these models functioned as “aesthetic contracts,”²⁸ responsible for picking up and consolidating specific types of church buildings or mural paintings. Or to use Jacques Rancière’s concept of regime: these discourses on modern religious art created “a frame of visibility and intelligibility that puts things or practices together under the same meaning, which shapes thereby a certain sense of community.”²⁹ And as we know, a shared ‘sense of community’ was extremely formative, even essential, for the conventions sought after in the modernisation of religious art during the 1950’s. Specific for contemporary church ar-

 Dondeyne, Albert, “Christelijk universalisme: een boodschap voor 58,” in: Universitas. Speciaal nummer, Universitas-schrift: de mens in 58, XX (1958): 57.  This is for example the case in: Foucart, Bruno, “Les éternelles résurrections de l’art sacré,” in: J. Bony/E. Bréon/P. Dagen [et al.], L’art sacré au XXe siècle en France, Thonon-les-Bains et al. 1993: 7– 11.  This notion was developed in: Sussman, Henry, The Aesthetic Contract. Statutes of Art and Intellectual Work in Modernity, Stanford 1997.  Rancière, Jacques, “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics,” in: Beth Hinderliter/ William Kaizen/Vered Maimon/Jaleh Mansoor/Seth McCormick (ed.), Communities of sense. Rethinking Politics and Aesthetics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009, 31.

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chitecture, the complex interaction between a playful freedom of shapes and styles, representing a domus Dei (‘the house of God’), and the emphasis on the actively worshiping community, looking for a domus ecclesiae (‘a house church’), a lived space to pray, was of the essence. This synergy underwent many reformulations, exactly because it was propelled by the fragile equilibrium between an openess and the dogmatics within neo-Thomism. Consequently, the development of religious art continually triggered internal debates and, unavoidably, that meant a loss of energy and at moments, even a climate which lacked direction.³⁰ Catholic aesthetics from the middle of the twentieth century did not just impose a theory of the beautiful, nor did it present itself as a specialised theory of art or a general theory of sensibility. Besides being a (theoretical) compendium of artistic practices and forms of visibility, it mostly entailed a collection of fiercely debated patterns of intelligibility. When studying the recent history of art philosophy or architectural practice among Catholics after 1945, emphasis should therefore not only be put on what was found out, but on how aspects were found out or contested. Such an approach could open a forgotten door. As architectural historians have recently stressed, the development of religious architecture of the 1950’s and 1960’s offers a unique field of endeavor. In contrast to “the more prosaic jobs in housing, schools, and so on,” Robert Proctor wrote, church building encompassed an unforeseen experiment with the possible fusion of poetry, monumentality and technology.³¹ One can unpack this fusion by revealing the multiformity and (in)consistencies of the answers given to one and the same question: which (shifting) criteria were seen as the guiding ones for modern religious art and architecture? And more specifically, to take up the metaphor at the outset of this article: what was discussed in the compartments on the train? In these compartments one comes across individuals like Stehman triggering discussions and eventually generating a kind of factionalism. A full understanding of divisions in such past intellectual scenes, Richard Rorty once stated, therefore depends on a secure analysis of the “real and imagined conversations” actors had with each

 This idea stands central in: Heynickx, Rajesh/O’Connor Perks, Samuel/Symons, Stéphane, “At the Crossroads between Catholicism and Modernist Art. Marie-Alain Couturier and the Conceptual Zigzags,” in: Church History and Religious Culture, 97/1 (2017): 71– 95.  Proctor, Robert, “Churches for a Changing Liturgy: Gillespie, Kidd & Coia and the Second Vatican Council,” in: Architectural History, 48 (2005): 291– 322, 291.

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other.³² Dondeyne and Stehman never directly debated, probably even never met, yet they embody two different mind sets within the same community. Although both left an imprint in their own time, their impact in the long term was not the same. While Stehman has been forgotten, Dondeyne is hailed as one of the precursors of Vatican II. He was on track, or at least that is what historiography has taught us to see. In order to infuse some critical nuance into a far too linear retrospection, one has to situate the train compartment of the clergy men, as we did, in a larger, multifaceted plot. The development of modern religious art did not coincide with one track on which art objects became thrown after loaded debates took place between or in the compartments. It more resembled a metropolitan trainyard crowded with seperate tracks, often running parallel to each other, but also – as the nuances within Neo-Thomistic art philosophy or the vexed assimilation of phenomenology suggest – regularly crossing over one another. As it was traversed by more than one track, and because there could be more than one train on each track (eventually following different epistemological maps), the modernisation of religious art became a confusing matter of entanglement and variations. That is why for Catholics the word ‘modern’ contained so many implications beyond that of plain ‘contemporary.’

References Blumenberg, Hans, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. transl. Robert M. Wallace, Cambridge 1983. Bosschaert, Dries D., “L’art pour la théologie. Gustave Thils’ toepassing van de ’theologie van het tijdelijke’ op kunst,” in: Tijdschrift voor Theologie, 54/1 (2014): 7 – 22. Bosschaert, Dries D., “A Brave New World: Albert Dondeyne’s Christian Humanism in the University and Society” in: Trajecta: Religion, Culture and Society in the Low Countries, 24/2 (2015), 309 – 330. Bosschaert, Dries D., “A House with Many Mansions: The Anthropological Turn in Louvain Theology (1942 – 1962),” in: Church History and Religious Culture, 95/2 – 3 (2015), 293 – 314. Debuyst, Frederic, Architecture moderne et célébration chrétienne, Saint-André 1966. Debuyst, Frédéric, L’art chrétien contemporain: de 1962 à nos jours, Paris 1988. Dondeyne, Albert, Foi chrétienne et pensée contemporaine, Leuven 1951. Dondeyne, Albert, “Christelijk universalisme: een boodschap voor 58,” in: Universitas. Speciaal nummer, Universitas-schrift: de mens in 58, XX (1958): 57.

 Rorty, Richard, “The Historiography of Philosophy. Four genres,” in: Richard Rorty/J.B. Schneewind/Quentin Skinner (ed.), Philosophy in History. Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy, Cambridge 1984, 71.

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Dupont, Christian, Phenomenology in French Philosophy: Early Encounters, Dordrecht et al. 2014. Flynn, Gabriel/Murray, Paul D. (ed.), Ressourcement: A Movement for Renewal in Twentieth-Century Catholic Theology, Oxford 2012. Foucart, Bruno, “Les éternelles résurrections de l’art sacré,” in: J. Bony/E. Bréon/P. Dagen [et al.], L’art sacré au XXe siècle en France, Thonon-les-Bains et al. 1993: 7 – 11. Fouilloux, Etienne, “Nouvelle théologie’ et théologie nouvelle (1930 – 1960),” in: B. Pellistrandi (ed.), L’histoire religieuse en France et Espagne, Madrid 2004, 411 – 425. Van Haecht, Louis, “Les racines communes de la phénoménologie, de la psychanalyse et de l’art contemporain,” in: Revue Philosophique de Louvain, LI (November 1953): 573. Van Haecht, Louis, “Kunst en liefde,” in: Tijdschrift voor Philosophie, 21 (1959): 215. Heynickx, Rajesh, “Le chantier de la tradition: les réflections d’Edgar De Bruyne sur la culture moderne pendant l’entre-deux-guerres,” in: Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique, 100 /1 (2005): 519 – 543. Heynickx, Rajesh, “On the road with Maritain. European Modernist Art Circles and Neo-Thomism during the 1920’s and 1930’s,” in: Rajesh Heynickx/Jan De Maeyer (ed.), The Maritain Factor. Taking religion into Interwar Modernism. Leuven 2010, 7 – 25. Heynickx, Rajesh, “Conceptual Debts. Neothomism and Modern Architecture in Postwar America,” in: The European Legacy, Toward New Paradigms, 22/3 (2017): 258 – 277. Heynickx, Rajesh/O’Connor Perks, Samuel/Symons, Stéphane, “At the Crossroads between Catholicism and Modernist Art. Marie-Alain Couturier and the Conceptual Zigzags,” in: Church History and Religious Culture, 97/1 (2017): 71 – 95. Heynickx, Rajesh/Symons, Stéphane, “A Matter of Interactions—Religion and Architectural Modernism, 1945 – 70: Introduction,” in: The European Legacy, Toward New Paradigms, 22/3 (2017): 251 – 257. Janssens, P., “Liturgie en eigentijdse sacrale kunst,” in: Tijdschrift voor Liturgie, 37 – 39 (1953): 196. De Keyser, E., “Art religieux et signification,” in: E. De Keyzer/W. De Pater/A. De Waelhens (ed.), Miscellanea Albert Dondeyne. Godsdienstfilosofie. Philosophie de la Religion, Leuven 1974. Mettepenningen, Jürgen, Nouvelle Théologie – New Theology: Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican II, London 2010. Morel, Anne-Françoise/Van de Voorde, Stéphanie, “Rethinking the twentieth-century Catholic church in Belgium: the inter-relationship between liturgy and architecture,” in: Architectural History, 55 (2012): 269 – 297. Newton, Eric, “Modernism and Religious Art,” in: Liturgical Arts, XIIX/4 (august 1950): 88. Proctor, Robert, “Churches for a Changing Liturgy: Gillespie, Kidd & Coia and the Second Vatican Council,” in: Architectural History, 48 (2005): 291 – 322. Rancière, Jacques, “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics,” in: Beth Hinderliter/William Kaizen/Vered Maimon/Jaleh Mansoor/Seth McCormick (ed.), Communities of sense. Rethinking Politics and Aesthetics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Rorty, Richard, “The Historiography of Philosophy. Four genres,” in: Richard Rorty/J.B. Schneewind/Quentin Skinner (ed.), Philosophy in History. Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy, Cambridge 1984.

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Spiegelberg, Herbert, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction. Dordrecht et al. 2012. Stehman, Samuel, L’atelier des benedictines de Vanves, Bruges 1948. Stehman, Samuel, “L’art dans la vie humaine,” in: L’art d’église, XXII/2 (1954): 269 – 270. Stehman, Samuel, “nous voyons parce que nous savons,” in: L’art d’église, XXII/2 (1954): 270 Stehman, Samuel, “Verbondsberichten,” in: West-Vlaanderen, IV/1 (1955): 311. Stehman, Samuel, “Une journée à l’Abbaye de Saint-André,” in: Terre d’Europe, March 23 (1957): 30. Sussman, Henry, The Aesthetic Contract. Statutes of Art and Intellectual Work in Modernity, Stanford 1997. Sterken, Sven, “A House for God or a Home for his People? The Domus Dei Church Building Action in the Belgian Archbishopric,” in: Architectural History, 56 (2013): 387 – 425. Taminiaux, Jacques, “Le mouvement phénoménologique,” in: Revue Philosophique de Louvain, LXVIII/1990: 243 – 254. Voet, Caroline, “Dom Hans van der Laan en zijn publicaties over kerkelijke architectuur in L’art d’église,” in: Dominique Bauer/Mikael Bauer (ed.), Cum tanta sit in amicitia vera perfectio, (Liber Amicorum for Prof. Em. Raoul Bauer). Kapellen 2009, 102 – 133. De Wulf, Maurice, Art et Beauté. Conférences philosophiques, Leuven 1943

John Carter Wood

When Personalism Met Planning: Jacques Maritain and a British Christian Intellectual Circle, 1937 – 1949 From the late nineteenth century, “Neo-Thomism” became the official theological-philosophical framework for Roman Catholic engagement with (and resistance to) cultural modernity, a position it held until the 1960s and the Second Vatican Council. There were many “varieties” or “versions” of Thomism, involving efforts by clergy, theologians, and Christian-oriented philosophers to revive medieval Scholasticism, particularly in the form expressed by Thomas Aquinas in his monumental Summa Theologiae and other works.¹ One shared aim was to provide an effective Church response to the perceived threats of secularism, rationalism, liberalism, and cultural disintegration brought about by the decline in Church authority and the rise of philosophical schools seen as opposed to genuinely Christian perspectives on human life. Aquinas’s writings were officially endorsed by Pope Leo XIII (in his first encyclical, Aeterni Patris, 1879) as an antidote to modern philosophy, enabling the rise of “Neo-Thomism” – a label with various meanings but often denoting the “papally supported form of Thomism” – to intellectual dominance within the Church.² However, this school of thought was influential beyond Roman Catholic contexts. In this essay, I consider how elements of Thomism influenced an overwhelmingly Protestant intellectual group in 1930s and 1940s Britain. More specifically, the group was inspired by a particular expression of Thomism: French philosopher Jacques Maritain’s book Humanisme Integral (1936), published in English as True Humanism (1938). Maritain shared core Thomist principles but also went his own way: he resisted the label Neo-Thomist, but he has been depicted as such, and his works were certainly “imbued with the traditional

I thank the editors and Mihai-D. Grigore for their comments on earlier drafts.  See Kerr, Fergus, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism, Oxford 2002; O’Meara, Thomas F., Thomas Aquinas: Theologian, Notre Dame 1997, 152– 200; McGinn, Bernard, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae: A Biography, Princeton 2014, 117– 209; Schloesser, Stephen, “The Rise of a Mystic Modernism: Maritain and the Sacrificed Generation of the Twenties,” in: Rajesh Heynickx/Jan De Maeyer (ed.), The Maritain Factor: Taking Religion into Interwar Modernism, Leuven 2010, 30.  McGinn, Summa Theologiae, 163. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110588255-006

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Thomism of Leo XIII.”³ He became one of the most internationally visible Catholic thinkers in the period of Neo-Thomism’s predominance, and, especially for many non-Catholic observers, fine distinctions among Thomist schools may not have seemed particularly relevant.⁴ Throughout his work, Maritain diagnosed modernity’s disintegrative effects on culture and society, and he argued for cultural renewal through Catholic Christianity. However, his political views evolved. Already a passionate antimodernist by the Great War, Maritain afterwards published Antimoderne (1922) and became editor of Revue Universelle, linked to Charles Maurras’s reactionary, monarchist, nationalist, and anti-Semitic movement Action Française. ⁵ But he came to see Catholicism and modernity as capable of a profound synthesis.⁶ Two intellectual “about turns” followed: his rejection of Action Française (after the papal condemnation of Maurras in 1926) and support for Republican Spain after 1936.⁷ This was the Maritain – with a relative openness to other denominations, to secular knowledge, and to democracy – who influenced the British Christian group considered here. British Christians – not only Catholics – were aware of the “French Catholic renaissance” of the inter-war years, particularly of Thomist authors such as Maritain, Paul Claudel, François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, and Etienne Gilson.⁸ “Anglo-Catholics” in particular – an influential variety of Anglican churchmanship in this period⁹ – saw Maritain as an important thinker; however, they sometimes criticised him for a narrow-minded Thomism.¹⁰ (Despite their commitment

 McGinn, Summa Theologiae, 186, 193; O’Meara, Thomas Aquinas, 179. McCool, Gerald, “Jacques Maritain: A Neo-Thomist Classic,” in: Journal of Religion 58.4 (1978): 380 – 404.  On the widespread European influence of Maritain and Neo-Thomism in the 1940s and 1950s, see Müller, Jan-Werner, “Die eigentlich katholische Entschärfung? Jacques Maritain und die christdemokratischen Fluchtwege im Zeitalter der Extreme,” in: Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte 2.3 (2008): 40 – 54 and Müller, Jan-Werner, “Towards a New History of Christian Democracy,” in: Journal of Political Ideologies 18.2 (2013): 243 – 255.  Schloesser, “Sacrificed Generation,” 30.  Ibid., 35.  Einfalt, Michael, “Debating Literary Autonomy: Jacques Maritain versus André Gide,” in: Heynickx/De Maeyer, Maritain Factor, 154.  Hastings, Adrian, A History of English Christianity 1920 – 1990, London 1991, 280 – 282.  Ibid., 298.  Even Catholic-friendly Anglican newspapers critiqued Thomists for suggesting Aquinas “said the last word on every possible subject”: Maritain’s “genuine philosophical ability will hasten the reductio ad absurdum of Thomism already in progress. S. Thomas was a great man and a great thinker but not a demigod.” “Estimates of Philosophy and Religion,” Guardian (4 February 1938), 70. “M. Maritain is the Neothomist in excelsis. For him there is nothing wise, nothing good, nothing true, that may not be found on the pages of the angelic doctor.”: “Science and Beyond,”

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to Catholic traditions and liturgical elements, Anglo-Catholics were part of a church with a Protestant self-understanding, and some were suspicious of the Vatican as a political actor, particularly after its accommodation with Fascism).¹¹ Nonetheless, some Protestant and even agnostic thinkers valued Thomist perspectives such as Maritain’s. Considering Maritain’s influence on a specific intellectual circle contributes to the recently growing historiography of twentieth-century British Christian social and political thought.¹² I refer retrospectively to the circle considered here as “the Oldham group” after its leading figure, the missionary and ecumenical activist Joseph H. Oldham.¹³ It was one of many British intellectual networks of the time that advocated a cultural renewal of modern society, responding both to the pessimism of the inter-war “morbid age” – brought on by the crises of totalitarianism and economic depression – and the optimism encouraged by war-time Allied rhetoric of “social reconstruction” and defence of “Christian civilisation.”¹⁴ The group stood out in its influential membership, support from church leaders, international contacts, and high-profile publications. Maritain’s Thomist vision for a new, Christian-inspired “personalist democracy” was eager-

Guardian (10 June 1938), 370. Maritain was “suspicious of attempts to modernize Aquinas” and wrote “an oeuvre de vulgarisation of Thomistic principles”: Review of Jacques Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge and An Introduction to Logic, Church Times (10 December 1937), 675. Maritain was seen to believe that “the quasi-Aristotelianism of St. Thomas expresses the last word, if not on all subjects, at least on the metaphysic which, dressed up as the handmaid of theology, leads up to the intellectual conception of God”: “Philosophia Perennis,” Guardian (29 December 1939), 768.  E. g.: “But the greatest tragedy of a tragic era in history has been the alliance – it is, in fact, a surrender – of the Roman Catholic Church with Italian Fascism.” “This Freedom” (leading article), Church Times (11 March 1938), 272.  Coupland, Philip M., Britannia, Europa and Christendom: British Christians and European Integration, Basingstoke 2006; Itzen, Peter, Streitbare Kirche: Die Church of England vor den Herausforderungen des Wandels 1945 – 1990, Baden-Baden 2012; Villis, Tom, British Catholics and Fascism: Religious Identity and Political Extremism Between the Wars, Basingstoke 2013; Gorry, Jonathan, Cold War Christians and the Spectre of Nuclear Deterrence, 1945 – 1959, Basingstoke 2013; Tonning, Erik/Feldman, Matthew/Addyman, David (ed.), Modernism, Christianity and Apocalypse, Leiden 2015.  See Kurlberg, Jonas, “Resisting Totalitarianism: The Moot and a New Christendom,” in: Religion Compass 7 (2013): 517– 531 for an overview of research. On Maritain’s influence on part of the group see Grimley, Matthew, “Civil Society and the Clerisy: Christian Élites and National Culture, c. 1930 – 1950,” in: Jose Harris, (ed.), Civil Society in British History: Ideas, Identities, Institutions, Oxford 2003, 231– 247.  Overy, Richard, The Morbid Years: Britain between the Wars, London 2009; Robbins, Keith, “Britain, 1940 and ‘Christian Civilisation’,” in: Keith Robbins (ed.), History, Religion and Identity in Modern Britain, London 1993, 195 – 214.

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ly taken up into the Oldham group’s efforts to outline a “Christian” social order and delineate paths for European cultural renewal. The Oldham group’s non-Thomist appropriation of Thomist ideas can be seen as an episode in the centuries of “equivocations” that have marked engagements with Thomist thinking.¹⁵ It was less Neo-Thomism as such than the version of it promulgated by Maritain that truly influenced the Oldham group, particularly his political and social vision of “personalist democracy” and a “new Christendom.” Maritain’s ideas were taken on selectively and for specific reasons, becoming part of an ecumenical intellectual synthesis built from various faiths and strongly influenced by secular sociology, especially as provided by Karl Mannheim’s notion of “planning for freedom.” Aspects of Thomism were transported across cultural contexts through trans-national (and cross-denominational) processes of intellectual exchange, emphasising the inherent complexity of “intercultural transfer.”¹⁶ Ideas are appropriated for concrete purposes: groups selectively adopt ideas they find appealing (while perhaps ignoring aspects they do not) and combine concepts in ways that sometimes seem contradictory; “influences” may retain little of their original contexts or creators’ intended meanings.¹⁷ The ambiguities of such processes can be shown by considering the Oldham group’s encounter with Maritain’s distinctive Thomist political vision. After an introduction to the group, two sections analyse its reception of True Humanism: the first considers a paper by Presbyterian theologian John Baillie that presented the book to the group in January 1939; the second uses other commentaries, the group’s discussions, and its public statements to explore the appeal of True Humanism: Maritain seemed part of a growing “convergence” in Christian social thought, offered a similar diagnosis of the European crisis, enabled a compatible synthesis of faith and “secular” social thought, and proposed an analogous strategy for Christian political renewal. I then draw together some concluding thoughts.

 McGinn, Summa Theologiae, 117– 119.  Adam, Thomas, Intercultural Transfers and the Making of the Modern World, 1800 – 2000, Basingstoke 2011; Paulmann, Johannes, “Interkultureller Transfer zwischen Deutschland und Großbritannien: Einführung in ein Forschungskonzept,” in: Rudolf Muhs/Johannes Paulmann/Willibald Steinmetz (ed.), Aneignung und Abwehr. Interkultureller Transfer zwischen Deutschland und Großbritannien im 19. Jahrhundert, Bodenheim 1998, 21– 43.  Adam, Intercultural Transfers, 6; Paulmann, “Interkultureller Transfer.”

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I The Oldham group What I refer to as the “Oldham group” was active from the late 1930s to the end of the 1940s. It consisted of church organisations, an informal discussion group, and publication projects. Oldham (1874– 1969) was born in India but mainly grew up in Scotland.¹⁸ Inspired by an evangelical campaign while studying at Oxford, he became a missionary and, after further studies in Edinburgh and Halle, a leading lay figure in the missionary and ecumenical movements.¹⁹ He co-organised the ecumenical “Church, Community and State” conference in Oxford in 1937, which gave particular attention to the growing threat of totalitarianism.²⁰ To advance the conference’s aims, Oldham set up two church-affiliated organisations (with Anglican leadership and support from the largest Protestant denominations): the Council on the Christian Faith and the Common Life (CCFCL, 1938 – 1942) and, later, the Christian Frontier Council (CFC, 1942– 1975).²¹ He also formed a discussion group, “the Moot” (1938 – 1947), and established a weekly (later biweekly) periodical, the Christian News-Letter (CNL, 1939 – 1949), and associated book series. They formed an interlocking whole: the CCFCL and CFC were links to official British Christianity; the Moot was a private arena for developing ideas; and the CNL was published under the auspices of the CCFCL and CFC, with some content developed in the Moot and CFC. (Oldham was the CNL’s editor from 1939 to mid-1945, followed by Kathleen Bliss).²² Embedded in national Christian structures, the group was also part of an international network that encouraged dialogue across national and denominational borders (without, thereby, erasing them).

 Clements, Keith, Faith on the Frontier: A Life of J.H. Oldham, Edinburgh 1999, 5.  Ibid., 15 – 35, 102.  Ibid., 354. See Smith, Graeme, Oxford 1937: The Universal Christian Council for Life and Work Conference, Frankfurt 2004 and Thompson, Michael G., For God and Globe: Christian Internationalism in the United States between the Great War and the Cold War, Ithaca 2015, 120 – 166.  These organisations were supported and funded by the main British Protestant denominations, with a lead role by the Church of England.  The CNL consisted of an initial “Letter” written by the editor (Oldham until mid-1945, afterwards Kathleen Bliss) and a “Supplement”, i. e. an essay either by the editor or another author (often anonymous or pseudonymous). CNL references include issue number, date, and specification of the “Letter” or “Supplement” sections; author names (if available) and titles of Supplements are given. Pagination varied: if no page numbers were given, I count them separately for Letters and Supplements.

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Oldham was a skilled networker: the “collaborators” named in early CNL issues included many of the era’s influential Christians.²³ The Moot’s members have been aptly called “a good cross-section of the liberal, intellectual British establishment,” representing the Churches of England and Scotland, policy groups, the universities, and media.²⁴ Among them were clergy and theologians (such as John Baillie and Alec Vidler),²⁵ ecumenical activists (such as Eric Fenn, Daniel Jenkins, and Kathleen Bliss),²⁶ writers and academics (such as T.S. Eliot, John Middleton Murry, and H.A. Hodges),²⁷ and high-ranking educationalists (such as Sir Walter Moberly and Sir Fred Clarke).²⁸ The group was almost entirely Protestant (mostly Anglicans and Presbyterians), except for the Catholics Christopher Dawson (a historian) and, from 1944, Michael Polanyi (a chemist, philosopher, and Catholic convert). Polanyi was also one of the group’s three academics with Jewish origins, the other two being Karl Mannheim and Adolf Löwe (both sociologists and personally non-religious). Members spanned the political “right” and “left” and their religious influences were diverse, including a selfcritical liberal Anglicanism, American “Christian realism” (Reinhold Niebuhr), Russian social and religious philosophy (Nikolai Berdyaev), Martin Buber’s “I‐Thou” philosophy, and continental sociology (Karl Mannheim). This mix was enriched by Maritain’s Thomist perspectives. Maritain was personally known to group members: he had written for Eliot’s magazine, The Criterion,

 Oldham, Joseph H., “0 L” in: CNL (18 October 1939): 1; Oldham, Joseph H. “4 L,” in CNL (22 November 1939): 4. The lists included, alongside Moot members, V.A. Demant, Dorothy L. Sayers, A.D. Lindsay, William Temple, Ernest Barker, Sir Stafford Cripps, William Paton, J.S. Whale, Arnold Toynbee, Charles Raven, Reinhold Niebuhr, R.H. Tawney and Sir Alfred Zimmern.  Steele, Tom/Taylor, Richard Kenneth, “Oldham’s Moot (1938 – 1947), the Universities and the Adult Citizen,” in: History of Education 39 (2010): 183 – 197, 188. Minutes from Moot meetings have been collected and annotated in Clements, Keith (ed.), The Moot Papers: Faith, Freedom and Society 1938 – 1944, Edinburgh 2010. On its members, see ibid., 24– 34.  Other theologians involved were Anglicans Gilbert Shaw and Oliver Tomkins and Presbyterians H.H. Farmer, and Alexander Miller. Reinhold Niebuhr was an occasional guest and wrote essays for the CNL.  Also Eleanora Iredale. Fenn was also the BBC’s Assistant Director of Religious Broadcasting during the war.  Hodges was philosophy professor at Reading, Eliot a prominent Anglo-American poet and critic, and John Middleton Murry was a literary critic, editor, Christian communist, pacifist, and founder of a rural commune.  Moberly was chair of the University Grants Committee, Clarke was director of the Institute of Education. Other educationalist members included Walter Oakeshott (assistant master, Winchester College and later high master, St. Paul’s School), and Sir Hector Hetherington (principal and vice-chancellor of Glasgow University).

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and helped inspire his book The Idea of a Christian Society (1939).²⁹ The Criterion had itself been an important vector for the introduction of Neo-Thomism into Britain.³⁰ Maritain’s Religion and Culture (1931) had been published in a series edited by Dawson, and he met and corresponded with Moot members.³¹ Oldham recommended True Humanism to others, including Archbishops Cosmo Lang and William Temple.³² He also put the book on the agenda of the Moot’s third meeting, in January 1939, to which we now turn.

II “Of the very greatest interest and value”: Baillie on Maritain “The Moot” (Old English for a meeting or assembly or, instead, argument or discussion) was set up by Oldham as a “free, autonomous and anonymous” body to discuss Christian views of the modern age.³³ It met for weekends near London two to four times a year between 1938 and 1944 and once a year between 1945

 See, e. g., Harding, Jason, “‘The Just Impartiality of a Christian Philosopher’: Jacques Maritain and T.S. Eliot,” in: Heynickx/De Maeyer, Maritain Factor, 181– 191. Eliot had also felt an affinity to the reactionary monarchism of Maurras and the Action Française, but after the mid1920s he was influenced by Christopher Dawson and Maritain’s post-Action thought. See Takayanagi, Shun’ichi, “T.S. Eliot, the Action Française, and Neo-Scholasticism”; Wilson, James Matthew, “An ‘Organ for a Frenchified Doctrine’: Jacques Maritain and The Criterion’s Neo-Thomism”; McVey, Christopher, “Backgrounds to The Idea of a Christian Society: Charles Maurras, Christopher Dawson, and Jacques Maritain”; and Lockerd, Benjamin G., “Beyond Politics: T.S. Eliot and Christopher Dawson on Religion and Culture,” in: Benjamin G. Lockerd, (ed.), T.S. Eliot and Christian Tradition, Madison 2014, 89 – 97, 99 – 116, 179 – 193, 217– 236. Eliot and Maritain had both been part of the “Chelsea Group” of Catholic intellectuals in the 1920s: Robichaud, Paul, “David Jones, Christopher Dawson, and the Meaning of History”, Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 6.3 (2003): 68 – 85.  Wilson, “Frenchified Doctrine,” 99 – 100.  Grimley, “Civil Society,” 239 – 241. Maritain, Jacques, Copy of Letter (14 April 1939), University of Leeds, Brotherton Library, BC MS 20c Moot. Its contents suggest it had been sent to Mannheim.  Lang read it on the eve of war: “though the style is sometimes irritating in the extreme,” he wrote, it was “both profound and timely”: Lambeth Palace Library (LPL) Lang 26, f.154, Lang to Oldham, 2 September 1939.  Clements, Moot Papers, 182, 188.

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and 1947, when it was disbanded after Mannheim’s death.³⁴ Discussions centred on pre-circulated essays, and debate continued via letters. The Moot’s third meeting, held 6 – 9 January 1939 at a retreat and conference centre in Sussex, established key parts of the group’s early intellectual consensus.³⁵ Four items were considered: Maritain’s True Humanism, a paper by Hodges on creating a Summa Theologiae for the modern age, one by Mannheim titled “Planning for Freedom,” and a draft mission statement for the CCFCL. The first day was devoted to True Humanism, with discussion based upon a paper by Church of Scotland minister and Edinburgh University professor of divinity John Baillie. Brief written responses to the book by Moot members Vidler, Dawson, Mannheim, Löwe, Hodges, and Murry and one by the philosopher John Macmurray had also been circulated. A few participants had also seen comments by Russian Orthodox lay theologian Nicolas Alexeiev and three German theologians: Heinz-Dietrich Wendland, Wilhelm Loew, and an unnamed theologian “of the younger generation.”³⁶ In his thirteen-page, single-spaced paper, Ballie considered True Humanism and others’ remarks on it.³⁷ He had been asked to introduce the book, he said, because, as a Presbyterian, he would not be “predisposed to agreement”; however, he stressed that Maritain had mostly avoided “aspects of Romanism” and was in any case concerned “not with the salvation of the soul but with the salvation of civilization.”³⁸ Baillie found much “of the very greatest interest and value” in Maritain’s “quite innocuous” use of Thomistic principles of analogy to define a future society.³⁹ Baillie even shared Maritain’s critique of Luther’s and Calvin’s “nominalism, voluntarism, dualism and extreme anti-humanism” and the “secularisation of culture” they had encouraged.⁴⁰ He agreed that

 Ibid., 13. Oldham, Joseph H., Address to the members of the Moot (November 1947), J.H. Oldham Papers, New College Library, Edinburgh OA 9/7/52, 1– 2. Hereafter any papers taken from the J.H. Oldham Papers are referred to as “OA.”  For the meeting’s minutes, see Clements, Moot Papers, 126 – 183.  Clements, Moot Papers, 137. Wendland’s paper has not been found. The others: Alexeiev, Nicolas [“N.N. Alexejeff”], Bericht über das Buch ‘L’Humanisme integral’ von Jacques Maritain, OA 14/9/5; [Anon.], Stellungnahme zu dem Buch von Maritain (by a German theologian of the younger generation), OA 13/7/52 and Loew, Wilhelm, Stellungnahme von Lic. W. Loew zu Maritain ‘Humanisme Intégral,’ OA 13/7/58.  Baillie, John, Paper on Maritain’s True Humanism, (n. d. [for the third meeting of the Moot, 6 – 9 January 1939]), Lambeth Palace Library, Lang 26, ff.52– 64.  But he noted his “bad-tempered and undiscerning attack on Luther in his Trois Reformateurs”: ibid., 1.  Ibid., 1– 2.  Ibid., 2.

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“what the Reformers cut asunder” must be reconnected in “a unity of an altogether looser and more elastic kind than the old.”⁴¹ Baillie admired Maritain’s analysis of the birth of the “modern world” in the loss of Christianity’s medieval authority, which brought claims of “the autonomy of man’s temporal interests as over against his central religious interest” and the “emancipation of the secular from the control of the sacred.”⁴² Key social spheres – “science, art, philosophy, politics, economics, etc.” – were no longer guided by Christian views of the purposes of life; medieval “Christian absolutism” had given way to “anthropocentric humanism,” which was, in turn, becoming a “totalitarian absolutism.”⁴³ Baillie thought Maritain’s analysis of Communism was “extraordinarily fine,” suggesting that having once been a “convinced communist and atheist” enabled Maritain to see both its “truth and goodness” and “evil and error.”⁴⁴ He did not urge “turning our backs on the modern world and the modern mind” and attacked not “humanism” but only its modern “anthropocentrism”; he sought an “integral” or “theocentric” humanism that saw people as crucially (but not completely) “dependent” on God.⁴⁵ Baillie argued that Maritain successfully negotiated various competing views of the state: The temptation of Mediaevalism was to make the State belong to God outright; Augustine, Luther and Barth seem to give it over completely to the devil; anthropocentric humanism has seemed to give it over as completely to the domain of man and nature. But to Maritain it is the domain of all three at once. The earthly city is, he says, ambivalent. The Kingdom of God can never be realised in it, but it may be refracted in it.⁴⁶

The Christian political goal, Maritain argued, was to make this “refraction of the world of grace” more “effective,” creating a “new Christendom.” The “secular Christian order,” with “relative autonomy” from faith, would be “a temporal city vivified and impregnated with Christianity.”⁴⁷ Religion and politics would be “es-

 Ibid.  Ibid., 3.  Ibid.  Ibid., 4. John Macmurray similarly praised Maritain’s “thorough experience” with understanding of Marxism’s “inner meaning”: “To grapple with Marx to the point of real understanding is to have a spiritual experience of the first order.” Macmurray, John, Comments on M. Maritain’s True Humanism (n. d. [for the third meeting of the Moot, 6 – 9 January 1939]), OA 14/8/45, 1.  Baillie, “True Humanism,” 6.  Ibid., 7. Emphasis in original.  Ibid., 7. Emphasis added.

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sentially separate spheres,” the Church giving only “general ethical principles” or a “theological firmament” for action (but directly addressing issues like divorce).⁴⁸ Change would come not through a “single political party” but rather “a sort of Christian diaspora.”⁴⁹ A “new Christendom” would have Christian “leadership” and “inspiration” for the “whole ordering of its life” but also be “pluralist,” with “a very large diversity of men and of views”: its “unity” would be one of “orientation, based on a common task” rather than one of “essence, based on a common creed.”⁵⁰ Baillie found Maritain’s “relative pluralism” to be “most valuable,” showing “how to transcend the weakness of liberal democracy without surrendering to the totalitarian principle.”⁵¹ Maritain also described “a half-way-house” between Communism and capitalism, “transcending the distinction between them”; clearly, though, it would be a “post-capitalist order.”⁵²

III “A common basis”: Maritain and the Oldham Group The Moot’s discussion focused on Baillie’s essay and the other written responses (which were mostly one or two pages).⁵³ By meeting’s end, it had, as Baillie said, “agreed on a common basis [for its activities] in Maritain.”⁵⁴ Reactions were indeed highly positive. Mannheim, for instance, prefaced his criticisms of True Humanism with praise of Maritain’s “contribution to the history of human thought,” highlighting his “realism,” “readiness to appreciate the contribution of his opponents,” “capacity for grasping the ultimate premises of a system of thought,” and “open-mindedness.”⁵⁵ Others were “deeply impressed” by, had “profound admiration” for, or felt “entirely in sympathy” with True Humanism. ⁵⁶

 Ibid., 9.  Ibid., 9 – 10.  Ibid., 10.  Ibid., 10. Emphasis in original.  Ibid., 10, 11.  Clements, Moot Papers, 138 – 145. Alexeiev’s paper was ten pages.  Ibid., 173.  Mannheim, Karl, Some Remarks on ‘Humanisme Intégral’ by Jacques Maritain (n. d.), OA 14/ 3/82, 1.  Löwe, Adolf, Some Remarks on Maritain’s True Humanism (n. d. [for the third meeting of the Moot, 6 – 9 January 1939]), OA 14/4/50, 1; Macmurray, “Comments,” 1; Murry, John Middleton, Comments on Maritain’s True Humanism (n.d. [for the third meeting of the Moot, 6 – 9 January 1939]), OA 14/5/22, 1.

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Vidler found Maritain’s argument “convincing”; Hodges argued that if a new philosophical “synthesis” were to be found, “it is on his lines that it must be sought.”⁵⁷ Four factors explain the group’s welcoming – though not uncritical – reaction to True Humanism.

1 An Apparent Convergence Maritain’s book, first, seemed to signify an intellectual “convergence.” Baillie saw similarities between it and ideas from German Catholic theologian Karl Adam, Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, Austrian Catholic theologian Friedrich von Hügel, and British Anglican philosopher William de Burgh.⁵⁸ Löwe saw an “almost miraculous concord” between True Humanism and “the deepest emanations of recent Protestant thinking.”⁵⁹ Vidler found Maritain’s “general standpoint” was “in effect remarkably like that of, say, [Emil] Brunner and [Reinhold] Niebuhr,” suggesting either that “the gulf between the Catholic and Protestant positions is not so actual as has been supposed” or that “there is a form of neo-Catholicism and a form of neo-Protestantism which to all intents and purposes meet.”⁶⁰ Murry said the book showed “a convergence of neo-Catholic and neo-Protestant thought, which I find illuminating and encouraging.”⁶¹ (In a published review he compared Maritain’s approach to Paul Tillich’s idea of “theonomy”: it was “of no small significance that the two most original thinkers of Catholicism and Lutheranism should reach the same conclusion.”)⁶² Alexeiev suggested the phrase “integral humanism” had appeared in fin de siècle French positivism.⁶³ Lutheran theologian Wilhelm Loew thought Maritain’s emphasis on the need for a Christian understanding of “humanity” (Humanität) to resist the industrialised mass culture resembled things “that have featured in our discussions for some time.”⁶⁴

 Vidler, A.R., Comments on M. Maritain’s True Humanism (n. d. [for the third meeting of the Moot, 6 – 9 January 1939]), OA 14/6/89, 1; Hodges, H.A., Comments on M. Maritain’s True Humanism (n.d. [for the third meeting of the Moot, 6 – 9 January 1939]), OA 14/2/62, 1.  Baillie, “True Humanism,” 6.  Löwe, “Some Remarks,” 1.  Vidler, “Comments,” 1.  Murry, “Comments,” 1.  Murry, John Middleton, “Towards a Christian Society,” in: Times Literary Supplement, (28 January 1939): 56.  Alexeiev, “Bericht,” 2.  Loew, “Stellungnahme,” 1.

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Closer to home, Baillie found it “remarkable how like all of this is to all that has been said by Oldham, before and during and since the Oxford Conference” about lay leadership, which also “fits in with Murry’s conception of a clerisy” (i. e., an elite educative group or class).⁶⁵ “Our continental Protestant brethren,” Baillie wrote, “have something of cardinal importance to learn from Oldham-cum-Murry-cum-Maritain.”⁶⁶ Vidler even thought the book “seems to gather up and follow on what was said and felt at the last meeting of the Moot.”⁶⁷ Similar claims were made at later meetings. Hodges thought Maritain’s “polity” looked “much the same” as that advocated “25 years ago” by Temple and R.H. Tawney.⁶⁸ Jenkins saw “common ground” between the “Catholic and Reformed schools of thought” as expressed by Maritain and Barth on faith’s “social implications.”⁶⁹ In a 1938 draft mission statement for the CCFCL, Oldham approved Maritain’s definition of a “rational” society “compatible” with Christianity as one that would be “communal,” “personalist,” and “peregrinal” (i. e., in Oldham’s words, recognising “that man is created for a spiritual and eternal destiny and has on earth no continuing city”): admitting the memorandum “owes much to M. Maritain’s striking and powerful volume True Humanism,” Oldham asserted its “main positions” had been reached “independently.”⁷⁰ In a similar vein, in early 1944, Oldham listed Maritain, Eberhard Grisebach, Reinhold Niebuhr, and V.A. Demant as Christians who increasingly “found themselves concerned with the same points and on the same side”: “the beginning of a common Christian understanding of the main facts of our total situation.”⁷¹ Maritain was

 Baillie, “True Humanism,” 9. On the idea of a “clerisy” see Grimley, “Civil Society.”  Baillie, “True Humanism,” 9. In the Moot, the unnamed German theologian was also reminded of Oxford. Anon, “Stellungnahme,” 1. Baillie, in January 1938, was already arguing for a new “unity” or “synthesis” that would be distinct from the medieval one: “We must move forward to a new synthesis – instead of vainly endeavouring to recover the old mediaeval one. We must discover a more complex form of unity in which, while the various spheres of life are denied an ultimate autonomy, a very real relative autonomy is nevertheless allowed to them.” Untitled address by John Baillie given at the Student Christian Movement’s Theological Conference held at Stanwick, January 1938, 6, University of Birmingham, Cadbury Research Library, DA 43, Box 5, File “SCM TCD Chaplains.”  Vidler, “Comments,” 1.  Hodges, H.A., Politics and the Moot (9 June 1943), OA 14/1/43, 2.  Clements, Moot Papers, 626 – 627.  [Oldham, Joseph H.], Statement of Policy, 25 November 1938, LPL Lang 26, ff.38 – 49, 5 – 6.  Clements, Moot Papers, 680 – 681. Theology – edited by Vidler – suggested that many Christians “who are neither French nor Roman Catholic” saw True Humanism “as a masterly adumbration of the task ahead”: [Vidler, A.R.], “Editorial,” in: Theology, vol. 38, no. 228 (June 1939): 403. Reviewer E.L. Mascall called it a book “no intelligent Christian can afford to neglect”: Mascall, E.L., “Review of True Humanism,” in: Theology, vol. 38, no. 223 (January 1939): 74– 76, 75.

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seen to confirm that “many Christian minds” were “arriving at the same essential meanings.”⁷²

2 A Similar Diagnosis and Solution Maritain was also valued by the group because he shared its view that Western culture had eroded into an amoral “liberalism” and shallow “individualism.” Authoritarian and totalitarian regimes were “idolatrous,” “pagan,” and “demonic” efforts to rebuild community, which the group hoped to combat through a new (Christian-inspired) “common social philosophy” and rejuvenated community life. It was in this sense that Reading University philosophy professor H.A. Hodges discussed the creation of a “new Summa” in one of the other papers discussed at the third meeting of the Moot.⁷³ Despite its reference to Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, this goal was not foreseen as a specifically Catholic or Thomist project: indeed, Hodges himself suggested that the traditional Thomist emphasis on natural reason could not be the basis of a new, “modern” Christian social philosophy. Instead, within the Oldham group, the image of a “new Summa” – which appears to have originated with Mannheim⁷⁴ – referred to creating a comprehensive statement of the meaning of life from a Christian perspective that was specifically tailored to the unprecedented nature of modernity and that took into account new forms of knowledge (particularly psychology). It was argued that an intellectual synthesis of this scale and purpose was necessary, given the apparent disintegration of modern culture and social life and the faulty philosophical underpinnings of modern knowledge. The apparent “convergence” of Christian thought in this direction was encouraging and made Thomism – among other Christian traditions – resources for such an intellectual re-thinking.⁷⁵ The image of a “Summa” as a shorthand for this aim recurred a few times at subsequent meetings.⁷⁶ However, while a Christian philosophy for the modern age remained the group’s core aim, there were doubts about calling it a “Summa”: Eliot rejected the term because “the conditions of the present were so totally different

 [Anon.], Christianity and the Secular (19 April 1944), OA 13/6/35, 1.  Hodges, H.A., Towards a Plan for a New Summa, (n. d. [for the third meeting of the Moot, 6 – 9 January 1939]), Lambeth Palace Library, Lang 26 ff.65 – 74. Clements, Moot Papers, 134– 135.  Mannheim, Karl, Copy of Letter, (n.d. [possibly after the second meeting of the Moot, 23 – 26 September 1938]), OA 9/3/12.  Hodges admired Aquinas but doubted traditional Thomism could be revived: Clements, Moot Papers, 49.  Ibid., 130, 163, 205, 410.

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from the age of St. Thomas”; Hodges, in the Moot, agreed that the title “Summa” was “not appropriate.”⁷⁷ The Oldham group’s analyses received sociological backing from Mannheim. The Hungarian sociologist had established his reputation in Germany with Ideologie und Utopie (1929), but after the Nazis forced his dismissal from his Frankfurt professorship in April 1933, he came to Britain and taught at the London School of Economics and the University of London.⁷⁸ He became a key figure in the Oldham group.⁷⁹ Though personally agnostic, he saw Christianity as a resource for cultural “reintegration” during what he saw as the inevitable transition from “laissez-faire” liberalism to a “planned” society.⁸⁰ Christian values, he argued, had to be “retranslated” into the “large-scale terms” of modern life: “brotherly love” meant “a political system based on equality of opportunity.”⁸¹ Mannheim valued True Humanism as a “significant” aid to creating a new “Summa”: he saw the Oldham group as seeking a “philosophical anthropology,” a “social philosophy,” and a “history of the changing conception of man and of society which might help us to understand the peculiarities of our age and our special situation in the world.”⁸² Thinking it futile to cling to laissez-faire in resisting totalitarianism, he favoured encouraging “a dialectical process combining the advantages of both the two systems,” bringing together “new techniques of organization and communication” with “democratic control and leaving the necessary space for freedom.”⁸³ This crystallised at the third Moot meeting into the idea of “planning for freedom,” which became a group slogan, even if some members – such as Eliot, Murry, Vidler, and (later) Polanyi – were sceptical of its reliance on increased state power.⁸⁴ Mannheim saw both Protestant

 Ibid., 172.  Mannheim’s immigration had been assisted by Marxist political scientist Harold Laski and the left-wing Christian academic A.D. Lindsay: Kettler, David/Meja, Volker/Stehr, Nico, Karl Mannheim, Chichester 1984, 11; Steele/Taylor, “Oldham’s Moot,” 190.  Much of Diagnosis of Our Time: Wartime Essays of a Sociologist, London 1943 had been presented to the Moot for discussion (see ibid., 100).  Mannheim, Karl, Planning for Freedom, (n.d. [for the third meeting of the Moot, 6 – 9 January 1939]), Lambeth Palace Library, Lang 26, ff.75 – 93, 12– 13. Clements, Moot Papers, 192.  Clements, Moot Papers, 506.  Mannheim, “Planning for Freedom,” 18 – 19.  Clements, Moot Papers, 70.  See Clements, Moot Papers, 165, 182, 185, 313; Vidler, A.R., Comments on Papers by Mannheim and Hodges (n. d. [for the third meeting of the Moot, 6 – 9 January 1939]), OA 14/6/92; Murry, John Middleton, Letter to J.H. Oldham (14 September 1942), Fred Clarke Papers, Institute of Education, University of London MOO /93, 1 (any documents taken from the Institute of Education are hereafter referred to as IOE); Eliot, T.S., Letter to J.H. Oldham (11 May 1944), OA 9/6/67;

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and Catholic traditions as having important contributions to make: Protestantism was “nearer to modern man’s predicament” but too often individualistic; Catholicism (especially in its “Thomistic traditions”) had a long history of thinking sociologically, but it was prone to “medievalism.”⁸⁵ Both would unavoidably have to work together to make recommendations for a shared set of values for the planned society, making it likely that as “the age of planning proceeds” they would take the form of “a consistent system similar to the Summa of St. Thomas.”⁸⁶ While Maritain’s analysis emerged from a different context from that of the Oldham group – whether ecumenical Protestantism or Mannheim’s secular sociology – he took a similar approach in defining his “new Christendom.” Both started not from policy blueprints, specific biblical passages, or particular historic models but rather from an “anthropological” understanding of “true” human nature, about which (they argued) Christianity was especially “realistic.” The group sought a “revolution,”⁸⁷ and Maritain’s analysis seemed sufficiently radical: his image of a “new Christendom” filtered into their language, notably in Oldham’s book The Resurrection of Christendom (1940).⁸⁸ Baillie agreed with Maritain that “liberal-bourgeois humanism is now no more than barren wheat and starchless bread.”⁸⁹ In a war-time book, Murry cited Maritain to argue: “we live in a world in which we cannot change anything without changing everything.”⁹⁰ In early 1940, the CNL recommended True Humanism on a list of “aids to an understanding of present-day Christian thought.”⁹¹ In another issue, Oldham drew attention to Maritain’s assertion of a growing potential for a new

Polanyi, Michael, Copy of a letter (25 June 1948), OA 9/8/33. Both Eliot and Dawson stressed the relation between a healthy culture and religion, but were sceptical about efforts, such as those suggested by Mannheim, to plan culture. This became a key element in Eliot’s Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948): McVey, “Backgrounds to The Idea of a Christian Society,” 187– 188.  Mannheim, Diagnosis, 106 – 107.  Ibid., 110.  E. g., Clements, Moot Papers, 54, 89, 102, 115, 208, 266, 268, 287, 295, 300, 310, 311, 320, 325, 358, 387, 479, 545 – 546, 580. Jenkins thought the Moot was “apt to contemplate revolution too happily”: ibid., 633.  Ibid., 127, 222– 223.  Baillie, “True Humanism,” 6.  Murry, John Middleton, The Betrayal of Christ by the Churches, London 1940, 123.  Oldham, Joseph H., “12 L,” in: CNL (17 January 1940): 3. The others were Baillie, John, Our Knowledge of God, New York 1939; Dawson, Christopher, Beyond Politics, London 1939; Demant, V.A., The Religious Prospect, London 1939; Dodd, C.H., History and the Gospel, New York 1938; Eliot, T.S., The Idea of a Christian Society, London 1939; and Niebuhr, Reinhold, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, London 1936.

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Christendom in Britain and France.⁹² Key CNL essays on a Christian social order referenced Maritain.⁹³ Some commentators, however, thought Maritain unfairly blamed Protestantism for secularisation. Wilhelm Loew suggested he shared the “well-known Catholic inability to distinguish between the Reformation and Renaissance.”⁹⁴ Alexeiev also critiqued Maritain’s one-sided historical vision: focusing solely on theological contexts – where free-will may indeed have been downplayed – led him to ignore Protestantism’s positive influence on political and social freedom.⁹⁵ (Alexeiev saw Marxism as deriving not – as Maritain suggested – from Protestantism but rather from Catholicism, suggesting lingering Protestant cultural influences had given western European Marxism what minimal democratic qualities it possessed.⁹⁶) Dawson, the Moot’s lone Roman Catholic until Polanyi’s arrival in 1944, also criticised Maritain’s “lack of historical knowledge and of the sense of history,” especially his ignoring of the Enlightenment: “A naïve reader might well get the impression that Humanism was something invented by St. Thomas and revived by Karl Marx and that there was a chap called Molina who had something to do with it in the interval.”⁹⁷ Baillie and Murry agreed with Dawson about what Baillie called his “extreme foreshortening” of history and “almost absurdly abrupt” leap “from the Counter-Reformation to the dissolution of liberalism,” but neither thought this undermined Maritain’s main argument.⁹⁸

3 A Synthesis of Christianity and Modern Thought Maritain was also seen to share an openness to secular thought. The Oldham group approved Maritain’s call for the political order to be “‘vivified and impregnated’ with the truths of the Christian revelation” but believed society would re-

 Oldham, Joseph H., “15 L,” in: CNL (7 February 1940): 4.  Oldham, Joseph H., “The Predicament of Society and the Way Out. II. Supplement 88,” in: CNL (1 July 1941): 3; Oldham, Joseph H., “198 L,” in: CNL (29 December 1943): 5.  Loew, “Stellungnahme,” 1, 2. The anonymous “younger” German commentator similarly argued that “Protestantism may not be made so solely responsible for the process [of secularisation] as happens repeatedly in Maritain’s book”. Anon., Stellungnahme,” 1.  Alexeiev, “Bericht,” 4.  Ibid., 4– 5.  Dawson, Christopher, Comments on M. Maritain’s True Humanism (n. d. [for the third meeting of the Moot, 6 – 9 January 1939]), OA 14/4/31, 1.  Baillie, “True Humanism,” 4, emphasis in original; Murry, “Comments,” 1.

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main mostly secular.⁹⁹ This drove its focus on the “frontier” between faith and society and emphasis on working with non-Christians. In a radio talk, Oldham urged cooperation with atheists. Maritain, he stated, has said truly that a man may in his fundamental attitude choose God, even when, as the result of his education or through some intellectual misunderstanding, his professed faith is philosophic atheism. Christ plainly taught that there would be people in heaven who would be utterly surprised to find themselves there.¹⁰⁰

Maritain’s emphasis on a “secular Christian” order was appealing.¹⁰¹ Building on the Oxford conference and Oldham’s concept of “middle-axioms” – which defined “the directions in which, in a particular state of society, Christian faith must express itself”¹⁰² – the group emphasised that social life should be relatively autonomous from specifically Christian standards. Ballie thought Maritain helpfully described how Christian ideals “must necessarily be expressed in terms that the non-Christian would appreciate.”¹⁰³ The group repeatedly emphasised that Christians, as Christians, had no special insight into economic, social, and political problems, requiring cooperation with “experts.” Maritain seemed to share a similar view. Maritain, Baillie wrote, is well aware that this ideal of a Christian secular order or Christianised earthly city is opposed not only to (a) the mediaeval Roman ideal, (b) the ideal of secularist liberalism, (c) the atheistic communist ideal, and (d) the Fascist neo-pagan ideals, but also to (e) the fundamental dualism of Luther, the neo-Lutherans and the Barthians.¹⁰⁴

The group thus saw itself as having the same opponents as Maritain. In particular, Maritain confirmed the group in its rejection of “continental Protestantism,” by which they mainly referred to Lutheranism and to Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth’s “dialectical theology.” Both – especially, as Baillie put it, Barth’s “entirely abrupt dichotomy between the heavenly and the earthly cities”¹⁰⁵ – seemed to downplay or even deny Christianity’s place in judging the social order, thereby undermining the raison d’être of the Oldham group. Reviewing True Humanism in the Times Literary Supplement, Murry agreed that

 Oldham, Joseph H., “187 L,” in: CNL (28 July 1943): 2.  Oldham, Joseph H., The Root of Our Troubles: Two Broadcast Talks, London 1941, 22.  Maritain, Jacques, True Humanism, London 1938, 156.  Visser ’t Hooft, W.A/Oldham, J.H., The Church and Its Function in Society, London 1937, 210.  Clements, Moot Papers, 155.  Baillie, “True Humanism,” 8.  Ibid., 8.

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the Kingdom of God could not be built on earth; still, Christians should be “completely armed against the dangerous revival, by an extreme form of Protestant theology, of a primitive anti-humanism, which rejects the secular order as radically corrupt.”¹⁰⁶ However, in the Moot’s discussion, the anonymous German theologian and Alexeiev argued against religious meddling in politics.¹⁰⁷ Oldham received a similar comment from Lutheran philosophy professor Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy claiming “that Mr. Maritain’s society either will remain a dream or would be a nightmare if ever coming true.”¹⁰⁸ Such reactions reinforced the group’s rejection of “continental” Protestantism. Baillie saw “an absence of appreciation of Maritain’s essential position in the continental comment.”¹⁰⁹ Vidler, expressing a group consensus, concluded that “when we are examining the truth of a matter continental criticism could be left out.”¹¹⁰ Nonetheless, a few commentators reproached Maritain for a lingering medievalism. Alexeiev accused him of “idealising” the Middle Ages (which had been “highly non-humanist, barbaric and wild.”)¹¹¹ Hodges thought Maritain defended “a structure battered in succession by Renaissance, Reformation, and Critique [that] cannot be rebuilt”: “When a scholastic like Maritain writes in his Thomist idiom about issues of our time, he speaks like a foreigner, in a foreign tongue, but not in a more Christian tongue.”¹¹² Macmurray rejected Maritain’s praise of “Medieval orthodoxy”: in Macmurray’s view, Protestantism was not “just a heresy,” secularisation began not with the Reformation (but rather the east-west Great Schism), the Middle Ages had been marked by their own spiritual-temporal “dualism,” and Aristotle could not be a “source of Christian understanding.”¹¹³ Indeed, while Maritain was open to scientific knowledge, he was adamant that – in accordance with the Thomist principle of “intellection” – it was only valid within its own sphere and subordinate to (a Christian) metaphysics.¹¹⁴ The Oldham group shared a similar view of science as only legitimate in its “ma-

 Murry, “Towards a Christian Society,” 56.  Anon., “Stellungnahme,” 2– 3; Alexeiev, “Bericht,” 8 – 9.  Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen, Letter to J.H. Oldham, University of Leeds, Brotherton Library, BC MS 20c Moot, 1– 2. He was no more pleased with “Planning for Freedom”: “Mannheim bores me. I think he is death incarnate.” Ibid., 1.  Clements, Moot Papers, 138.  Ibid., 141.  Alexeiev, “Bericht,” 3.  Hodges, H.A., Christian Thinking Today (n.d. [ca. August 1941]), IOE, MOO /63a, 11.  Macmurray, “Comments,” 1– 2.  Thompson, Phillip M., Between Science and Religion: The Engagement of Catholic Intellectuals with Science and Technology in the Twentieth Century, Lanham 2009, xviii, 44– 46.

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terial” sphere, but it emphasised mutual accommodation by science and faith rather than insisting science bend to faith’s will.

4 Agreement on Religion, Politics, and Strategy Finally, the Oldham group and Maritain shared views of the relationship between religion and politics as well as of the strategy for achieving social change. Seeking a “Christian” society, the group was nonetheless wary of bringing faith and politics too closely together, making True Humanism’s vision of a “secular Christian order” attractive. Murry, for example, agreed with Alexeiev’s comment that there was no single “Christian” state, society, or economics: different societies offered “a more or less favourable atmosphere for the awakening and development of the Christian spirit in man.”¹¹⁵ It was a group consensus that the same “Christian” principles might justify very different policies. The first two Moot meetings had (with great reluctance) considered whether the only answer to the seemingly unstoppable growth of state power might be a “Christian totalitarianism”; however, from the third meeting Maritain’s “personalist democracy” and Mannheim’s “planning for freedom” – both seen as antidotes to totalitarianism – became guiding concepts.¹¹⁶ But “Christian” freedom was distinguished from secular-liberal alternatives, requiring, first, a society-wide agreement on, and enforcement of, core values (having seen Weimar’s collapse, Mannheim and Löwe advocated a kind of “militant democracy”)¹¹⁷ and, second, the replace-

 Clements, Moot Papers, 141; Alexeiev, “Bericht,” 8.  Oldham’s thought has been labelled “Christian totalitarianism”: Smith, Graeme, “Christian Totalitarianism: Joseph Oldham and Oxford 1937,” in: Political Theology 3 (2001): 32– 46 and idem. Oxford 1937, I agree with Kurlberg’s rejection of the claim that the Moot was totalitarian but also disagree with his view that “the Moot was irrefutably undemocratic”: Kurlberg, “Resisting Totalitarianism,” 524, 525, and 527.  Mannheim urged democracies to be “as militant as the totalitarian states” in defending “a fundamental set of rules and moral codes concerning the basic issues of social life”: “we should not shrink from propagating democratic methods and making contempt for dictatorship a creed, for it is surely a misinterpretation of democracy to believe that one must tolerate the intolerant.” “Planning for Freedom,” 14. In a letter to Mannheim, Maritain agreed with (and quoted) this point in commenting on the “orders” that would advocate for social change: “et qu’ils devraient avoir une existence légale et institutionnelle, en sorte que l’Etat puisse refuser le droit de se constituer et de subsister à des ‘ordres’ qui iraient contre ses principes fondamentaux et viseraient par exemple à détruire la liberté elle-même (‘for it is surely a misinterpretation of democracy to believe that one must tolerate the intolerant’).” Maritain, “Copy of Letter,” 2. Löwe: “society must accept some few principles. If and when the heretic arose he must be dealt with”: Clem-

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ment of a shallow individualism with an “organic” emphasis on the “person” rooted in community. In the Oldham group, this vision predated discussion of Maritain, but his concept of “personalist democracy” was clearly compatible: in the CNL, Oldham praised Maritain’s call for replacing “a democracy based on the isolated individual” with one that “draws its strength from persons living in community.”¹¹⁸ A similar argument appeared in a later CNL essay by William Temple (that had been substantially prepared by Oldham): If we are to save freedom we must proceed, as Maritain urges, from democracy of the individual to democracy of the person, and recollect that personality achieves itself in the lesser groupings within the State – in the family, the school, the guild, the trade union, the village, the city, the county.¹¹⁹

This passage was also quoted in a Church of England report on post-war planning.¹²⁰ Given Britain’s lack of a denominational political tradition – and seeking to avoid sacralising particular policies – the group downplayed an electoral strategy. Instead, a two-pronged effort was foreseen. First, while some members disliked the phrase, the group sought a “revolution from above” via an “Order” of committed Christians influencing leading figures in corporations, the civil service, universities, and the media.¹²¹ Second, society would be “permeated” with new values (partly via numerous Christian “cells”), providing a cultural “leaven”:¹²² this metaphor of the Kingdom of God starting imperceptibly but having sudden revolutionary impact derives from biblical parables, and the idea of activist Christian “cells” was common in 1930s Britain.¹²³ The CFC (which brought business people, civil servants, politicians, educators, and theologians together with Christian activists) and the CNL (which inspired dozens of reading circles) ents, Moot Papers, 91. On “militant democracy,” see Müller, Jan-Werner, Contesting Democracy. Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe, New Haven 2011, 147.  Oldham, “Predicament of Society and the Way Out. II,” 3.  Temple, William, “What Christians Stand for in the Secular World”, in: CNL (29 December 1943): 5. Clements, Moot Papers, 615 – 616.  Church Assembly, The Church and the Planning of Britain, London 1944, 28.  On “revolution from above” see Clements, Moot Papers, 149, 164, 176, 266, 295, 387.  Clements, Moot Papers, 81, 90, and 182. The idea of “permeating” society with Christian values preceded the third meeting: ibid., 54, 69, and 73.  Matthew 13:33 and Luke 13:20 – 21. On “cells,” see Visser ’t Hooft/Oldham, Function in Society, 198 and Oldham J.H. et al., The Churches Survey Their Task, London 1937, 50. Sir Walter Moberly envisioned “hundreds and thousands” of “‘cells’ all over the country” through which “the national life might gradually be permeated by Christian influence.” Moberly, Walter, “The Christian Faith and the Common Life,” in: Contemporary Review, CLIII (May 1938): 555 – 562, 561.

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implemented such strategies in limited ways. Maritain seemed to confirm the need for an “order” through his call for Christians to form “temporal fellowships of an entirely new type.”¹²⁴ “They will evidently be at the beginning in the form of a minority,” Maritain had written, “which will act like a leaven and depend on the initiatives of a few.”¹²⁵ Mannheim stated that Maritain had told him at a meeting in Paris that he “regarded the Order as the most important and difficult part of the project.”¹²⁶ This recalled Maritain’s emphasis on what Baillie called “a sort of Christian diaspora.”¹²⁷ Baillie both welcomed and doubted Maritain’s views on the relationship between religion and politics. He approved his argument that their “ends” diverged (one was “eternal”, the other “temporal”) and rejection of a “Thomist distinction of nature and revelation”; Maritain (similar to Niebuhr) advocated a realistic principle of the “lesser evil” in political action but insufficiently addressed its application.¹²⁸ There were other critiques. The anonymous German theologian critiqued Maritain’s elusiveness about what forms of Christian organisation would pursue his goals (would there be “a group of churches brought somehow together ecumenically” or “free brotherhoods”?) and the relationship between the “new Christendom” and the Catholic Church.¹²⁹ Mannheim found Maritain’s analysis too “abstract” and “vague,” ignoring “large scale industrial technique, the difficulties of the trade cycle, and mass organisation.”¹³⁰ Löwe thought it expressed “an almost outrageous utopianism” and lack of institutional detail, assuming a “state of moral perfection according to the standard set up in the Sermon of the Mount.”¹³¹ Maritain, he said, was a “test case” of the dangers of confining oneself to “the realm of principles” and leaving “technical problems” to experts.¹³² Löwe later rejected Maritain’s division between church responsibility for “dogma and moral consequences” and the “lay task” of political action: Maritain was “alright” but “not in a period of such rapid transition,” which demanded a more active church.¹³³

 Clements, Moot Papers, 156 – 157.  Maritain, True Humanism, 266.  Clements, Moot Papers, 209.  Baillie, “True Humanism,” 9 – 10.  Ibid., 12.  Anon., “Stellungnahme,” 2.  Mannheim, “Some Remarks,” 1, 2.  Löwe, “Some Remarks,” 3.  Ibid., 4. Loew similarly suggested that Maritain, while seeking to avoid utopia, seemed economically and politically utopian: Loew, “Stellungnahme,” 2.  Clements, Moot Papers, 285.

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These issues returned in the CNL’s evaluations of post-war continental Christian Democracy. Kathleen Bliss argued that the new parties were building on thinkers like Maritain, whom she credited with breaking two false assumptions: first, that the Church must either avoid politics or enter it as the Church and, second, that the Christian must be “schizophrenic” in politics, “bearing the name ‘Christian’ when he worships and donning the alibi of ‘citizen’ when he votes.” True Humanism, she wrote, gave a “firm basis” for Christian politics, i. e. one must “understand and assert what the Gospel has to say about the natural order, about man as man and about human society.”¹³⁴ Christian Democracy, however, was unsuited to Britain, where both left- and right-wing politics had Christian roots and “the deep intellectual and religious cleavages which weaken some continental nations” had been avoided. Any British party claiming exclusive Christian inspiration would generate “a large measure of hostility.”¹³⁵ In the British electoral contest between Tories and Labour, the CNL was non-partisan, giving arguments for both Christian “conservatism” and “radicalism,” just as Oldham urged any Christian “Order” should include both socialists and conservatives.¹³⁶

IV Conclusion Starting in the late nineteenth century, the Vatican promoted Neo-Thomism in constructing “a systematic, militant, and uncompromising bulwark against modern thought,” the fruit of a papal agenda opposed to “representative government, political liberalism and the trappings of modernity.”¹³⁷ Maritain rose to prominence as a Thomist thinker in this “age of imperial neo-Scholasticism”¹³⁸ and with an anti-modern agenda. How could this representative of such a clearly Roman Catholic (and reactionary) worldview so profoundly influence a Protestant intellectual group that took as its key aims the defence of some aspects of the “liberal” political order (such as parliamentary democracy) and a constructive engagement with secular sociology? As I have shown, it was specifically True Humanism’s democratic, tolerant, and pluralist formulations of Thomist principles that enabled a combination of Maritain and Mannheim – of “person-

   tian  

Bliss, Kathleen, “Letter 263,” in: CNL (26 June 1946): 3. See ibid., and Bliss, Kathleen, “Letter 281,” in: CNL (19 March 1947): 4– 5. Bliss, “Letter 263,” 3; [Anon.], “Christians in Politics: I. Christian Conservatism and ChrisRadicalism. 263S,” in: CNL (26 June 1946); Clements, Moot Papers, 211. McGinn, Summa Theologiae, 168. O’Meara, Thomas Aquinas, xv.

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alism” and “planning” – to shape the Oldham group’s consensus, an example of the dynamic, partial, and ambivalent nature of intellectual exchange. Various factors explain the Oldham group’s enthusiasm for Maritain. First, the ecumenical context, backgrounds, and outlooks of most participants made them open to religious thought across denominational boundaries.¹³⁹ Second, a perceived “convergence” in Christian social thought increased True Humanism’s appeal even among those who did not share its broader Thomist assumptions. Third, Maritain’s ideas confirmed the group’s existing views and offered intellectual resources for pursuing them, particularly a useful language for expressing the relationship among Christianity, secularity, and politics. Fourth, Maritain proposed a respectful, mutually enriching dialogue between Christians and “secular” thought. Fifth, his strategy for achieving a “new Christendom” matched the group’s, centring on lay Christian efforts to “permeate” culture from above and below. Sixth, personal connections between Maritain and some members in the group surely smoothed the process of intellectual transfer. Maritain’s thought, however, was not simply used as a screen behind which group members pursued their pre-existing interests: they took his ideas seriously and respected the depth of his Christian commitment. As Keith Clements has argued, Maritain’s “theocratic humanism” translated “into a personalist vision of society: communitarian yet pluralist, organic yet allowing diversity, cohesive yet encouraging freedom of both association and expression, and as such in steadfast contradiction to contemporary Communism (on the Soviet model), Fascism and laissez-faire capitalism.”¹⁴⁰ This combination was deeply appealing for those seeking a middle-way through the “age of extremes.” Vidler thought it crucial that ideas like those in True Humanism “should be worked out and developed in an English idiom and context,” a reasonable description of the group’s efforts.¹⁴¹ Fenn even saw the group’s vision of a “Christian society” as a “modernised edition of Natural Law” as filtered through Maritain.¹⁴² Maritain provided a vocabulary – “new Christendom,” “democracy of the person,” “permeation,” “secular Christian order” – that echoed though the next decade of the group’s activities.

 The Catholic Church in this period rejected working with the ecumenical movement, but war-time Britain saw some cooperation through the (Catholic-led) “Sword of the Spirit” movement, of which Moot member Christopher Dawson was vice-president. See Walsh, Michael J., “Ecumenism in War-Time Britain. The Sword of the Spirit and Religion and Life,” The Heythrop Journal, 23.3 (1982): 243 – 258 and 23.4 (1982): 377– 394; Coupland, Britannia, 20 – 21.  Clements, Moot Papers, 128.  Vidler, “Comments,” 1.  Fenn, Eric, Letter to J.H. Oldham (31 March 1941), IOE, MOO /48, 2– 3.

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For such reasons, Matthew Grimley has linked the Moot to the “resurgence in twentieth-century political thought of a medieval concept of civil society” and stressed Maritain’s influence.¹⁴³ Jonas Kurlberg even sees it as pursuing a “Neo-Thomist Christian revolution”: Neo-Scholasticism was “one of the primary theological and socio-political sources” and Maritain “something of a sage” for the group.¹⁴⁴ But the importance of medievalism, Maritain, and Neo-Thomism for the Oldham group should not be overstated. Other influences were equally important: traditions of liberal Anglicanism, Niebuhrian “Christian realism,” various forms of “personalism” (Protestant, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish), and the continental sociology of Mannheim and Löwe. Creating a new synthesis was foundational to the group’s goals, encapsulated in Oldham’s aim of developing a “school of thought” that was not “exclusive” but included “the elements of truth in the different schools already in existence.”¹⁴⁵ The group, moreover, adopted not Neo-Thomism but rather elements from Maritain’s formulation of it. Some of its members did hold “Anglo-Catholic” views and some Catholic ideas were explored; however, the group sought to avoid “political Catholicism,” viewed as potentially authoritarian.¹⁴⁶ In a prefatory volume for the 1937 Oxford Conference Oldham depicted “the Thomist system” as “an extraordinarily powerful and impressive attempt to hold in combination the otherworldly and the thisworldly ends of human life.”¹⁴⁷ He observed, however, that Catholic emphasis on the “natural moral law” required “the interpretation of an authoritative church”: “The Thomist doctrine of natural law seems to lead in the direction of clericalism.”¹⁴⁸ Oldham saw Christianity’s “distinctive” contribution as an “ethic of inspiration” (based on “a living fellowship with God”) rather than “an ethic of ends” (focused on goals), a view “at variance with the Thomist doctrine of a hierarchy of ends.”¹⁴⁹ In the Moot, it was precisely True Humanism’s avoidance of what Baillie called “aspects of Romanism” that was praised. Maritain was appealing because of his distinctiveness, particularly his advocacy of what has been called an “open Thomism” that was “liberal” and “eclectic.”¹⁵⁰ The group’s

 Grimley, “Civil Society.”  Kurlberg, “Resisting Totalitarianism,” 1; Kurlberg, Jonas, “The Moot, the End of Civilisation and the Re-Birth of Christendom”, in: Erik Tonning/Matthew Feldman/David Addyman (ed.), Modernism, Christianity and Apocalypse, Leiden 2015, 222– 235, 228.  Clements, Moot Papers, 487– 488.  E. g., ibid., 360, 628, 648 – 649.  Visser ’t Hooft/Oldham, Function in Society, 117.  Ibid., 119.  Ibid., 220.  O’Meara, Thomas Aquinas, 178.

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critiques of Maritain’s incomplete and partisan vision of history, vague aims and strategy, and lingering medievalist tendencies should also not be ignored. Maritain’s independence as a thinker was part of his appeal more broadly in Britain. In its positive review of True Humanism, for example, the Church Times stressed Maritain’s unusual emphasis (for such an “ardent Thomist”) on avoiding medievalist solutions and his openness toward contemporary knowledge.¹⁵¹ Some whose relationship to Christianity was decidedly ambivalent reacted similarly. For example, George Orwell – an agnostic and no fan of Catholicism¹⁵² – thought that Maritain’s Christianity and Democracy (1945) argued compellingly “that Democracy and social justice are inherent in Christian doctrine and have even been enjoined by the leaders of the Church.” However, Orwell saw Maritain as “a voice crying in the wilderness,” expressing a “Christian Socialism” that was “certainly not representative of the Church as a whole”: “it is difficult to feel”, Orwell concluded, “that the people for whom he is specially writing will be much impressed.”¹⁵³ Orwell’s openness to this Christian social vision derived from his ambivalent view of the historical consequences of secularisation. Christianity’s decline had been “absolutely necessary,” Orwell thought, but the collapse of traditional social and moral assumptions had enabled the alternative certainties of political totalitarianism.¹⁵⁴ He was far from alone in this view. The poet W.H. Auden, for example (who became an active Christian in 1940), observed in 1948 that the “modern problem” involved “living in a society in which men are no longer supported by tradition without being aware of it,” requiring new forms of individual sense-making in a confusing, fragmented cultural environment.¹⁵⁵ Matthew Sterenberg has recently argued that this perceived crisis of modernity led British intellectual discourse to be profoundly influenced from the

 Review of Jacques Maritain, True Humanism, Church Times, (25 November 1938): 595.  Spiller, Leroy, “George Orwell’s Anti-Catholicism,” in: Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 6.4 (2003): 150 – 163. See, e. g., Orwell, George, “Review of Karl Adam’s The Spirit of Catholicism” (in the New English Weekly, 9 June 1932), in: Sonia Orwell/Ian Angus, (ed.), Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, vol. 1, Boston 2000 [1968], 79 – 81. In August 1947, Orwell warned that the influence of the Catholic Church “is and always must be against freedom of thought and speech, against human equality, and against any form of society tending to promote earthly happiness.” “Towards European Unity,” in ibid., vol. 4, 370 – 375, 374.  Orwell, George, “A Muffled Voice,” Observer, 10 June 1945, in: id. Orwell: The Observer Years, London 2003, 162– 164. “The fact is that the Catholic humanist is a rare animal, like an albino elephant, and must probably remain so.” Idem, 163.  Orwell, George, “Notes on the Way,” in: Sonia Orwell/Ian Angus (ed.), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol. 2, London 1970 [1958], 30 – 33.  Sterenberg, Matthew, Mythic Thinking in Twentieth-Century Britain: Meaning for Modernity, Basingstoke 2013, 1– 2.

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early twentieth century by “mythic thinking,” which sought meaning through appeals to the “imagination” and by “making the claim that myths communicate timeless truths that cannot be apprehended through reason and science.”¹⁵⁶ Such attitudes shaped the broader context of the Oldham group’s efforts to communicate their ideas to the public, providing an opening for spiritual – and specifically Christian – discourses in a secular society. The flow of ideas between Maritain and the Oldham group was not oneway. Mannheim sent Maritain copies of his “planning for freedom” paper and Hodges’s “plan for a new Summa.” Maritain praised both, agreeing with the Moot’s views on “revolution from above” and the centrality of an “Order.”¹⁵⁷ Maritain’s enthusiasm for such perspectives is unsurprising: in True Humanism he speculated that in a future society organised along “communal and personalist” principles, collectivisation would not be suppressed but “organised on entirely other lines and for the benefit of the human person.”¹⁵⁸ Here, again, setting up Maritain and the Oldham group as exemplars of “Christian civil society” ideals – as an alternative to state planning – underplays the openness of these ideas to admixture and synthesis. Finally, while the Oldham group had a particular stature in the Christian intellectual world of the 1930s and 1940s, its reception of Maritain’s thought should not necessarily be taken as typical of British Christianity as a whole. The group was distinctively intellectual and ecumenical and placed greater emphasis on a socially and politically oriented faith than did most Christians. There was another, more explicitly Anglo-Catholic Christian intellectual group in these years, “the Christendom Group,” that was more directly oriented toward Thomist thought.¹⁵⁹ Eliot was a member of both groups; however, their outlooks were in many ways different. Oldham, reviewing the Christendom Group’s Prospect for Christendom in 1945 critiqued the group’s over-emphasis on natural law and some of the essays’ “remoteness from actual life as it has to be lived to-day by ordinary men and women.”¹⁶⁰ Thus, while Maritain was clearly influential on the Oldham group, a closer look at the group’s engagement with his ideas shows both the complexity of the transfer of Thomist concepts as well as the extent to which Maritain was only one ingredient in a complicated mix of intellec-

 Ibid. 3 – 4.  Maritain, “Copy of a Letter,” 2.  Maritain, True Humanism, 158.  Oliver, John, The Church and Social Order: Social Thought in the Church of England 1918 – 1939, London 1968, 118 – 139.  Oldham, Joseph H., “Prospect for Christendom. Supplement 237,” in: Christian News-Letter (27 June 1945): 8.

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tual, religious, and political influences that formed the group’s consensus. It was possible to adapt elements of Thomism without thereby taking on either the entire edifice of its philosophical assumptions or its more typical socio-political conclusions.

References [Anon.], Stellungnahme zu dem Buch von Maritain (by a German theologian of the younger generation), (n. d. [for the third meeting of the Moot, 6 – 9 January 1939]), J.H. Oldham Papers, New College Library, Edinburgh OA 13/7/52. Quoted as OA. [Anon.], Christianity and the Secular (19 April 1944), 1. J.H. Oldham Papers, New College Library, Edinburgh, OA 13/6/35. Quoted as OA. [Anon.], “Christians in Politics: I. Christian Conservatism and Christian Radicalism. Supplement 263,” in: Christian News-Letter (26 June 1946). Quoted as CNL. [n/a], “Review of Jacques Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge and An Introduction to Logic,” in: Church Times (10 December 1937): 675. [n/a], “Estimates of Philosophy and Religion,” in: Guardian (4 February 1938): 70. [n/a], “This Freedom (leading article),” in: Church Times (11 March 1938): 272 – 273. [n/a], “Science and Beyond,” in: Guardian (10 June 1938): 370. [n/a], “Review of Jacques Maritain, True Humanism,” in: Church Times (25 November 1938): 595. [n/a], “Philosophia Perennis,” in: Guardian (29 December 1939): 768. Adam, Thomas, Intercultural Transfers and the Making of the Modern World, 1800 – 2000, Basingstoke 2011. Alexeiev, Nicolas [“N.N. Alexejeff”], Bericht über das Buch ‘L’Humanisme integral’ von Jacques Maritain, (n. d. [for the third meeting of the Moot, 6 – 9 January 1939]) J.H. Oldham Papers, New College Library, Edinburgh OA 14/9/5. Quoted as OA. Baillie, John, Untitled address given at the Student Christian Movement’s Theological Conference held at Stanwick, January 1938, University of Birmingham, Cadbury Research Library, DA 43, Box 5, File “SCM TCD Chaplains.” Baillie, John, Paper on Maritain’s True Humanism, (n. d. [for the third meeting of the Moot, 6 – 9 January 1939]), Lambeth Palace Library, Lang 26, ff.52 – 64. Quoted as LPL. Baillie, John, Our Knowledge of God, New York 1939. Bliss, Kathleen, “Letter 263,” in: Christian News-Letter (26 June 1946): 3. Quoted as CNL. Bliss, Kathleen, “Letter 281,” in: Christian News-Letter (19 March 1947): 4 – 5. Quoted as CNL. Church Assembly, The Church and the Planning of Britain, London 1944. Clements, Keith, Faith on the Frontier: A Life of J.H. Oldham, Edinburgh 1999. Clements, Keith (ed.), The Moot Papers: Faith, Freedom and Society 1938 – 1944, Edinburgh 2010. Coupland, Philip M., Britannia, Europa and Christendom: British Christians and European Integration, Basingstoke 2006. Dawson, Christopher, Beyond Politics, London 1939.

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Dawson, Christopher, Comments on M. Maritain’s True Humanism (n. d. [for the third meeting of the Moot, 6 – 9 January 1939]), J.H. Oldham Papers, New College Library, Edinburgh OA 14/4/31, 1. Quoted as OA. Demant, V.A., The Religious Prospect, London 1939 Dodd, C.H., History and the Gospel, New York 1938. Einfalt, Michael, “Debating Literary Autonomy: Jacques Maritain versus André Gide,” in: Rajesh Heynickx/Jan De Maeyer (ed.), The Maritain Factor: Taking Religion into Interwar Modernism, Leuven 2010. Eliot, T.S., The Idea of a Christian Society, London 1939. Eliot, T.S., Letter to J.H. Oldham (11 May 1944), J.H. Oldham Papers, New College Library, Edinburgh OA 9/6/67. Quoted as OA. Fenn, Eric, Letter to J.H. Oldham (31 March 1941), Fred Clarke Papers, Institute of Education, University of London. MOO /48, 2 – 3. Quoted as IOE. Gorry, Jonathan, Cold War Christians and the Spectre of Nuclear Deterrence, 1945 – 1959, Basingstoke 2013. Grimley, Matthew, “Civil Society and the Clerisy: Christian Élites and National Culture, c. 1930 – 1950,” in: Jose Harris, (ed.), Civil Society in British History: Ideas, Identities, Institutions, Oxford 2003, 231 – 247. Harding, Jason, “‘The Just Impartiality of a Christian Philosopher’: Jacques Maritain and T.S. Eliot,” in: Rajesh Heynickx/Jan De Maeyer (ed.), The Maritain Factor: Taking Religion into Interwar Modernism, Leuven 2010, 181 – 191. Hastings, Adrian, A History of English Christianity 1920 – 1990, London 1991. Hodges, H.A., Christian Thinking Today (n. d. [ca. August 1941]), Fred Clarke Papers, Institute of Education, University of London MOO /63a, 11. Quoted as IOE. Hodges, H.A., Comments on M. Maritain’s True Humanism (n. d. [for the third meeting of the Moot, 6 – 9 January 1939]), J.H. Oldham Papers, New College Library, Edinburgh OA 14/2/62, 1. Quoted as OA. Hodges, H.A., Towards a Plan for a New Summa, (n. d. [for the third meeting of the Moot, 6 – 9 January 1939]), Lambeth Palace Library, Lang 26 ff.65 – 74. Quoted as LPL. Hodges, H.A., Politics and the Moot (9 June 1943), J.H. Oldham Papers, New College Library, Edinburgh OA 14/1/43, 2. Quoted as OA. Itzen, Peter, Streitbare Kirche: Die Church of England vor den Herausforderungen des Wandels 1945 – 1990, Baden-Baden 2012. Kerr, Fergus, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism, Oxford 2002. Kettler, David/Meja, Volker/Stehr, Nico, Karl Mannheim, Chichester 1984. Kurlberg, Jonas, “Resisting Totalitarianism: The Moot and a New Christendom,” in: Religion Compass 7 (2013): 517 – 531. Kurlberg, Jonas, “The Moot, the End of Civilisation and the Re-Birth of Christendom,” in: Erik Tonning/Matthew Feldman/David Addyman (ed.), Modernism, Christianity and Apocalypse, Leiden 2015, 222 – 235. Lang, Cosmo, Letter to Oldham (2 September 1939), Lambeth Palace Library, Lang 26, f.154. Quoted as LPL. Lockerd, Benjamin G., “Beyond Politics: T.S. Eliot and Christopher Dawson on Religion and Culture,” in: Benjamin G. Lockerd (ed.) T.S. Eliot and Christian Tradition, Madison, 2014, 217 – 236.

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Loew, Wilhelm, Stellungnahme von Lic. W. Loew zu Maritain ‘Humanisme Intégral,’ (n. d. [for the third meeting of the Moot, 6 – 9 January 1939]), J.H. Oldham Papers, New College Library, Edinburgh OA 13/7/58. Quoted as OA. Löwe, Adolf, Some Remarks on Maritain’s True Humanism (n. d. [for the third meeting of the Moot, 6 – 9 January 1939]), J.H. Oldham Papers, New College Library, Edinburgh OA 14/4/50, 1. Quoted as OA. Macmurray, John, Comments on M. Maritain’s True Humanism (n. d. [for the third meeting of the Moot, 6 – 9 January 1939]), J.H. Oldham Papers, New College Library, Edinburgh OA 14/8/45, 1. Quoted as OA. Mannheim, Karl, Copy of Letter from Karl Mannheim, n. d. [probably after the second Moot meeting, September 1938], J.H. Oldham Papers, New College Library, Edinburgh OA 9/3/12. Quoted as OA. Mannheim, Karl, Planning for Freedom (n. d. [for third Moot Meeting, 6 – 9 January 1939]), Lambeth Palace Library, Lang 26, ff.75 – 93, 12 – 13. Quoted as LPL. Mannheim, Karl, Some Remarks on ‘Humanisme Intégral’ by Jacques Maritain (n. d. [for third Moot Meeting, 6 – 9 January 1939]), J.H. Oldham Papers, New College Library, Edinburgh OA 14/3/82, 1. Quoted as OA. Mannheim, Karl, Diagnosis of Our Time: Wartime Essays of a Sociologist, London 1943. Maritain, Jacques, True Humanism, London 1938. Maritain, Jacques, Copy of Letter (14 April 1939), University of Leeds, Brotherton Library, BC MS 20c Moot. Mascall, E.L., “Review of True Humanism,” in: Theology, vol. 38, no. 223 (January 1939): 74 – 76. McCool, Gerald, “Jacques Maritain: A Neo-Thomist Classic,” in: Journal of Religion 58.4 (1978): 380 – 404. McGinn, Bernard, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae: A Biography, Princeton 2014. McVey, Christopher, “Backgrounds to The Idea of a Christian Society: Charles Maurras, Christopher Dawson, and Jacques Maritain,” in: Benjamin G. Lockerd (ed.) T.S. Eliot and Christian Tradition, Madison 2014, 179 – 193. Moberly, Walter, “The Christian Faith and the Common Life,” in: Contemporary Review, CLIII (May 1938): 555 – 562. Müller, Jan-Werner, “Die eigentlich katholische Entschärfung? Jacques Maritain und die christdemokratischen Fluchtwege im Zeitalter der Extreme,” in: Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte 2.3 (2008): 40 – 54. Müller, Jan-Werner, Contesting Democracy. Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe, New Haven 2011. Müller, Jan-Werner, “Towards a New History of Christian Democracy,” in: Journal of Political Ideologies 18.2 (2013): 243 – 255. Murry, John Middleton, Comments on Maritain’s True Humanism (n. d. [for the third meeting of the Moot, 6 – 9 January 1939]), J.H. Oldham Papers, New College Library, Edinburgh OA 14/5/22, 1. Quoted as OA. Murry, John Middleton, “Towards a Christian Society,” in: Times Literary Supplement, (28 January 1939): 56. Murry, John Middleton, The Betrayal of Christ by the Churches, London 1940. Murry, John Middleton, Letter to J.H. Oldham (14 September 1942), Fred Clarke Papers, Institute of Education, University of London MOO /93, 1. Quoted as IOE.

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Niebuhr, Reinhold, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, London 1936. Oldham, Joseph H. et al., The Churches Survey Their Task; The Report of the Conference at Oxford, July 1937, on Church, Community, and State, London 1937. Quoted as The Churches Survey Their Task. [Oldham, Joseph H.], Statement of Policy, 25 November 1938, Lambeth Palace Library, Lang 26, ff.38 – 49. Quoted as LPL. Oldham, Joseph H., “0 L,” in: Christian News-Letter (18 October 1939): 1. Quoted as CNL. Oldham, Joseph H., “4 L,” in: Christian News-Letter (22 November 1939): 4. Quoted as CNL. Oldham, Joseph H., “12 L,” in: Christian News-Letter (17 January 1940): 3. Quoted as CNL. Oldham, Joseph H., “15 L,” in: Christian News-Letter, (7 February 1940): 4. Quoted as CNL. Oldham, Joseph H., “The Predicament of Society and the Way Out. II, 88S,” in: Christian News-Letter (1 July 1941): 3. Quoted as CNL. Oldham, Joseph H., The Root of Our Troubles: Two Broadcast Talks, London 1941. Oldham, Joseph H., “187 L,” in: Christian News-Letter (28 July 1943): 2. Quoted as CNL. Oldham, Joseph H., “198 L,” in: Christian News-Letter (29 December 1943): 5. Quoted as CNL. Oldham, Joseph H., “Prospect for Christendom. 237S,” in: Christian News-Letter (27 June 1945): 8. Quoted as CNL. Oldham, Joseph H., Address to the members of the Moot (November 1947), J.H. Oldham Papers, New College Library, Edinburgh OA 9/7/52, 1 – 2. Quoted as OA. Oliver, John, The Church and Social Order: Social Thought in the Church of England 1918 – 1939, London 1968. O’Meara, Thomas F., Thomas Aquinas: Theologian, Notre Dame 1997. Orwell, George, “Notes on the Way” (in Time and Tide, 30 March and 6 April 1940), in: Sonia Orwell/Ian Angus, (ed.), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol. 2, London 1970 [1958], 30 – 33. Orwell, George, “Review of Karl Adam’s The Spirit of Catholicism” (in New English Weekly, 9 June 1932), in: Sonia Orwell/Ian Angus, (ed.), Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, vol. 1, Boston 2000 [1968], 79 – 81. Orwell, George, “Towards European Unity” (in Partisan Weekly, July-August 1947), in: Sonia Orwell/Ian Angus, (ed.), Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, vol. 4, Boston 2000 [1968], 370 – 375. Orwell, George, “A Muffled Voice” (in Observer, 10 June 1945), in Orwell: The Observer Years, London 2003, 162 – 164. Overy, Richard, The Morbid Years: Britain between the Wars, London 2009. Paulmann, Johannes, “Interkultureller Transfer zwischen Deutschland und Großbritannien: Einführung in ein Forschungskonzept,” in: Rudolf Muhs/Johannes Paulmann/Willibald Steinmetz (ed.), Aneignung und Abwehr. Interkultureller Transfer zwischen Deutschland und Großbritannien im 19. Jahrhundert, Bodenheim 1998, 21 – 43. Polanyi, Michael, Copy of a letter (25 June 1948), J.H. Oldham Papers, New College Library, Edinburgh OA 9/8/33. Quoted as OA. Robbins, Keith, “Britain, 1940 and ‘Christian Civilisation’,” in: Keith Robbins (ed.), History, Religion and Identity in Modern Britain, London 1993, 195 – 214. Robichaud, Paul, “David Jones, Christopher Dawson, and the Meaning of History,” in: Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 6.3 (2003): 68 – 85. Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen, Letter to J.H. Oldham, (n. d. [for the fourth meeting of the Moot, 14 – 17 April 1939]), University of Leeds, Brotherton Library, BC MS 20c Moot, 1 – 2.

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Schloesser, Stephen, “The Rise of a Mystic Modernism: Maritain and the Sacrificed Generation of the Twenties,” in: Rajesh Heynickx/Jan De Maeyer (ed.), The Maritain Factor: Taking Religion into Interwar Modernism, Leuven 2010. Smith, Graeme, “Christian Totalitarianism: Joseph Oldham and Oxford 1937,” in: Political Theology 3 (2001): 32 – 46. Smith, Graeme, Oxford 1937: The Universal Christian Council for Life and Work Conference, Frankfurt 2004. Spiller, Leroy, “George Orwell’s Anti-Catholicism,” in: Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 6.4 (2003): 150 – 163. Steele, Tom/Taylor, Richard Kenneth, “Oldham’s Moot (1938 – 1947), the Universities and the Adult Citizen,” in: History of Education 39 (2010): 183 – 197. Sterenberg, Matthew, Mythic Thinking in Twentieth-Century Britain: Meaning for Modernity, Basingstoke 2013. Takayanagi, Shun’ichi, “T.S. Eliot, the Action Française, and Neo-Scholasticism,” in: Benjamin G. Lockerd (ed.) T.S. Eliot and Christian Tradition, Madison, 2014, 89 – 97. Temple, William, “What Christians Stand for in the Secular World, Supplement 198,” in: Christian News-Letter, (29 December 1943), 5. Thompson, Michael G., For God and Globe: Christian Internationalism in the United States between the Great War and the Cold War, Ithaca 2015. Thompson, Phillip M., Between Science and Religion: The Engagement of Catholic Intellectuals with Science and Technology in the Twentieth Century, Lanham 2009. Tonning, Erik/Feldman, Matthew/Addyman, David (ed.), Modernism, Christianity and Apocalypse, Leiden 2015. Vidler, A.R., Comments on Papers by Mannheim and Hodges (n. d.) [for the fourth meeting of the Moot, 14 – 17 April 1939], J.H. Oldham Papers, New College Library, Edinburgh OA 14/6/92. Quoted as OA. [Vidler, A.R.], “Editorial,” in: Theology, vol. 38, no. 228 (June 1939): 403. Vidler, A.R., Comments on M. Maritain’s True Humanism (n. d.) [for the third meeting of the Moot, 6 – 9 January 1939], J.H. Oldham Papers, New College Library, Edinburgh OA 14/6/89, 1. Quoted as OA. Villis, Tom, British Catholics and Fascism: Religious Identity and Political Extremism between the Wars, Basingstoke 2013. Visser ’t Hooft, W.A/Oldham, J.H., The Church and Its Function in Society, London 1937. Walsh, Michael J., “Ecumenism in War-Time Britain. The Sword of the Spirit and Religion and Life,” The Heythrop Journal, 23.3 (1982): 243 – 258 and 23.4 (1982): 377 – 394. Wilson, James Matthew, “An ‘Organ for a Frenchified Doctrine’: Jacques Maritain and The Criterion’s Neo-Thomism,” in: Benjamin G. Lockerd (ed.) T.S. Eliot and Christian Tradition, Madison, 2014, 99 – 116

Part II. Encountering Phenomenology, Existentialism, and Aesthetics

A drawing by the modernist artist and historiographer of abstract art Michel Seuphor. Seuphor, who always preferred clear-cut situations, for radical and even extreme positions, became fascinated by Neo-Thomism in the 1930’s. It was during this period that he converted to Catholicism. In this undated drawing (ink on paper) he synthesizes Aquinas’ monumental work by means of a single image airing a schematic clarity. [Drogenbos (Belgium), Private Collection FeliXart Museum].

Edward Baring

Neo-Scholasticism, Phenomenology, and the Problem of Conversion

Today, phenomenology and Neo-Scholasticism strike us as strange bedfellows. The former is perhaps the dominant strand of what has come to be known as “continental philosophy,” associated often with atheistic thinkers and hyper-, perhaps post-, modernity. The latter is, even in Catholic circles, regarded as dated, a misguided effort to turn back the philosophical clock. And yet in the first fifty years of the twentieth century, neo-scholastics were at the forefront of the reception of phenomenological ideas in France, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and elsewhere. They produced a number of synoptic and historical accounts of phenomenology that had great influence even beyond Catholic philosophical circles, especially where translations were thin on the ground. So too, they deployed the institutional resources of the Catholic Church to make phenomenology known across Europe. The French Société Thomiste organized the first conference on phenomenology outside of Germany, just to the South of Paris in 1932, and religious organizations supported the itinerant educations of Catholic students, allowing many to come to Freiburg to study with Husserl. Most dramatically, the Catholic Church provided the international connections and political clout that saved the Husserl archives in 1938 from Nazism. In the midst of the Munich Crisis, the Franciscan Herman Leo van Breda organized the transportation of 40,000 pages of Husserl’s stenographed notes out of Freiburg and into Belgium. He then hid the papers and provided sanctuary for Husserl’s wife in Leuven during the War, before opening the Husserl archives in 1945. At the point of convergence of phenomenology and scholasticism we can also locate Edith Stein, who trained with Husserl before producing a German translation of Aquinas’s de Veritate, the young Karol Wojtyła (future John Paul II), who argued in his 1954 dissertation that we needed to turn to Aquinas’s thought to remedy the abstract essentialism of phenomenological ethics, and Martin Hei-

I would like to thank Rajesh Heynickx and the participants of the Leuven “Neo-Thomism” conference as well as Katja Guenther and Andrea Robiglio for their helpful comments and criticisms. The writing of this article was in part supported by an ACLS Ryskamp Grant. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110588255-007

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degger, who first read Husserl at a time when he had dedicated himself to the “service of researching and teaching Christian-Scholastic philosophy.”¹ As these last two examples suggest the meeting between phenomenology and scholasticism was not without tension. For some, like Edith Stein, phenomenology showed them the way into “the majestic temple of scholastic thought.”² Of Husserl’s early followers, many converted to Catholicism, including Max Scheler, Siegfried Hamburger, Aurel Kolnai, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and Adelgundis Jaegerschmidt.³ The latter, like Stein, took religious vows. Hedwig Conrad Martius’s embrace of phenomenology encouraged a multi-decade engagement with scholastic thought, even if that never led to a religious conversion from her native Protestantism. But for others like Heidegger, phenomenology encouraged skepticism about scholastic doctrines and an increasing distance from the tradition; Husserl’s work led them to Protestantism or even a crisis of faith. Giulio Grasselli and Ernesto Grassi, who both played important roles in the introduction of phenomenology into Italy, started out as students at that neo-scholastic center in Italy, the Milanese Sacred Heart University, before embracing a secular form of phenomenology in the late 1920s and beyond. And while phenomenology did not lead the Spanish philosopher Xavier Zubiri to call into question his Catholic faith, it did make him increasingly critical of the scholastic tradition in which he had been trained. Husserl remarked on this religious merry-go-round in a 1918 letter to Rudolf Otto: “my philosophical influence has something remarkably revolutionary: Protestants become Catholic, Catholics become Protestant,” and, he might have added, both become unbelievers.⁴ Phenomenology in the early part of the twentieth century seems to have been a conversion machine, leaving no profession of faith untouched. Previous accounts have suggested that these conversions can be explained by the peculiarities of phenomenology. The phenomenological appeal to intuition and the loosening of the strictures of empiricism made philosophers

 Quoted in van Buren, John, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King, Bloomington 1994, 54.  Stein, Edith, Finite and Eternal Beings, Washington 2005, 12.  Scheler had converted in 1899, but only around 1912 came to embrace the faith. See Johannes Schaber, “Phänomenologie und Mönchtum,” in: Stephan Loos/Holger Zaborowski, (ed.) Leben, Tod und Entscheidung, Berlin 2003, 74.  Husserl to Otto quoted in Pöggeler, Otto, Philosophie und Hermeneutische Theologie, Munich 2009, 64.

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more open to religious belief.⁵ But these accounts have tended to emphasize the compatibility of phenomenology and religion, and thus have not been successful in explaining conversions in the other direction.⁶ In this article, I will leave to one side the question of personal religious conversion, to focus on its philosophical correlate, the way phenomenology encouraged an embrace or rejection of scholasticism. And I will argue that to understand these philosophical conversions, we need to direct our attention to the other partner in the relationship: neo-scholasticism, especially its so-called “progressive” form. For progressive neo-scholastics, conversion and the danger of apostasy were an integral part of their project of combining modern and medieval thought.

I Progressive Neo-Scholasticism Like neo-scholastics more generally, the progressives formed an international community. Prominent representatives included Constantin Gutberlet in Germany and Agostino Gemelli in Italy, but they took their lead, at least initially, from Désiré Mercier and his Institut Supérieur de Philosophie in Belgium. The motto Mercier chose for the institute—“Nova et vetera”—is an elegant distillation of their project: scholasticism needed to be updated to fit the needs of the present. The eminent German historian of scholastic philosophy, Martin Grabmann, explained their reasoning: “when a plant is to be transplanted from one place to another, it must be disengaged from its former soil and conditions of life, take root in the new soil, and thrive under the new vital conditions.”⁷ Above all this meant adopting the questions and methods of modern philosophy. Neoscholastics hoped thereby to convince their secular colleagues of the truth of medieval philosophy. Progressive neo-scholasticism was premised on the possibility of philosophical conversion. For Mercier, the aspect of modern philosophy most pertinent for a renewed scholasticism was its theory of knowledge: epistemology or, in his terms, criteriology. Mercier argued that a critical approach to knowledge did not necessarily lead to the skepticism or relativism that he diagnosed in the contemporaneous positivists; rather it could lay out a path to truly objective knowledge. For this

 See for example Vidal, Jacques, “Phénoménologie et conversions,” in: Archives de Philosophie, (1972): 209 – 243.  This is why Spiegelberg rejected the idea of a link between phenomenology and conversion to Catholicism in his Phenomenology: a Historical Introduction, The Hague 1960, n. The note was removed from the third edition.  Zybura, John (ed.), Present-day Thinkers and the New Scholasticism, New York 1926, 129 – 31.

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reason, in his most important book, the 1899 Critériologie, the first and longest section sought to prove from a critical starting point the “objectivity of the relationship between the predicate and the subject of our judgments.”⁸ To achieve this goal Mercier was willing to restrict that judgment to the realm of ideal objects. As he wrote, the truth of a thing was the “id quod est, what a thing is, its intelligible essence, abstracted from knowing whether it exists or not, either within us or outside of us.”⁹ Consequently, according to Mercier truth applied to the connection between two (mental) concepts, not a concept and a thing. The less important question of the “reality of the subject of our judgments” was consigned to the shorter, less developed second part, where Mercier infamously and inadequately appealed to the principle of causality.¹⁰ Mercier’s attempt to integrate modern epistemology into scholastic thought did not leave the latter unaffected; it required a dramatic revision of Aquinas’s correspondence theory of truth. As Mercier claimed “the definitions of ontological and logical truth that it suggests are manifestly defective…. the metaphysicians’ definition: Veritas est adaequatio intellectus et rei, needs at the very least to be interpreted and completed.”¹¹ Reformulated it should read “adaequatio intellectus et rei jam mente praeconceptae.”¹² Mercier claimed that the truth of empirical claims involved the conformity between a generic and a singular concept, not that between a concept and the world.¹³

II Husserl’s Logical Investigations At first sight, Husserl’s Logical Investigations from 1900 seemed to align with Mercier’s brand of neo-scholasticism. In that book Husserl attacked the very enemies that Mercier had identified in his own work: the psychologistic and positivistic philosophies that both labeled modern forms of “nominalism.” Husserl also claimed inheritance of the same philosophical tradition. In the Prolegomena he addressed the objection that he was “attempting to restore the Aristotelian scholastic logic, on whose worthlessness history has pronounced judgment,” and he responded by arguing that the “discipline in question is by no means so narrow in scope, and so poor in profound problems, as it is here reproached

 Mercier, Désiré, Critériologie Générale 2nd (ed.), Louvain 1900, 39.  Ibid., 33.  See on this van Riet, Georges, Problèmes d’épistemologie, Louvain 1960, 86 – 91.  Mercier, Critériologie, 21– 2.  Ibid., 367.  Mercier, Désiré, “La Notion de la vérité,” in: Revue Néo-Scolastique (1899): 388.

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with being.”¹⁴ Above all, Husserl’s appeal to intentionality, through Brentano, seemed to bring him in line with the scholastic tradition. Husserl had followed another of Brentano’s students, Kazimierz Twardowski, in using intentionality to separate the sensuous psychical elements of an act from its intentional meaning and object, which were mind-transcendent.¹⁵ The former were subjective acts (varying, individual, transient, and real) while the latter were objective content (identical, enduring, and ideal). Thus though my assertion of the Pythagorean theorem is bound to the here and now (and I can state it badly), the meaning of that theorem is valid at all times and for all places. As Husserl wrote “the scientific investigator… knows… that he does not make the objective validity of thoughts and thought-connections, of concepts and truths, as if he were concerned with contingencies of his own or of the general human mind, but that he sees them [sieht ein], discovers them [entdeckt].”¹⁶ Like Mercier, Husserl focused his attention on a priori logical laws and not those with a fundamentum in re. ¹⁷ His work would deal with the realm of essences or “ideal objectivities.” These essences provided what Husserl called “ideal possibility—i. e. a possibility in regard to the being of empirical cases falling under the general idea,” regardless of whether it was in fact fulfilled in reality.¹⁸ As he discussed in the Prolegomena, the species red was not “contained” in the concrete red object, such that we could simply filter out the other aspects, for in that case, it too would be temporally and spatially bound: “the part (moment) red is not Redness, but an instance of Redness.”¹⁹ For this reason, the species Red could not be apprehended in perception, but rather in a different type of act, an intuition intentionally directed at it: what Husserl called “Ideation.” Later Husserl would rename this the Wesensschau. In this way Husserl vastly expanded the role of experience beyond that granted it in empiricist philosophies. We could intuit real concrete objects, but also universal and ideal ones. In the second volume Husserl focused his attention on a subset of ideal objects: meaning (Bedeutung).²⁰ In Husserl’s famous example, “victor at Jena” and “vanquished at Waterloo” had two different meanings, but they referred to the same object: Napoleon. Under reflective phenomenological analysis, Husserl argued, we could

 Husserl, Edmund, Logical Investigations I, transl. J Findlay, London 2001, 32.  Husserl, Edmund, Logical Investigations II, transl. J Findlay, London 2001, 99. On this see Hickerson, Ryan, The History of Intentionality, London et al 2007, 65 – 81.  Husserl, Logical Investigations I, 226.  See Ibid., 46 – 55, 113 – 5, and 160 – 1  Husserl, Logical Investigations I, 86.  Ibid., 86.  See Zahavi, Dan, Husserl’s Phenomenology, Stanford 2002, 22– 7.

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redirect our attention from the intended object (Napoleon) to the intention (meaning) aiming at it. In so doing, we transformed intentional meanings themselves into a “class of ʻuniversal objectsʼ or species.”²¹ Husserl’s discussion of the relationship between meanings and objects informed his understanding of truth, which he treated at greatest length in the sixth investigation. The meaning of an expression was ideal, but that was not sufficient to make it “true.”²² So too the working out of these meanings provided a “formal logic” not a “logic of truth.” The difference between the two was determined by whether the object could be apprehended directly in intuition. False expressions were references without referents.²³ This was the force of Husserl’s catchphrase “zu den Sachen selbst”: we have to check our judgments against intuition. But as Dan Zahavi has written, in the Logische Untersuchungen, “we are not talking about a classical correspondence theory of truth, since the coincidence in question is a coincidence between two intentions [one full and one empty], and not between two separate ontological domains.”²⁴

III The Neo-Scholastic Reception of the Logical Investigations The parallels between Husserl’s project and their own inclined progressive neoscholastic philosophers to embrace phenomenology. The most important of the early neo-scholastic readers was Joseph Geyser, one of Gutberlet’s collaborators at the Philosophisches Jahrbuch. In his 1909 Grundlagen der Logik und Erkenntnislehre, Geyser wrote that Husserl’s Logical Investigations were a sign that “in the most recent logic and psychology the understanding of thought processes approaches that of the old doctrine.”²⁵ Geyser took as his main target psychologism, or more precisely anthropologism, which related truths to the subjective capacities of humans. Such an approach, Geyser averred, led straight to “agnosticism.”²⁶ Geyser asked, “does truth mean merely the common human necessities of thought, or does it mark the grasping of a state of affairs [Sachverhalt], as it is in itself?” To address this question, Geyser identified Husserl as a leading

     

Husserl, Logical Investigations I, 231. Husserl distinguishes between meaning and its objective reference. Ibid., 196 – 8. Or more precisely the expressions had objects, but those objects did not exist. Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology, 32. Geyser, Joseph, Grundlagen der Logik und Erkenntnislehre, Münster 1909, 23. See Ibid., 15 – 7.

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light.²⁷ Later in the book, Geyser was effusive in his praise: Husserl was “pathbreaking and subtle,” and had “broken the psychologistic spell,” returning “objectivism” to the center of philosophical debate.²⁸ In resisting anthropologism, Geyser wanted to show that the “foundational doctrine of logic,” (which included the principle of identity, contradiction etc.) was not a product of the mind, which rather came across [vorfinden] its objects.²⁹ Geyser used Husserl to distinguish the content of thought from the mental acts of a particular thinker, even if the former never existed without the latter. In fact Geyser suggested a form of bracketing of these elements to consider only “what is immanent to the pure meaning of thought.” This allowed Geyser to focus his attention on the question of supra-temporal “validity [Geltung].”³⁰ A judgment is valid when the intentional content of consciousness (a Bedeutung) is fulfilled by the intuition of an object.³¹ In this way the realm of meaning acted as a “norm” for psychological acts of judgment. But because the meaning was not itself psychological, the laws governing it were not those of psychological causality; they were “laws sui generis et ordinis.”³² Similarly Geyser distinguished the foundational doctrine from judgments of existence: its Being was “validity” not “existence [Dasein].”³³ Following Husserl, Geyser’s logic did not concern the “special doctrines of knowledge” such as amongst others the “question of the reality of the outside world.”³⁴ As he remarked at the end of the book, he could only make the briefest of gestures towards judgments of existence, but it was sufficient, he thought, to have shown that “in the human sciences there is a list of truthfully objective and unconditionally general pieces of knowledge.”³⁵ Geyser’s excitement about Husserl’s philosophy filtered through to centers of the neo-scholastic movement in other countries. Indeed the initial neo-scholastic reception of Husserl’s phenomenology is exemplary of the way in which its networks were able to shuttle ideas quickly around Europe. Mercier’s student Léon Noël, who had come across Geyser in 1909 at a meeting of the Görresgesellschaft,  Ibid., v.  Ibid., 7 and 274. Here Geyser explicitly aligned Husserl’s thought with scholasticism.  Ibid., 17.  Ibid., 47.  Ibid., 51.  Ibid., 49. See also Gruss, Heribert, Transzendenz-Erkenntnis im Phänomenologischen Ansatz : zur method. Neubegrü ndung theist. Weltsicht, Paderborn 1980, 56.  See Gruss, Transzendenz-Erkenntnis, 36.  Geyser, Grundlagen der Logik, 17. Geyser did think that the proof of the outside world was prepared in logic, but it was not achieved there.  Ibid., 411.

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wrote the first article on Husserl’s thought in a language other than German: the 1910 “les Frontières de la logique.”³⁶ Noël was enthusiastic in his response: Husserl had come close to “the theory of objective truth that has been presented many times in this review [the Revue Néo-Scolastique].”³⁷ Two things are worth noting: first, like Geyser, Noël focused on the objectivity of thought, mind-independence, and in his discussion the intentional object was always the “ideal object”; we have not yet arrived in 1910 at Noël’s “immediate realism.”³⁸ Second, Noël placed great significance on the fact that Husserl was “a convert,” referring to how Husserl had left behind the psychologism of the Philosophy of Arithmetic. ³⁹ In his trajectory then Husserl demonstrated how a careful working through of modern philosophy could lead one to the neo-scholastic position. In Leuven, a small cadre of students around Noël came to focus on phenomenology, amongst them René Kremer. At around this time he began his doctoral work, “La logique et la phénoménologie d’Edmund Husserl,” a project that because of the War was only completed in 1919, but counts as the first doctoral thesis written on Husserl’s work in French. Noël’s article also attracted the attention of the Italian neo-scholastics. In 1910 it merited an extended analysis in the Rivista di filosofia neo-scolastica, which Agostino Gemelli had founded only the previous year, modeled on Mercier’s Belgian review.⁴⁰ Over the next couple of years Husserl’s work made a number of appearances in the Milan Rivista. In a 1911 review of Geyser’s Grundlagen, Emilio Chiocchetti warmly encouraged neo-scholastics to read Husserl.⁴¹ That same year, Amato Masnovo declared that in Husserl’s “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft” one could see how “modern thought liberates itself, slowly but resolutely, from so many prejudices. Here it

 See his remarks in Noël, Léon, “Le Mouvement néo-scolastique,” in: Revue Néo-scolastique de philosophie (hereafter RNSP), 1912. It seems that the main cause of Noël’s reading of Husserl, as it had been for Geyser, was the work of August Messer.  Noël, Léon, “Les Frontières de la logique,” in: RNSP, 1910: 231.  Noël, “Les Frontières,” 38 f., 228 – 9. Andrea Robiglio rightly draws attention to the phenomenological aspects of Noël’s later work, but that work does not follow directly from Noël’s initial reading of Husserl. Robiglio, Andrea “Alle cose stesse” in: M. Salvio (ed.), Tomismo Creativo, Bologna 2015. Indeed in his “Notes sur le ’problème’ de la connaissance” from 1913, Noël invoked Husserl’s thought to show that the objectivity of thought was no longer an issue, rather than to introduce his argument for realism per se. See Noël, Léon, “Note sur le ’Problème’ de la Connaissance,” in: Annales de l’ISP, 1913: 664n.  Noël, “Les Frontières,” 226.  Gemelli, Agostino, “Revue Néo-Scolastique,” in: Rivista di filosofia neo-scolastica (hereafter RFNS) (1910): 353 – 5.  Chiocchetti, Emilio, “Review of Geyser, Grundlagen der Logik und Erkenntnislehre,” in: RFNS, (1911): 706 – 9.

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is permitted to find a good sign for the future of neo-scholastic philosophy.”⁴² Gemelli, however, was at the forefront of this development, citing Husserl numerous times.⁴³ Gemelli’s and Noël’s discussion of Husserl then informed the work of one of Mercier’s students in Spain, Marcelino Arnáiz.⁴⁴ Noël’s piece even came full circle back to the German-speaking world. Martin Grabmann, referred to it on the 14th April 1913, in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Christian Philosophy in Vienna. Husserl’s work helped explain, as the title of Grabmann’s talk would have it, the present value of research in medieval philosophy.⁴⁵ For progressive neo-scholastics the Husserl of 1900 provided brilliant confirmation of their ideas: he was the prodigal son, a modern philosopher who had realized the errors of his ways and returned to the objectivism of medieval philosophy. As the German neo-scholastic Wladislaus Switalski wrote in 1926, Thomists saw phenomenology as a “volte-face” in philosophy; Husserl’s work rendered the “modern thinker more responsive to the Scholastic way of putting and clarifying problems.”⁴⁶ This context helps us understand Edith Stein’s famous recollection that in the first years of the twentieth century Husserl’s Logical Investigations gave the impression of a “new scholasticism [Neue Scholastik].”⁴⁷ We can see why so many of Husserl’s students should have seen in his philosophy an opening to Catholicism.

IV Ideas and Husserl’s Transcendental Idealism Husserl’s much vaunted “conversion” was, however, short-lived. As we saw Husserl had focused his attention on the Bedeutung, which was studied by shifting attention from the intentional object to the intention aiming at it.⁴⁸ The Bedeutung was then independent of the existence of the object it intended, and in the period following the Logical Investigations Husserl formalized this independence in what he called the epochè, which neutralized the naïve presuppositions of the “natural attitude,” and allowed us to examine objects as they were given to us in

 Masnovo, Armato, “Logos,” in: RFNS, (1911): 473.  Gemelli, Agostino, “Le Studio seprimentale del pensiero e della volontà, II,” in: RFNS, (1912): 72. Gemelli, Agostino, “Il problema della realizzazione secondo O. Külpe,” in: RFNS, (1913): 406 – 7.  Arnáiz, Marcelino, Psicología fundada en la experiencia, Madrid 1914.  Grabmann, Martin, Der Gegenwartswert der Geschichtlichen Erforschung, Vienna 1913, 46 – 7.  Zybura, Present-day Thinkers, 181– 2.  Stein, Edith, Life in a Jewish Family, Washington 1986, 250.  See Husserl, Ideas, transl. W. Boyce Gibson, London 2010, 123 – 5.

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pure immanence, to “clarify” their sense. Moreover, the analysis of these Bedeutungen raised the suspicion that, as the point of contact between subject and object, they might not be subject-independent. Husserl developed this line of argument in the 1913 Ideas, his first major publication since the Logical Investigations, where he placed the constituting function of the transcendental subject at the center of discussion. To analyze this subject one required a “transcendental” reduction to “suspend” the eidetic sphere, allowing one to focus on the “essences of the formations of consciousness itself.”⁴⁹ This reduction revealed that the transcendental ego was the source of all justification, and the world was its accomplishment [Leistung]. For instance, the claim that the mode of givenness of physical objects was ever-incomplete adumbrations—we could only see one side at a time—was not the result of an analysis of objectivities (whether ideal or not) considered independently of the subject, but rather of the intentional connection between subject and object: Husserl’s famous noetic-noematic correlation.⁵⁰ As Husserl wrote “to remain for ever incomplete after this fashion is an ineradicable essential of the correlation Thing and Thing-perception.”⁵¹ The analysis suggested to Husserl that the latter [Thing-perception] was essential to the former [Thing]: “the transcendent must needs be experiencable… by an actual Ego.”⁵² In the infamous § 49 of Ideas, Husserl took this argument to an extreme. Whereas we were able to imagine the absolute annihilation of the world, we could not imagine a transcendent thing without a subject. For this reason “consciousness, considered in its ʻpurity,ʼ must be reckoned as a self-contained system of Being, as a system of Absolute Being, into which nothing can penetrate, and from which nothing can escape.”⁵³ Transcendental subjectivity had absolute priority and the real world was dependent upon it. Rather than reality being accessible through the intentionality of consciousness, now that reality was, “absolutely speaking, nothing at all, it has no ʻabsolute essenceʼ whatsoever, it has the essentiality of something which in principle is only intentional, only known, consciously presented as an appearance.”⁵⁴ For these reasons, in Ideas Husserl seemed to be heading towards a “transcendental idealism.”⁵⁵ If

 Ibid., 180 – 1.  See Ibid., 130 – 2.  Ibid., 138.  Ibid., 150.  Ibid., 153. Husserl explicitly put aside the theory that an exterior thing caused our sensations: Ibid., 158 – 64.  Ibid., 154.  Husserl did not actually use the term idealism in Ideas, but had in earlier lecture courses and would in his later publications.

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Husserl’s 1900 Logical Investigations had promised a conversion from modern to medieval philosophy, his 1913 Ideas threatened a move in the opposite direction.

V Debating the Progressives The idea that Husserl in Ideas had broken his (albeit unavowed) alliance with the neo-scholastics marked the Catholic reception of phenomenology over the next few decades. For some an engagement with Husserl facilitated their estrangement from scholasticism—earlier I mentioned Giulio Grasselli and Ernesto Grassi in Italy, and Xavier Zubiri in Spain. Others chose scholasticism over phenomenology (at least openly). For instance, though Noël had mentioned Husserl in his 1913 “Note sur le ʻproblèmeʼ de la connaissance,” which was the first outline of his “immediate realism,” he removed the reference in the 1925 re-edition of the essay for his Notes d’épistémologie Thomiste, and his remarks about phenomenology in the 1920s were few and far between.⁵⁶ So too René Kremer put aside his dissertation on Husserl, which was never published, and over the 1920s rather focused on other topics, writing books on the American and English “neo-realists.”⁵⁷ For another group of neo-scholastics, however, Husserl’s trajectory provided fuel for a criticism of the Mercier school. Ironically, phenomenology garnered far more attention amongst neo-scholastics once it seemed to be a source of real philosophical danger than it had when it had been seen as a straightforward confirmation of their ideas. The so-called “strict Thomists” had long criticized Mercier’s approach. They argued that Mercier had conceded too much to modern thought. As evidence they pointed to Mercier’s reformulation of the correspondence theory of truth. It showed that Mercier, a Catholic missionary to the world of secular philosophy, had gone native.⁵⁸ This argument was given a new lease on life in 1930, when Étienne Gilson attacked Mercier and his students in a paper on “methodological realism.”⁵⁹ Gilson claimed that while the idealists thought that philosophical reflection “must go necessarily from thought to things,” this marked a “Copernican

 Noël, Léon, Notes d’Épistémologie Thomiste, Louvain 1926.  Kremer, René, Le néo-réalisme Américain, Louvain 1920 and La Théorie de la connaissance chez les néo-réalistes anglais, Louvain 1928. The Louvain turn away from Husserl should also be understood within the context of the destruction of the city by the Germans in World War I.  See for instance, Folghera, J. D., “Jugement et Vérité,” in: Revue Thomiste (Sept 1899): 427– 46.  See Robiglio who articulates clearly the differences between Noël and Mercier, as well as the inadequacy of Gilson’s reading. Robiglio, “Alle cose stesse.”

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revolution” of the old medieval tradition.⁶⁰ The scholastics had instead wanted to “think from the point of view of the object.”⁶¹ The clear opposition between the idealist and realist routes made a conciliatory position like that of the Mercier school contradictory; it was as absurd as “the notion of a square circle.”⁶² Gilson focused his attack on Noël’s “immediate realism,” which attempted to achieve a realist philosophy from a critical starting point. In Gilson’s judgment Noël had failed; from idealism, Gilson claimed, only idealism could emerge. There were many reasons why Husserl should play a role in the critical realism debate. After all, Husserl had once been seen as proof positive of the progressive project, and it is no coincidence that two of the early readers of Husserl were implicated in Gilson’s argument: Gilson launched his opening salvo in Geyser’s 1930 Festschrift, and took Noël as his major opponent. Moreover Husserl’s apparent “conversion” in Ideas added fuel to Gilson’s argument, even more so after Husserl located himself definitively on the modern side of the Cartesian divide in the 1931 Cartesian Meditations. Husserl’s philosophical itinerary could now be invoked as evidence that the progressive project had failed; the philosophical conversion of modernity was not possible. The question Erich Przywara posed in a 1928 article is a concise summary of the problematic: did phenomenology represent “an ultimate defeat of modern philosophy before the spirit of the ancient-scholastic, or the former’s most radical no against it?”⁶³ The first major neo-scholastic treatment of Husserl in the 1930s, by Jacques Maritain, was explicitly a “digression” from his contribution to the Noël/Gilson debate. And Maritain presented Husserl in these terms: phenomenology, he argued, began with “activation of post-Kantian philosophy by a contact with Aristotelian and scholastic seeds.” The question was which element would win out. And though Maritain sought to mediate between Gilson and Noël, he sided with the former on the possibility of a robust engagement with modern philosophy. Maritain identified the scholastic seeds in Husserl’s thought as intentionality and the Wesensschau. Both, however, were overwhelmed by the way Husserl, like the moderns, gave priority to reflexivity and criticism, which led him to consider the phenomenon as a pure object of thought.⁶⁴ For Maritain, in contrast, we grasp extramental Being directly in thought (“ego cogito ens”).⁶⁵ By rendering the

 Gilson, Étienne, “Le réalisme méthodique,” in: Fritz-Joachim von Rintelen (ed.) Philosophia Perennis II, Regensburg 1930, 745.  Ibid., 746.  Ibid., 751.  Przywara, Erich, “Drei Richtungen der Phänomenologie,” in: Stimmen der Zeit (1928): 252.  Maritain, Jacques, Les Dégrés de savoir, Paris 1932, 195 – 7.  Ibid., 198 – 9.

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“epochè” the bracketing of all “extramental existence” and ignoring the scholastic process of abstraction, Husserl had set himself the contradictory task of “thinking Being while refusing to think it as Being.”⁶⁶ For this reason, according to Régis Jolivet who adopted a very similar position to Maritain in the Critical Realism debate, if the epochè were successful, one would be left with a “pure nothingness [néant].”⁶⁷ Reversing Husserl’s own formula, Jolivet asserted that “the pure ego and its cogitationes presuppose the natural existence of the world, because without it, there would be no cogitationes nor a self-conscious of itself.”⁶⁸ Both Maritain and Jolivet wanted to argue that Husserl had adopted a modern metaphysics, and this had corrupted the scholastic elements of his thought. In response to this critique, progressive neo-scholastics set out to show that Husserl’s idealism was not the inevitable result of combining modern and medieval thought. This question motivated the two major presentations at the 1932 Société Thomiste conference on phenomenology, provided the initial impetus for Sofia Vanni Rovighi’s 1939 book La filosofia di Edmund Husserl, guided Henri Boelaars’s book De Intentionaliteit der kennis bij Edmund Husserl from 1940, and exercised virtually every progressive neo-scholastic writing on Husserl in the interwar period. Many recuperation efforts focused on Husserl’s epochè. The Benedictine Daniel Feuling at the 1932 Journée d’Études argued that the epochè did not entail the denial of the external world. Rather it served Husserl’s broader goal of establishing philosophy as science, by setting aside all presuppositions: absolute Voraussetzungslosigkeit. Husserl was skeptical of naïve assertions about the outside world, the certainty we have about existence. But, Feuling noted, Husserl “does not deny that existence at all; he does not even doubt it; in this he diverges from Descartes.”⁶⁹ Feuling’s argument coincided with René Kremer’s at the same event. For Kremer the methodological application of the epochè was compatible with Thomism, which asserted a real distinction between essence and existence, allowing the two to be treated separately: “isn’t that the condition, long known, of all serious philosophical research?”⁷⁰ The salutary effect of the epochè for Thomist thought was reiterated by Vanni Rovighi in Italy, Kurt Reinhardt in the USA, and Marcel de Corte in France.⁷¹

 Ibid., 197.  Jolivet, Régis, Le Thomisme et la critique de la connaissance, Paris 1933, 137.  Ibid., 142.  La Phénoménologie: Journées d’études de la Société thomiste, Kain 1932, 30 – 1.  Ibid., 69.  Vanni Rovighi, Sofia, “Il ʻCogitoʼ di Cartesio e il ʻcogitoʼ di Husserl,” in: Cartesio, Milan (1937). Reinhardt, Kurt, “Husserl’s Phenomenology and Thomistic Philosophy,” in: New Scholas-

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The epochè stood in for the critical staring point, and thus metonymically for modern philosophy tout court. It was a valuable methodological tool and could not be discarded if scholastics wanted to be taken seriously as philosophers. But this did not mean that progressive neo-scholastics did not appreciate the differences between scholasticism and phenomenology. Sofia Vanni Rovighi, for instance, claimed that while Aquinas’s epistemology derived from Aristotelianism, in leaping straight to the eidos, Husserl’s was Platonic in its inspiration.⁷² For similar reasons, Przywara presented the opposition as that between the impetuous “youthful passion” of the phenomenological Wesensschau and the “cool distancing of the scholastic doctrine of abstraction.”⁷³ For these thinkers, problems arose when Husserl transformed the epochè from a method into a metaphysics. According to Helmut Burgert, Husserl had “moved too quickly from a pure exploration of essences to metaphysical theses.”⁷⁴ For Kremer his error was that he had forgotten that the epochè was just a provisional moment, and had treated it as the “final stage of the spirit,” denying the independence of existence from consciousness rather than simply bracketing it.⁷⁵ In doing so Husserl illegitimately foreclosed the question of existence, and this marked his “return to idealism.”⁷⁶ According to Erich Przywara the methodical “bracketing” in the Logical Investigations had become a “revaluing change of sign [Vorzeichenänderung]” in Ideas, that is a move from “methodological idealism” to “fundamental idealism.” This led Husserl to grant consciousness the character of “true Being.”⁷⁷ Such analyses suggested that Husserl’s idealism was not integral to phenomenology, which with rigorous argumentation could be converted again to Thomism. Quite how the various neo-scholastics attempted such a re-conversion was varied, marking the differences between the various progressive branches in Italy, Germany, and Belgium: Geyser and Feuling thought they could reconvert Husserl by locating the constituting subject in the creator God;⁷⁸ Stein through

ticism (1937). de Corte, Marcel, “Idée sommaire de la phénoménologie,” in: Revue de Philosophie (1935).  See Söhngen’s discussion of the differences in La Phénoménologie, 87– 8.  Przywara, Erich, Gottgeheimnis der Welt, Munich 1923, 21.  Burgert, Helmut, “Zur Kritik der Phänomenologie,” in: Philosophisches Jahrbuch, (1925): 227– 8.  La Phénoménologie, 69. See also 90.  See also Vanni Rovighi, “Cogito,” 777– 80.  Przywara, Erich, “Drei Richtungen der Phänomenologie,” in: Stimmen der Zeit: 254– 5.  Geyser, Joseph, Neue und Alte Wege der Philosophie, Münster 1916, 300. Feuling, La Phénoménologie, 33.

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an appeal to faith as our access to supernatural reason;⁷⁹ Przywara through a displacement of the positive sciences and an embrace of his version of the analogia entis;⁸⁰ Vanni Rovighi in contrast by asserting the importance of the positive sciences and the cosmological proof;⁸¹ Kremer through a reflection on the act of thought which demonstrated the intentional presence of existing Being. But in each case, they thought that phenomenology, and thus by extension modern philosophy more broadly, could be redeemed.

VI Conclusion As these debates show, the neo-scholastic reading of Husserl was more than just the meeting of two different schools of thought. At stake were the approach and future direction of neo-scholasticism itself. This is why neo-scholastics from across Europe became so engaged with phenomenology in the interwar period, why they devoted so many books and articles to its discussion, and why Léon Noël in his capacity of President of the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie allowed Herman van Breda to engage in the risky task of transporting Husserl’s archives to Leuven in 1938 and hiding them there during the War. For in phenomenology, Catholics found a test case for the project of renewing scholasticism for the modern age. They debated Husserl’s thought, because in analyzing its curious mix of parallels and divergences with Thomism, they thought they could work out what would happen when modern met medieval philosophy, or, more pointedly, whether it was possible to be “neo-” and still remain a scholastic.

References [n/a], La Phénoménologie: Journées d’études de la Société thomiste, Kain 1932. Arnáiz, Marcelino, Psicología fundada en la experiencia, Madrid 1914. van Buren, John, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King, Bloomington 1994. Burgert, Helmut, “Zur Kritik der Phänomenologie,” in: Philosophisches Jahrbuch, (1925): 227 – 8. Chiocchetti, Emilio, “Review of Geyser, Grundlagen der Logik und Erkenntnislehre,” in: Rivista di filosofia neo-scolastica (1911): 706 – 9. Quoted as RFNS. de Corte, Marcel, “Idée sommaire de la phénoménologie,” in: Revue de Philosophie (1935).

 Stein, Edith, “Husserls Phänomenologie und die Philosophie des hl. Thomas von Aquino,” in: Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Phänomenologische Forschung, (1929): 317– 8.  Przywara, “Drei Richtungen der Phänomenologie,” 264.  Vanni Rovighi, Sofia, La filosofia di Edmund Husserl, Milan 1939, 165 – 6.

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Folghera, J. D., “Jugement et Vérité,” in: Revue Thomiste (Sept 1899): 427 – 46. Gemelli, Agostino, “Revue Néo-Scolastique,” in: Rivista di filosofia neo-scolastica (1910) Quoted as RFNS. Gemelli, Agostino, “Le Studio seprimentale del pensiero e della volontà, II,” in: Rivista di filosofia neo-scolastica (1912). Quoted as RFNS. Gemelli, Agostino, “Il problema della realizzazione secondo O. Külpe,” in: Rivista di filosofia neo-scolastica (1913). Quoted as RFNS. Geyser, Joseph, Grundlagen der Logik und Erkenntnislehre, Münster 1909. Geyser, Joseph, Neue und Alte Wege der Philosophie, Münster 1916. Gilson, Étienne, “Le réalisme méthodique,” in: Fritz-Joachim von Rintelen (ed.) Philosophia Perennis II, Regensburg 1930. Grabmann, Martin, Der Gegenwartswert der Geschichtlichen Erforschung, Vienna 1913 Gruss, Heribert, Transzendenz-Erkenntnis im Phänomenologischen Ansatz, : zur method. Neubegrü ndung theist. Weltsicht, Paderborn 1980. Husserl, Edmund, Logical Investigations I, transl. J Findlay, London 2001. Husserl, Edmund, Logical Investigations II, transl. J Findlay, London 2001. Jolivet, Régis, Le Thomisme et la critique de la connaissance, Paris 1933. Kremer, René, Le néo-réalisme Américain, Louvain 1920. Kremer, René, La Théorie de la connaissance chez les néo-réalistes anglais, Louvain 1928. Maritain, Jacques, Les Dégrés de savoir, Paris 1932. Masnovo, Armato, “Logos” in: Rivista di filosofia neo-scolastica (1911). Quoted as RFNS. Mercier, Désiré, “La Notion de la vérité,” in: Revue Néo-Scolastique (1899). Mercier, Désiré, Critériologie Générale 2nd (ed.) Louvain 1900. Noël, Léon, “Les Frontières de la logique,” in: Revue Néo-scolastique de philosophie (1910). Quoted as RNSP. Noël, Léon, “Le Mouvement néo-scolastique,” in: Revue Néo-scolastique de philosophie (1912). Quoted as RNSP. Noël, Léon, “Note sur le ʻProblèmeʼ de la Connaissance,” in: Annales de l’ISP (1913). Noël, Léon, Notes d’Épistémologie Thomiste, Louvain 1926. Pöggeler, Otto, Philosophie und Hermeneutische Theologie, Munich 2009. Przywara, Erich, Gottgeheimnis der Welt, Munich 1923. Przywara, Erich, “Drei Richtungen der Phänomenologie” in: Stimmen der Zeit (1928). Reinhardt, Kurt, “Husserl’s Phenomenology and Thomistic Philosophy,” in: New Scholasticism 1937. van Riet, Georges, Problèmes d’épistémologie, Louvain 1960. Robiglio, Andrea “Alle cose stesse,” in: M. Salvio ed. Tomismo Creativo, Bologna 2015. Johannes Schaber, “Phänomenologie und Mönchtum,” in: Stephan Loos/Holger Zaborowski (ed.) Leben, Tod und Entscheidung, Berlin 2003. Spiegelberg, Herbert/Spiegelberg, E., Phenomenology: a Historical Introduction, The Hague 1960. Stein, Edith, “Husserls Phänomenologie und die Philosophie des hl. Thomas von Aquino,” in: Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Phänomenologische Forschung (1929). Stein, Edith, Life in a Jewish Family, Washington 1986. Stein, Edith, Finite and Eternal Beings, Washington 2005. Vanni Rovighi, Sofia, “Il ʻCogitoʼ di Cartesio e il ʻcogitoʼ di Husserl,” in: Cartesio, Milan (1937).

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Vanni Rovighi, Sofia, La filosofia di Edmund Husserl, Milan 1939. Vidal, Jacques, “Phénoménologie et conversions,” in: Archives de Philosophie, (1972): 209 – 243. Zahavi, Dan, Husserl’s Phenomenology, Stanford 2002. Zybura, John (ed.), Present-day Thinkers and the New Scholasticism, New York 1926

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A Great Deal of Controversy? A Case Study of Dondeyne, Grégoire, and Moeller Integrating Phenomenology and Existentialism in Louvain Neo-Thomism In 1955 the Louvain exegete Joseph Coppens cited several publications of colleagues in his diaries that “caused a great deal of controversy.”¹ Among them were “the courses of canon Dondeyne on the proof for the existence of God – and his rash reflection, in his commentary on Humani generis, on the papal knowledge of existentialism.”² One year later Coppens returned to this matter and enlisted those members of the ‘Ecclesiastical Faculties’³ reprimanded for their opinions, among whom was also “an anonymous one, according to Mgr. Van Cauwenbergh…One has named Dondeyne, but he denies…”.⁴ The promulgation of Humani generis in 1950 had indeed produced some tension in the relationship between Neo-Thomism, phenomenology, and existentialism. The promulgation had questioned the use of existential philosophies and had restated Neo-Thomism as the standard for philosophy and theology. It also put the tradition of an ‘open’ Neo-Thomism under pressure in the context of the Leuven Ecclesiastical Faculties. Upholding the legacy of Mercier, members of these faculties had classically turned to Neo-Thomism as a means to answer the questions raised by modern

 List of “Publications qui ont fait du bruitˮ, entry on 24 June 1955, diary ‘C. Ephemerides 1955 (46 – 56)’ of Joseph Coppens kept in the Centre for the Study of the Second Vatican Council, Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies – KU Leuven, Charles de Bériotstraat 26, B-3000 Leuven. Besides Dondeyne and Grégoire, Coppens mentioned publications of Camille Muller, Jacques Leclercq, Gustave Thils, Fernand Van Steenberghen, Alphonse de Waelhens, Roger Aubert, Louis Janssens, and Robert Van Cauwelaert (promotor: René Draguet).  “Les cours du chanoine Dondeyne sur les preuves de Dieu, – et sa réflexion à l’emporte-pièce, dans son commentaire d’Humani generis, – de la science papale de l’existentialismeˮ (Joseph Coppens, entry on 24 june 1955, diary ‘C. Ephemerides 1955 (46 – 56)’).  We use the term ‘Ecclesial Faculties’ to refer to the Faculty of Theology, the Higher Institute for Religious Sciences, the Higher Institute for Philosophy, and the Faculty of Canon Law. Up until 1969 these were at the Catholic University of Louvain the institutes and faculties that stood directly under the authority of the rector magnificus.  “Sinds de oorlog 1940: – moeilijkheden Draguet 1942 – Index Muller – Aubert Hist[oire] de la théologie, – nu Leclercq + een niet bekende, zegt Mgr. Van Cauwenbergh…Men heeft Dondeyne genoemd, maar deze ontkent… Van Steenberghen impliciet gelaakt door Humani Generis” (Joseph Coppens, entry on 2 February 1955, diary ‘C. Ephemerides 1955 (46 – 56)’). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110588255-008

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times and the challenges it posed. They had also thereby not avoided engaging with new thought currents or methodologies. Similarly, the rise of phenomenology and existentialism had initiated attempts to reconcile these currents of thought with the Neo-Thomist legacy. Concepts such as historicity and human subjectivity, for instance, were considered to enrich Neo-Thomism, which was, at the time, often felt to be an abstract speculative doctrine unable to connect with the contemporary faithful. And while the atheist leanings of existentialism made it suspicious, it had to be recognized that it sharply raised the concerns of a new generation. While Albert Dondeyne and his publications were never subject of an official condemnation, his defense of existential philosophies in reaction to Humani generis had at least caused suspicion. He was, however, not the only one in Leuven with an interest in existential philosophy as Franz Grégoire and Charles Moeller had also developed a similar interest. Each in their own way, had tried to understand these currents of thought, had sought for their connection and possible dialogue with Neo-Thomism, while staying loyal to Humani generis: Albert Dondeyne integrated elements of existential philosophies in his actualized Neo-Thomist metaphysics; Franz Grégoire seized the foundations of contemporaneous (philosophical) thinking as part of Neo-Thomist apologetics; and Charles Moeller wished to renew the expression of Catholic doctrine through the use of literary works, as for example existentialist masterpieces.⁵ These figures not only shared a vision on philosophical and theological reform by integrating elements of existential philosophy, but they also wished to take up this challenge in the same context. The description and discussion of their projects bringing to light their understanding of Neo-Thomist and the existential philosophies using Humani generis as a common point of reference will be the particular focus of the present contribution of this chapter.

 The choice to develop these authors in this order in the present contribution is not so much chronologically based, for Grégoire started teaching in 1932, Dondeyne in 1933, and Moeller only in 1943; nor is it based on an eventual interdependence, for Grégoire saw in Dondeyne and Moeller his rightful successors. The main reason is found in the importance of Dondeyne’s articles Les problèmes soulevés dans l’Encyclique “Humani Generis”. Given the fact that Dondeyne’s interpretation of Humani generis also influenced Grégoire and Moeller in their argumentations this order was followed.

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I From ‘Aeterni patris’ to ‘Humani generis’ in Louvain The promulgation of Aeterni patris ⁶ by pope Leo XIII and its promotion of NeoThomism not only proved to be a turning point for Catholic philosophy and theology as a whole, it also meant a new start for the Catholic University of Louvain.⁷ There, a chair of Philosophy of Saint Thomas was established in 1882 to which the young professor Désiré Mercier was appointed. His efforts to promote Neo-Thomism at the university soon resulted in the establishment of an Institute for Thomist Philosophy of which he became the first president (1889). For years Neo-Thomism was taught and developed with an ‘open’ mind,⁸ in a dialogue with modern philosophies and scientific methods.⁹ The institute, with its aligned Leo XIII-Seminary, had an enormous impact on the philosophical formation of a whole generation of priests, many of whom would later take up major responsibilities in the Church and the university.¹⁰ Notwithstanding the importance of the Institute of Thomist Philosophy, the Faculty of Theology also took up a position

 Pope Leo XIII, “Aeterni Patris, encyclical of pope Leo XIII, 4 August 1879,” in: Acta Sanctae Sedis 12 (1879), 97– 115.  Cf. Aubert, Roger, “Le grand tournant de la Faculté de Théologie à la veille de 1900,” in: Mélanges offerts à M.-D. Chenu: maître en théologie, Paris 1967, 73 – 109.  In referring to this ‘open thomism’, Roger Aubert also used the expression ‘thomisme parisien’ (cf. Aubert, Roger, Aspects divers du néo-thomisme sous le pontificat de Léon XIII [Aspetti della cultura cattolica nell’Età di Leone XIII: atti del convegno tenuto a Bologna il 27– 28 – 29 dicembre e 1960], Rome 1961).  Aubert, Roger, Aspects divers du néo-thomisme sous le pontificat de Léon XIII [Aspetti della cultura cattolica nell’Età di Leone XIII: atti del convegno tenuto a Bologna il 27– 28 – 29 dicembre 1960], Rome 1961; Aubert, Roger, “Le context historique et les motivations doctrinales de l’encyclique ‘Aeterni Patris’,” in: Benedetto D’Amore (ed.), Tommaso d’Aquino nel I centenarzio dell ‘Enciclica ‘Aeterni Patris’, Rome 1981, 15 – 48. Van Steenberghen, Frans, “Les Thomistes en dialogue avec la pensée moderne,” in: Benedetto D’Amore (ed.), Tommaso d’Aquino nel I centenarzio dell ‘Enciclica ‘Aeterni Patris’, Rome 1981, 137– 158. On the discussion concerning the title of the encyclical and it’s use of the notion of philosophia christiana, see Van Riet, Georges, “Le titre de l’encyclique ‘Aeterni Patris’: Note historique,” in: Revue Philosophique de Louvain 80 (1982): 35 – 63.  Cf. Aubert, Roger, “Désiré Mercier et les débuts de l’Institut de Philosophie,” in: Revue philosophique de Louvain 88 (1990): 147– 167; De Raeymaeker, Louis, “Les origines de l’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie de Louvain,” in: Revue Philosophique de Louvain 49 (1951): 505 – 633; Mirguet, Françoise/Hiraux, Françoise, L’institut supérieur de philosophie de Louvain (1889 – 1968) : inventaire des archives, introduction historique, Louvain-la-Neuve 2008. Another excellent introduction Louvain philosophy can be found in Boudier, C.E.M. Struyker, “Wijsgerig leven in Nederland en België. Deel V – VI,” in: De filosofie van Leuven, Leuven et al. 1989.

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in the field.¹¹ On the one hand Thomism was taught here in antagonism with Mercier’s teaching and legacy. In contrast to this, Professors Jacques Laminne and Joseph Bittremieux taught a Thomism which leaned more towards a variation promoted by Rome and their respective mentors, Cardinals Mazzella and Billot. On the other hand, the Faculty was marked by the integration of the positive historical method in the disciplines of historical theology and exegesis. This tradition was personified in the work of Alfred Cauchie, Paulin Ladeuze and Albin Van Hoonacker; and for upcoming generations truly established in the founding of the Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique. ¹² Having survived the modernist crisis in 1942, the Ecclesial Faculties were drawn into the maelstrom of what by some was described as a second modernist crisis, namely the crisis of ‘nouvelle théologie.’¹³ This theological current of ressourcement and renewal was launched in the Dominican study house Le Sauchoir by Marie-Dominique Chenu. On the feast of Saint Thomas 1936, he had presented his views on the future of theology.¹⁴ His plea for an historical approach to the works of Saint Thomas and the revalorization of the notion of history in theology was received with enthusiasm. His dedication to a Thomist ressourcement was, however, looked at with Argus’ eyes: He was reprimanded by his su On the history of the Louvain Faculty of theology a number of general overviews have been published: Aubert, Roger, “Le grand tournant de la Faculté de Théologie à la veille de 1900,” in: Mélanges offerts à M.-D. Chenu: maître en théologie, Paris 1967, 73 – 109; Claes, Dirk, “Theologie in tijden van verandering. De theologische faculteit te Leuven in de twintigste eeuw. 1900 – 1968,” Dissertation, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven 2004; Neirynck, Frans, “Vijftig jaar Theologische Faculteit,” in: Arthur Janssen/Gérard Philips/Joseph Coppens (ed.), De Theologische Faculteit. 1919 – 1969, Leuven 1970, 11– 15. Besides there has also been an interest in the theological development of the Faculty and some of its protagonists: Kenis, Leo, “The Louvain Faculty of Theology and Its Professors. 1834– 1889,” in: Ephemerides Theologicae Lovaniense 67 (1991): 398 – 414; De Pril, Ward, “Modernism and the Problematic Relation between History and Theology. The Search for a Compromise by Louvain Historians and Theologians (1870 – 1910),” in: Church History and Religious Culture 91 (2011): 59 – 78; Schelkens, Karim, “The Louvain Faculty of theology and the Modern(ist) Heritage. Reconciling History and Theology,” in: Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 104 (2009): 856 – 891; Bosschaert, Dries, “A House with Many Mansions: The Anthropological Turn in Louvain Theology (1942– 1962),” in: Church History and Religious Culture 95 (2015): 293 – 314.  Cf. Tollebeek, Jo, “New Periodicals for New Ideas: On the Birth of the Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique,” in: Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 95 (2000): 391– 429.  Cf. Fouilloux, Etienne, Une Église en quête de liberté. La pensée catholique française entre modernisme et Vatican II.1914 – 1962, Paris 1998; Mettepenningen, Jürgen, Nouvelle Théologie – New Theology: Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican II, London et al. 2010.  Chenu, Marie-Dominique, Une école de théologie. Le Saulchoir, Kain-Lez-Tournai, Le Saulchoir 1937. (reprinted in Giuseppe Alberigo et al. (ed.), Une école de théologie. Le Saulchoir (Théologies), préface de R. Rémond, Paris 1985, 91– 176.

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periors in 1938, and the publication of his speech was put on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1942. At the same moment, also Essai sur le problème théologique,¹⁵ a work of the Louvain Dominican Louis Charlier, was placed on the index for discrediting scholastic philosophy by acknowledging historicity in theology and recognizing dogmatic development.¹⁶ Given that the inspiration for Charlier’s book was to be found mainly in the courses of René Draguet, professor of Dogmatics at the Faculty of Theology, the Holy Office also turned its sights on him. This resulted in Draguet losing his teaching position at the Faculty of Theology in the same year.¹⁷ For a number of years the positive historical method in which Louvain theologians advocated was looked upon with suspicion by proponents of a strict Neo-Thomism. In 1950 this tension between theological development and the control of a strict Neo-Thomism took an interesting turn with the promulgation of the encyclical Humani generis. ¹⁸ In the document, pope Pius XII warned against some false opinions in religious and moral matters that reigned among men and that even had found its way into Catholic philosophy and theology.¹⁹ As such, the encyclical called to mind the condemnation of ‘modernism’ in the encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis,²⁰ promulgated by Pius X in 1907. This time it was, however, less clear who the adversary was as whoever it was, they were not named, nor explicitly condemned. Most clearly the pope warned against ‘newness.’²¹ In

 Charlier, Louis, Essai sur le problème théologique, Thuillies, Ramgal 1938.  See esp. Mettepenningen, Jürgen, “L’Essai de Louis Charlier (1938). Une contribution à la nouvelle théologie,” in: Revue théologique de Louvain 39 (2008): 211– 232. For a comparison of the two theologians aim for a ressourcement, see esp. Mettepenningen, Jürgen/De Pril, Ward, “Thomism and the Renewal of Theology. Chenu, Charlier, and their Ressourcement,” in: Horizons 39 (2012): 50 – 68.  De Pril, Ward, “De Leuvense theoloog en oriëntalist René Draguet (1896 – 1980). Studie van zijn theologische positie en zijn conflict met de kerkelijke overheid,” Dissertation, KU Leuven Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies 2010.  Pope Pius XII, “Humani generis, encyclical of pope Pius XII, 12.08.1950,” in: AAS 42 (1950) 561– 578.  Weigel, Gustave, “Gleanings from the Commentaries on ʻHumani Generisʼ,” in: Theological Studies 12 (1951): 520 – 549.  Pope Pius X, “Pascendi dominici gregis, encyclical of pope Pius X, 08.09.1907,” in: AAS 40 (1907), 593 – 650.  This included new philosophies (§ 6; 17), new explanations (§ 12) new opinions (§ 13; 22), new concepts (§ 15) new exegesis (§ 23), new truths (§ 30), new opinions (§ 34; 40), new questions (§ 43), and novelties in general (§ 10; 13; 18; 30; 40) On the use of ‘newness’ and the contested term of ‘nouvelle théologie’, see Fouilloux, Étienne, “‘Nouvelle théologie’ et théologie nouvelle (1930 – 1960),” in: Benoit Pellistrandi (ed.), L’histoire religieuse en France et Espagne Madrid 2004, 411– 425.

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its reception it was, however, unanimously agreed that it was a reaction to the theologians of the ‘nouvelle théologie,’ namely the Dominicans who were condemned in 1942, and the Jesuits of La Fourvière. Many of the Dominicans lost their teaching positions around the time of the promulgation. In particular, it had been their critiques of strict forms of Neo-Thomism and their adoption of Maurice Blondel’s philosophy that had stirred up a storm. This had also been the case with the Jesuit Henri Bouillard, who had claimed that “a theology that would not be actual, would be a false theology.”²² This position brought him into conflict with Dominicans linked with the Revue Thomiste and most of all with the ‘sacred monster’ of Neo-Thomism: Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange.²³ Eventually this conflict resulted in a ban on teaching in 1950 and an echo of his debated ideas in Humani generis. Knowing that some of the positions of Humani generis were based on concrete philosophical and theological works, thinkers engaging with phenomenology and existentialism had a particular interest in paragraph 32, where it was stated that “no Catholic can doubt how false this is, especially where there is question of those fictitious theories they call immanentism, or idealism or materialism, whether historic or dialectic, or even existentialism, whether atheistic or simply the type that denies the validity of the reason in the field of metaphysics.”²⁴ First and foremost this paragraph intended to react to the doubts that

 Bouillard, Henri, Conversion et grâce chez S. Thomas d’Aquin: étude historique, Théologie, Paris 1944, 219. After the publication of Bouillard’s book a theological debate emerged between the Jesuits – mostly those connected to La Fourvière – Henri Bouillard, Henri de Lubac, and the Dominicans – mostly connected to the monastery of Toulouse – Marie-Michel Labourdette and Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange. The debate was in particular concerned with the nature and method of (Neo-Thomist) philosophy and theology. The most important contributions in the discussion were assembled in Labourdette, Marie-Michel/Nicolas Marie-Joseph/Bruckberger Raymond-Léopold, Dialogue théologique. Pièces du débat entre “ La Revue thomiste “ d’une part et les R.R. P.P. de Lubac, Danièlou, Bouillard, Fessard, von Balthasar, S.J., d’autre part, Saint-Maximin 1974. For a more extensive discussion of this debate see esp. Castro, Michel, “Henri Bouillard: lecteur de saint Thomas et ʻl’affaire de Fourvièreʼ,” in: Théophilyon 10 (2005): 111– 143; Fouilloux, Etienne, “Dialogue théologique? (1946 – 1948),” in: Serge-Thomas Bonino (ed.), Saint Thomas au XXe siècle. Actes du colloque du Centenaire de la “Revue thomiste”. 25 – 28 mars 1993 – Toulouse, Paris: 1994, 153 – 195; Fouilloux, Etienne, “Henri Bouillard et saint Thomas d’Aquin (1941– 1951),” in: Recherces de Science religieuse 97 (2009) 173 – 183.  This designation is used in reference to Peddicord, Richard, The Sacred Monster of Thomism: An Introduction to the Life and Legacy of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., South Bend 2005.  “[…] quod quidem falsum omnino esse, cum praesertim de commentis illis agatur, quae vel “immanentismum” vocant, vel “idealismum”, vel “materialismum” sive historicum, sive dialecticum, ac vel etiam “existentialismum” sive atheismum profitentem, sive saltem valori ratiocinii metaphysici adversantem, catholicus nemo in dubium revocare potestˮ ([n/a], “Humani generis,

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were raised concerning the Neo-Thomist ability to make absolute truth claims. Yet, the reference to existentialism did not remain unnoticed and André Hayen was quick to state that “not every form of existentialism was condemned by the encyclical, but only its atheist and anti-metaphysical form.”²⁵ Others, such as Marie-Michel Labourdette,²⁶ were more ambiguous in the encyclical stance towards the integration of existentialism into Neo-Thomist philosophy. He considered almost every form of existentialism in its essential principle incompatible with the philosophical views of Thomism. The vague phrasing in the pontifical brief caused questions as to which relation with existential philosophies was still allowed. Was, for example, the integration of phenomenology in religious thought still considered as permitted in a Neo-Thomist context? This had been an accepted practice for years with Christian Dupont even considering it a process in two stages: firstly, with the integration of Bergsonian and Blondelian insights, and secondly the integration of phenomenology.²⁷ As such, phenomenology had also been well received in Louvain. Or, did the words of Pius XII refer most of all to the more cultural form of existentialism as it had taken shape in the works and actions of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus? Their writings had given at least an indication of the prevailing mindset of their contemporaries or given the opportunity to oppose.²⁸ In short, the encyclical had raised questions and philosophers and theologians were asked to reconsider their intellectual projects and to readjust them if needed.

encyclical of pope Pius XII, 12.08.1950,” in: AAS 42 (1950) 561– 578. English translation: http:// w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_12081950_humani-gen eris.html (access on 24 February 2016).  “Aussi toute forme d’existentialisme n’est-elle pas condamnée par l’encyclique, mais seulement l’existentialisme soit athée, soit anti-métaphysiqueˮ (Hayen, André, “L’encyclique ʻHumani generisʼ et la philosophie,” in: Nouvelle revue théologique 73 (1951): 113 – 137, 120).  Cf. Labourdette, Marie-Michel, “Les enseignements de l’encyclique,” in: Revue thomiste 60 (1950): 32– 55.  See for a summary of these two stages, esp. Dupont, Christian, Phenomenology in French Philosophy: Early Encounters, Dordrecht 2014, 307– 313.  An example to this can be found in De Lubac, Henri, Le drame de l’humanisme athée, Paris 1945.

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II Albert Dondeyne: A Synthesis of Reality Through an ‘actual’ and ‘living’ Thomism One of the most extensive reactions to the encyclical came from the philosopher Albert Dondeyne. Ever since his dissertation on Kant’s agnosticism,²⁹ Dondeyne had been concerned with the development of a truthful discourse on God and metaphysical knowledge from a Neo-Thomist perspective.³⁰ He was especially interested in the problems raised by the tension between idealist and empirical strands of philosophy and had proposed Neo-Thomism as a way to overcome this tension. Dondeyne was convinced that only this current of thought could establish a satisfactory synthesis by offering an ‘integral realism’ or an ‘integral criticism.’³¹ Herein, the notion of existence was crucial to reach a metaphysical understanding of reality. The insistence on this notion logically led Dondeyne to phenomenology and its possible integration into Neo-Thomism. In the first instance, Dondeyne’s position had been very positive. As the first Flemish speaker at the Dutch Society for Thomist Philosophies, he had, without even mentioning Neo-Thomism at all, claimed “that an accurate phenomenological description of the human existence as knowing existence had also for general metaphysics a great value, and not only as epistemological introduction […], but as integrating part of metaphysics itself.”³²

 Dondeyne, Albert, “L’agnosticisme de Kant,” Dissertation, Université catholique de Louvain, 1922.  This was also illustrated by his first publications : Dondeyne, Albert, “Autour de quelques livres récents de métaphysique,” in: Revue Néoscolastique de Philosophie 37 (1934): 365 – 377; Dondeyne, Albert, Bijzondere Metaphysica: Aanteekeningen bij de colleges (gepolycop. tekst) Ed. Nauwelaerts, Leuven 1938; Dondeyne, Albert, Métaphysique spéciale: Notes du cours professé en 1938 (polyc.) Leuven 1938; Dondeyne, Albert, “Het thomisme ten overstaan van het probleem van de transcendentale deductie,” in: Verslag van de 6e algemene vergadering der Vereeniging voor thomistische wijsbegeerte, Nijmegen 1939, 73 – 86.  “Er bestaat ook een open realisme. Het is een integraal en critisch realisme: integraal omdat het de oorspronkelijke inspiratie die alle realisme ten grondslag ligt, nl. De gedachte van aanwezigheid, totaal getrouw blijft en consequent uitwerkt. En daarom juist is het een critisch realisme, want eerst in de critische bezinning zal de aanwezigheidsakt – en samen met hem de aanwezige werkelijkheid met haar diepe in-zich en transcendenteele samenhoorigheid – zich aan het bewustzijn openbaren. En zoo is het open realisme meteen een metaphysische realisme.” Dondeyne, Albert, “Idealisme of realisme?” in: Tijdschrift voor Philosophie 3 (1941): 607– 648, 648.  “We beweren echter dat een accurate phenomenologische beschrijving van het menselijke bestaan als kennend bestaan ook voor de algemene metaphysica groot belang heeft, en zuulks niet alleen bij wijze van epistemologische inleiding – om uit te maken b.v. of de metaphysische

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The publication of Humani generis, however, urged Dondeyne to elaborate the integration of phenomenology into (Neo-Thomist) metaphysics. This resulted in the publication of three subsequent articles titled Les problèmes soulevés dans l’Encyclique “Humani Generis” in the Revue Philosophique de Louvain, later published as the book Foi chrétienne et pensée contemporaine. ³³ Similar to numerous other interpretations, Dondeyne first of all presented a commentary to the encyclical.³⁴ Dondeyne’s commentary, however, also offered more and while numerous reactions seemed to regurgitate most of the positions of the encyclical, Dondeyne’s articles were marked by their positive approach. First of all, they tried to formulate answers to the questions, or problems, the encyclical had raised for philosophers. Throughout his writing, it became increasingly clear that Dondeyne also counted himself among these philosophers. At times this even resulted in an apologetic stance of the author to promote his own project and the positive integration of phenomenology in Neo-Thomism. This also explains that as a starting point Dondeyne referred to the crisis of Neo-Thomism. The system of thought had, according to him, become a dead system not capable of taking into account the problems of the time. Philosophers were therefore being called to engage in the revitalization of this mode of thinking. Through the integration of contemporaneous philosophies, phenomenology in particular, they seemed to have succeeded in the development of a kind of “existential Thomism.”³⁵ According to Dondeyne, the merits of phenomenology and existentialism for Thomism had been threefold. Firstly, through the recognition of the historicity of the human existence, philosophical relativism could be confronted. By linking the integration of phenomenology with the battle against relativism, Dondeyne smartly sided his own project with Pius XII’s warnings

kennis ja dan neen mogelijk is – maar als integrerend deel van de metaphysica zelf.” Dondeyne, Albert, “Belang voor de metaphysica van een accurate bestaansbeschrijving van de mens als kennend wezen,” in: Kenleer en metaphysiek: Verslag van de 12e algemeene vergadering der Vereeniging voor thomistische wijsbegeerte, Nijmegen 1947, 37– 51, 37.  Dondeyne, Albert, “Les problèmes philosophiques soulevés dans l’Encyclique Humani Generis,” in: Revue philosophique de Louvain 49 (1951): 5 – 56; 141– 188; 293 – 356. These were later published as Dondeyne, Albert, Foi chrétienne et pensée contemporaine, Bibliothèque philosophique de Louvain, Leuven 1951. An English translation is available as well: Dondeyne, Albert, Contemporary European Thought and Christian Faith, transl. Ernan McMullin/John Burnheim, Pittsburgh et al. 1958.  An overview of a number of these reactions to Humani generis can be found in Weigel, “Gleanings.”  “Elle ne le pourra qu’à la condition de se présenter comme une philosophie vivante et actuelle, ouverte au dialogue avec la pensée contemporaine, capable de fournir une réponse aux problèmes de notre temps.ˮ Dondeyne, “Les problèmes philosophiques,” 298.

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against philosophical and theological relativism. This was also the case for the second merit of phenomenology and existentialism. Indeed, Dondeyne claimed that the integration of phenomenology could overcome the problematic relation between reason and the irrational perceived in contemporary thought. If these two merits were not yet convincing enough to legitimize his project, the third merit, presented as the ultimate goal, would definitely be sufficient. The revival of Neo-Thomism was namely in itself the ultimate aspiration of Catholic philosophers. Defending the integration of phenomenology in Neo-Thomism, Dondeyne had to qualify existential philosophy by differentiating between closed and open existential theories. The two theories displayed a similar philosophical interest in the human being, but philosophers belonging to first group referred mostly to human subjectivity. In their theories, this was the ultimate measure to which everything had to be considered. Their thinking, Dondeyne stated, lapsed eventually into a metaphysical agnosticism or atheism. He found a clear example of this in the works of Sartre. In contrast, there were also philosophers who had rightfully turned to the human being and found truth and value in the notion of existence itself. For instance, the work of Jaspers and Marcel could be viewed from this perspective. Moreover, their thinking could, in Dondeyne’s opinion, even lead to a possible recognition of the mystery of the living God. That is to say they left an openness to link metaphysics with the Transcendental Divine. It should be no surprise then that Dondeyne sided in particular with this last group in his own integration of existential philosophies. In short, Dondeyne was of the opinion that this form of existentialism as no other would be able to expose the central question “if the empirical origin of our knowledge is reconcilable, yes or no, with the possibility to transcend experience to a transhistorical, meta-empiric, and universal truth.”³⁶ Phenomenology could give a first incentive, but this quest for a universal truth, could eventually only be accomplished in Neo-Thomism. The goal was therefore not to engage in phenomenology and existentialism, but to develop an actualized Thomism. This was perhaps the most important step in Dondeyne’s argumentation. By presenting his “actual Thomism” as an “oeuvre à faire”³⁷ Dondeyne avoided the risk of elaborating an alternative project to the strict Neo-Thomism underlying the encyclical. Instead of a critique, Dondeyne explained, his call for integration and renewal was rather a contribution to  “[la question] de savoir si l’origine empirique de notre connaissance est conciliable, oui ou non, avec la possibilité de transcender l’expérience vers une vérité transhistorique, méta-empirique et universelle.” Dondeyne, “Les problèmes philosophiques,” 188.  Ibid., 356.

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the general accomplishment of Neo-Thomism. While he thus echoed in a sense Henri Bouillard’s general idea that “a theology that would not be actual, would be a false theology,” at the same time he avoided its accusatory undertone. This is probably one of the reasons that Dondeyne avoided ending up in a heated debate, or that he was reprimanded. This is a consequence that was certainly not so implausible considering that the Leuven biologists Camille Muller’s interpretation of Humani generis was put on the Index.³⁸ It was clear that Dondeyne was convinced that only this re-actualized Thomism would provide the necessary foundation for a solid metaphysics.³⁹ Making an appeal to the authority of pope Leo XIII, Dondeyne argued, therefore, in favor of a new Thomist reform: ‘vetera novis augere.’ Given that existential philosophy and Neo-Thomism shared the same basis, namely existence as the ultimate principle, the latter could provide the ultimate answers to questions raised by the first vein of thought. Moreover, the theological focus on existence would be positive, for the existential idea of the “je-avec-autrui-au-monde,”⁴⁰ strongly connected with the theological understanding of the human being as part of creation. It was on this shared basis that Dondeyne saw the possibility of constructing a renewed philosophical-theological metaphysics. Indeed, according to him, this fundamental experience of the human existence in the world was the locus where the unity of being could be grasped. Through reason and in the original cognitive intention, a true understanding of reality would be possible.⁴¹ Only here the constitutive bond between subject and object could be found. Thus, this would also be the place where the answer to the critical question could be found. Finally, this deeper metaphysical knowledge of the object would also lead the subject to a better incarnation in the world enabling Neo-Thomism to once again present answers and give shape to the fundamentals of existence. According to Dondeyne this Neo-Thomist project was clearly linked with that of existential philosophies, the only difference was that the first recognized the idea of God as being the ultimate answer. The question remains only if Dondeyne’s plea for this ‘living Thomism’ was either a genuine plea for a renewal of Thomism using phenomenology, or more a clever idea to continue his metaphysical research within the limits set out by Humani generis. In this light, it is remarkable that, while in his articles the development of an actualized Thomism seemed the culmination of his project, in the  Muller, Camille, L’Encyclique ’Humani Generis’ et les problèmes scientifiques, Louvain 1951. [n/a], “Decree of the Holy Office, 14.12.1953,” in: Acta Apostolicae Sedis 46 (1954), 25.  See esp. Dondeyne, “Les problèmes philosophiques,” 296.  Ibid., 335 – 336.  Esp. Ibid., 343.

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book it was only a chapter among the others. Moreover, it seemed he had changed his general argument. In the book, he still started with the interpretation of the encyclical (chapter I) and continued with the problems of historicity (chapter II) and (ir)rationality (chapter III), but then Thomism was added as a third problem (chapter IV). This then was completed with a reflection on the more transcending problem of the relation between faith and reason (chapter V). The general theme of his book had become a dialogue between Christian faith and contemporary reason. Likewise, in his further oeuvre this project of an actualized Thomism seemed to disappear further. In his most-famous book Geloof en Wereld ⁴² [Faith and World] Dondeyne returned to some of the problems he had also raised in his reaction to Humani generis, but he did not return to his ideas on Neo-Thomism. He only reflected in general on the actuality of Christian faith.

III Franz Grégoire: Searching for the Foundations of Ideas and Reality Dondeyne’s “brilliant and original discussion of the philosophia perennis”⁴³ also sparked a reaction in his own milieu. The Louvain philosopher Franz Grégoire⁴⁴ discussed extensively the ideas of his colleague in the next year of the Revue philosophique de Louvain. This did not signify, however, that this review would be biased in the positive sense. First, the two professors were known to have their differences of opinion, which could by times lead to heated debates. Notable in this regard was their debate in 1942 on the relation between history and theology in the Louvain ‘circle for theological exchanges,’ an unofficial discussion group of theologians concerning present developments in theology. Discussing whether Édouard Le Roy should be considered a modernist or not, Dondeyne had expressed his strong disagreement with Grégoire’s conciliatory

 Dondeyne, Albert, Geloof en Wereld, Antwerpen 1961.  Crowley, Theodore, “Review of Foi chrétienne et pensée contemporaine,” in: Irish Theological Quarterly 19 (1952): 203 – 204, 204.  See Coppens, Joseph, “Le chanoine Franz Grégoire: Sa formation, son enseignement, son oeuvre,” in: Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 37 (1961): 390 – 402; Lambert, A., “Bibliographie des travaux de Monsieur le professeur Franz Grégoire,” in: Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 37 (1961): 403 – 408; Ponthot, J., “In memoriam Franz Grégoire,” in: Revue théologique de Louvain 9 (1978): 129 – 132.; van Waeyenbergh, Honoré, “Hommage de l’Université Catholique à M. le chanoine Grégoire, professeur à la Faculté de Théologie,” in: Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 37 (1961): 389.

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analysis of Le Roy’s work.⁴⁵ Besides, Grégoire had already established his reputation as an autonomous thinker in the field of philosophy and the study of contemporary currents of thought. During his studies in Louvain he had been strongly influenced by Maréchal and after his teaching at the Minor Seminary of Tournai, he returned to Louvain in 1932 to teach the course philosophy of religion at the Institute of Philosophy. His continuous effort to link his teachings with contemporaneous intellectual frameworks had made him the suitable candidate to be appointed to the chair of ‘contemporary pseudo-mysticisms’ in 1937. This chair had been launched the same year during the first meeting of the association of alumni of the Faculty of Theology on June 29th. In this meeting, Cardinal Van Roey had taken the floor to present his views on the challenges the discipline of theology faced. First, he reminded his listeners that in line with its tradition professors of the faculty had to explain the essential principles of theology. He further called his public to pay attention to the present-day problems. Therefore, the Cardinal stated that the faculty’s typical historical approach had to be completed with a speculative study of the Christian message and a rational explanation of its content. In Coppens’ recollection of the event, the Cardinal’s inspiration was that “in the upheaval of the Western civilization, the Church had her mission to conserve the deposit of faith in all its clarity of thought and its force of action. The one and the other depend on the analysis of the theologians.ˮ⁴⁶ Appointed to this chair, Grégoire took up Van Roey’s call and engaged in the analysis of the philosophical foundations of the ideological movements that seemed to offer a new spirituality to his contemporaries across Europe. He studied the sources of materialism to gain a better understanding of communism and developed an interest in idealism to comprehend the rise of National Socialism in Germany. This last phenomenon even urged him to go on a field trip to Germany together with Paul Sobry, Professor of Dutch literature, to strengthen his teaching with positive research. Consequently, Grégoire soon became an expert on Marx, Hegel, and Feuerbach. Later, he also engaged in the analysis of the roots of phenomenology and existentialism as a philosophical and cultural

 See Suenens, Léo-Joseph, Souvenirs et espérances, Paris 1991, 32– 34. See also rapport, 27.05. 1942, Fonds Dondeyne, Archives of the University, 290.  “Dans le bouleversement des civilisations occidentales, l’Eglise a pour mission de conserver à son dépôt toute sa clarté de pensée et sa force d’action. L’une et l’autre dépendent en dernière analyse des théologiensˮ (Coppens, Joseph, “Chronica Consociationis: Congressus consociationis habitus Lovanii die 29 iunii in festo SS. Apostolorum Petri et Pauli,” in: Annua Nuntia Lovaniensia 3 (1938): 91– 96, 96; also Rigaux, Béda, “Une importante réunion à la Faculté de Théologie de l’Université de Louvain,” in: Annua Nuntia Lovaniensia 17/16 (1937): 10 – 13.

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movement. He started his quest by studying Henri Bergson.⁴⁷ This philosopher, who also strongly influenced Jacques Maritain at the beginning of his career,⁴⁸ who was renowned for his metaphysics with its insistence on intuition as a means to understand reality. However, in Catholic circles his thought was also contested and three of his books were even put on the Index of Prohibited Books during the modernist crisis.⁴⁹ Grégoire studied Bergson’s method particularly in his Réflexions sur l’étude critique des philosophes intuitionistes. Le cas de l’élan vital chez Bergson. ⁵⁰ This did not lead him to a critique of intuitive philosophies, but to an appreciation of their accomplishment to find a foundation on which a metaphysics could be based. As a recipient of Bergson’s ideas, as described by Dupont, Grégoire ought to be considered as belonging to the first stage of phenomenological reception in religious thought. When Dondeyne published his Les problèmes soulevés dans l’Encyclique “Humani Generis” in 1951, he therefore found a well-prepared dialogue partner in Grégoire, who engaged in a discussion of this commentary. Besides a simple presentation of the Dondeyne’s argument, Grégoire also formulated some points of critique from a Thomist viewpoint. First, Grégoire insisted on the falseness of all forms of existentialism, for they did not recognize a universal essence in human nature. He objected to the classic Thomist possibility of developing a metaphysics of the human being not being retained in existential philosophies: “a doctrine on the essence of the human being is already beyond the scope of existentialism for the mere reason that this philosophy lacks, at least up to the present, a purposeful and serious study of this concept.”⁵¹ Second, Grégoire  Programatic for his thought is Henri Bergson, “Introduction à la métaphysique,” in: Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 11 (1903): 1– 36; a new edition was recently published Bergson, Henri, Introduction à la métaphysique, Paris 2011.  E. g. Maritain, Jacques, La philosophie bersonienne, Paris 1914.  [n/a], “Congregation of the Index for Prohibited Books, 1.06.1914,” in: AAS 6 (1914), 314– 315; see also Neveu, Bruno, “Bergson et l’Index,” in: Revue de métaphysique et de morale 40 (2003): 543 – 551.  Grégoire, Franz, “Réflexions sur l’étude critique des philosophes intuitionnistes. Le cas de l’élan vital chez Berson,” in: Revue philosophique de Louvain 45 (1947): 169 – 187. A prelude on the method of intuition can be found in Grégoire, Franz, “Notes sur les termes “intuition” et “expérience,” in: Revue philosophique de Louvain 44 (1946): 401– 415. A further elaboration can be found in Grégoire, Franz, “La collaboration de l’intuition et de l’intellection selon Bergson,” in: Revue Internationale de Philosophie 3 (1949): 392– 406; Grégoire, Franz, L’intuition selon Bergson : étude critique. Fascicule I. Partié générale, Leuven 1947; Grégoire, Franz, L’intuition selon Bergson : étude critique. Fascicule II. Complément sur la fidélité de Bergson aux documents mystiques, Leuven 1950.  “une doctrine sur l’essentiel dans l’homme se trouve hors de portée pour l’existentialisme déjà pour cette seule raison que cette philosophie manqué, tout au moins jusqu’à présent,

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elaborated further on the principle of sufficient reason which states that everything has a cause (the formula: “tout s’explique”⁵²) and distinguished clearly the existential and Thomist understanding of it. He insisted that Thomism was unique in pointing to a first trans-experiential/transcendent cause. He further elaborated this line of thought in his Questions concernant l’existentialisme,⁵³ where he clarified his view on implicit intuitions as the basis of human behavior and thus the object of the phenomenological psychology. These intuitions, even more than the principle of existence as Dondeyne had claimed, could be taken as the basis for the proof of the existence of God. The study of these implicit intuitions, originally a strange notion to Neo-Scholastic philosophy, was now legitimatized by linking it to the lumen naturale of Thomas Aquinas. In sum, Grégoire was convinced that Thomism could find inspiration in existential phenomenology to overcome the rational idealism and pure empiricism by focusing on the pre-reflexive orientations of the human being thinking the world, but it could never give a sufficient answer in itself.⁵⁴ Shortly after, Grégoire had to stop his teaching gradually and his legacy was given to Dondeyne. Joseph Coppens, dean at the time, described Grégoire’s feelings on this engagement entrusting his legacy into the hands of colleagues he greatly appreciated. Coppens remembered seeing Grégoire passing on his courses to Dondeyne, for whom “he had always had the greatest respect” and to Charles Moeller, in whom he had the fullest trust thanks to his “apostolic sense, and literary and philosophical culture.ˮ⁵⁵

IV Charles Moeller: A Renewed Christian Apologetics Through Literature In contrast to Dondeyne and Grégoire, Charles Moeller was in a certain way an outsider to the theological milieu of Louvain. While he did receive his theological training at the Major Seminary of Malines and the Faculty of Theology, he initially taught for some years in a grammar school in Brussels. Here, he made a name d’une étude expresse et sérieuse du conceptˮ (Grégoire, Franz, “Compte rendu de ‘Foi chrétienne et pensée contemporaine’,” in: Revue philosophique de Louvain 50 (1952): 305 – 321, 312).  Ibid., 313.  Grégoire, Franz, Questions concernant l’existentialisme. Fascicule I, Leuven 1951; Grégoire, Franz, Questions concernant l’existentialisme. Fascicule II. Essai d’une phénoménologie des preuves métaphysiques, Leuven 1952.  Cf. Grégoire, Questions. Fasc. II.  Coppens, “Le chanoine Franz Grégoire,” 401– 402.

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for himself, by introducing his pupils to his passion of the Greek classics and contemporary literature. His success as a teacher did not remain unnoticed at the Faculty of Theology. In light of their newly established Higher Institute for Religious Sciences in 1942, they looked at Moeller with interest.⁵⁶ It had been the wish of the founders of the institute Lucien Cerfaux and Dondeyne to offer philosophical and theological training of students belonging to other faculties of the university. Consequently, teachers at this institute also had to engage with the mentality of this generation of students. The institute thus became the breeding ground for ‘new’ forms of theology. Here ‘theologies of earthly realities’ (esp. Gustave Thils), ‘theologies of history’ (idem), ‘theologies of the laity’ (esp. Gerard Philips), or reflections on contemporary philosophies (esp. Grégoire) were developed. Yet, no one would gain as much success as Charles Moeller when he started his Thursday-evening lectures in 1943. They proved to be an immense success and were able to draw full auditoria of 500 to 600 students.⁵⁷ Applying insights from literary works, Moeller developed in his lectures a contemporaneous Christian humanism that had a strong appeal to the day-to-day experience of his students. In 1949 he was made a university lector at the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts. Despite being attached to another faculty and appearance of being a literary critic, his works clearly bear the sign of his aim to renew Christianity and theology with the help of a literary discourse to come to terms with modernity. The impetus for Moeller’s lectures had been a feeling of crisis in society and the inadequacy of the Church and theologians to respond to it. He shared this basis with Dondeyne. They had both gained this insight from their experiences with students. In Dondeyne’s case the students of the movement for Catholic Action, Universitas and in Moeller’s case his students in the grammar school. Moreover, they were both convinced that Catholic thinkers had to present a Christian humanism, an ideal of the human being, to give a renewed sense to the existence of their contemporaries. They differed, however, in its design. Dondeyne had developed his notion of Christian humanism, mainly as a rational option to the

 Cf. Gevers, Lieve, “Vijftig jaar Hoger Instituut voor Godsdienstwetenschappen. 1942– 1992,” in: Mathijs Lamberigts/Lieve Gevers/Bart Pattyn (ed.), Hoger Instituut voor Godsdienstwetenschappen. Faculteit der Godgeleerdheid K.U. Leuven: 1942 – 1992: Rondom Catechese en Godsdienstonderricht, Leuven 1992, 3 – 58.  “Les lundis de l’abbé Moeller, c’était pour notre génération, et cela durera plus de vingt ans, l’événement de l’année louvaniste.” Houssia, Albert, “In memoriam Mgr Charles Moeller,” in: Jean van Cangh, In memoriam Charles Moeller, Louvain-la-Neuve, 31– 36, 32. See also Letter of L. Cerfaux to H. Van Waeyenbergh, 02.03.1949, in Fonds Van Waeyenbergh, Archives of the University, 3245.

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‘new humanism’ developed by existential philosophies. Moeller in contrast presented Christian humanism more as an existential option, because it was the existential confrontation with the world that made the human being question his nature and goals in life. As Moeller explained these questions were classically raised throughout the ages in different cultures, where they had also come to expression in literary works. Consequently, in these works various ideas on the ideal human being came to fruition. At first, Moeller mainly referred to writers of classical antiquity (Homer, Virgil, etc.) and literary classics (Montaigne, Cervantes, Goethe) to identify the opinions, possibilities and pitfalls of their view on the human being and his/her future. These images could be inspirational in our times, but the true answer could only be found in a synthetic Christian humanism. This completion of existing humanisms was also what Moeller wished to present in his developed works.⁵⁸ Later on, especially in his famous Littérature du XXe siècle et christianisme,⁵⁹ this aspect of the contemporary understanding of the human being increasingly gained attention, also bringing to light existentialist writers, such as Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Gabriel Marcel. In Moeller’s description, the success of existential writers was presented first and foremost as a cultural phenomenon.⁶⁰ For example, he first addressed Heidegger’s and Sartre’s humanism in 1946 in the context of a description of mili-

 “Le christianisme nous permet, lui seul, de surmonter ces antinomies douloureuses entre les aspirations romantiques et classiques, de combler la lacune de l’humanisme préchrétien en répondant au problème de la mort par la JOIE.” Moeller, Charles, Humanisme et sainteté. Témoignages de la littérature occidentale, Paris 1946, 191.  Moeller, Charles, Silence de Dieu : Camus, Gide, Huxley, Simone Weil, Graham Greene, Julien Green, Bernanos (Littérature du XXe siècle et christianisme, 1), Tournai 1952; Moeller, Charles, La foi en Jésus-Christ : Sartre, Henry James, Martin du Gard, Malègue (Littérature du XXe siècle et christianisme, 2), Tournai 1953; Moeller, Charles, Espoir des hommes : Malraux, Kafka, Vercors, Cholokhov, Maulnier, Bombard, Sagan, Reymont (Littérature du XXe siècle et christianisme, 3), Tournai 1957; Moeller, Charles, L’espérance en Dieu notre Père : Anne Frank, Miguel de Unamuno, Gabriel Marcel, Charles du Bos, Fritz Hochwälder, Charles Péguy (Littérature du XXe siècle et christianisme, 4), Tournai 1960; Moeller, Charles, Amours humaines : Françoise Sagan, Bertold Brecht, Saint-Exupéry, Simone de Beauvoir, Paul Valéry, Saint-John Perse (Littérature du XXe siècle et christianisme, 5), Tournai 1975; Posthumous a sixth volume was published : Moeller, Charles, L’exil et le retour : Marguerite Duras, Ingmar Bergman, Valery Larbaud, François Mauriac, Sigrid Undsert, Gertrude von Le Fort (Littérature du XXe siècle et christianisme, 6), Louvain-la-Neuve 1993.  “Influencée, sans le savoir sans doute, par le «climat» de la philosophie existentielle, la jeunesse moderne, dégoûtée d’une civilisation trop compliquée et meurtrière, se tourne vers le concret, vers « ce qui est » ; elle attend qu’on lui montre, dans l’acte religieux, celui qui fonde sa personnalité d’homme en son essence la plus intime.” Moeller, Humanisme et sainteté, 16.

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tant atheism and antitheism⁶¹ that for his contemporaries had nullified religious faith and its values (e. g. a sense for human sinfulness). It was more their presentation of the general Zeitgeist that had to be confronted, than their philosophical position. This was, because Moeller was convinced that these existentialists and Christianity expressed the same building blocks to describe the experience of being in the world at present. They both shared a feeling of human responsibility by which the human being was called to engage actively in the world. Moreover, both currents considered the existential condition of the human person as its point of focus. They only differed in their emphasis: for existentialism, this was placed on human freedom and creativity, and for Christianity on the role of the human being in creation. Besides, they both shared a sense of ‘anxiety.’ In Christianity, the responsibility and significance of the human being was permanently threatened by original sin. In existentialism, a feeling of precariousness or relativity was discerned in all human activity. Existentialism thus offered his contemporaries the potential insight that “in front of the present world, the human being discovers at the same time his responsibility in the accomplishment of the political and social order, and the fragility, the contingency of his acts.”⁶² On this shared basis, according to Moeller, the Christian ideas of divine transcendence, the need for a general conversion, and the insistence on Christian liberty could find solid ground. Moeller’s project aimed to offer a Christian interpretation of literary works that would entail a mutual enrichment of both Christianity and culture.⁶³ He thus claimed not to develop a systematic philosophical discourse, nor would he develop a reflection on Neo-Thomist philosophy or would he question the actuality of Neo-Thomism. Speculative theology, he insisted, remained the most distinct discourse to express matters of Church doctrine, but through the use of cultural sources, such as literature, he would only clarify the sense of Christian truths to his contemporaries.⁶⁴ Moeller did not however, deny the importance of a philosophical reflection on Christian doctrine. He still considered it as an essential task to be completed, particularly in confrontation with the modern streams of thought such as existentialism. He only claimed to abstain from taking a position in this debate. This did not mean, however, that Moeller lacked a development of a proper reflection on the philosophical aspects of existential-

 Esp. Moeller, Charles, “Pierres d’attente et obstacles au ʻKèrugmaʼ chrétien, au XXe siècle,” in: Lumen Vitae 1 (1946) 222– 241, esp. 228.  Esp. Moeller, Charles, “Existentialisme et pensée Chrétienne,” in: Revue nouvelle 13 (1951): 570 – 581.  Esp. Moeller, Humanisme et sainteté, 21.  Esp. Moeller, Humanisme et sainteté, 195.

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ism. While he seemed to refrain from taking a position in the philosophical debates, he was nevertheless aware of them. This was made clear by his knowledge of the resemblances and the limits of existentialism in comparison with Christianity, which first became apparent in Existentialisme et pensée Chrétienne published in 1951.⁶⁵ If the title of this article was not yet a clear reference to Dondeyne’s reaction to Humani generis, his statement of tribute to the “magistrale study of Dondeyne”⁶⁶ made his source of inspiration obvious. This inspiration was also reflected in Moeller’s insistence on the two kinds of existentialism: existentialism in general with an openness towards transcending realities and the atheist existentialism of Sartre. Like Dondeyne, he also pleaded for the legitimate integration of this first kind of existentialism. Presenting his project as a literary work, Moeller was aware that his use of a language similar to that of existentialism could still raise suspicion. He therefore legitimized his project in a threefold way. First, Moeller claimed that what he envisaged was nothing more than a ressourcement. He wanted a mere return to the sources of dogmatic expressions and faith. He wished to help the faithful to rediscover the meaning of their faith. An integral understanding and experience of the Christian mystery, he claimed, could be considered the main goal of his works.⁶⁷ Surely, the ideas of Thomas Aquinas could be of help in this process, but according to Moeller the Bible and the thought of the Church Fathers with their emphasis on the Christian and the Trinitarian mystery could be more helpful. In the second step of his argumentation, he argued that to promote a better understanding of this mystery by his contemporaries one could use a literary language, since it offered a comprehensible framework. In Moeller’s words literature was a “propédeutique”⁶⁸ to Christianity. It formed an apologetic tool, preparing the entrance of Christianity. Existentialism, then, was logically a promising literary discourse to express Christian doctrine, because of its attraction among his contemporaries.⁶⁹ Likewise to similarly to Thomas Aquinas who had used Aristotle’s thought to express the Christian mystery in a fresh way, Moeller would adapt existentialism for a new expression of eternal truths. However, Moeller en-

 Moeller, “Existentialisme.”  “Cet article est presque entièrement tributaire de la magistrale étude de A. Dondeyneˮ (Ibid.)  Esp. Moeller, Charles, “Les chrétiens ont-ils encore la foi,” in: Revue Nouvelle 11 (1950): 113 – 121, 117.  Esp. Moeller, Charles, “Sagesse grecque et Paradoxe chrétien,” in: Revue Philosophique de Louvain, 11 (1948): 395 – 397.  Esp. Moeller, Pierres d’attentes, 234. See also Moeller, Charles, “De la littérature existentialiste à l’exploration du monde,” in: Revue nouvelle 20 (1954): 588 – 601; Moeller, Charles, “Existentialisme en moderne letterkunde,” in: West-Vlaanderen (1956): 306 – 311.

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sured that the content expressed, remained very traditional. References to the works of Sartre for instance, were no encouragement to read this author, but examples to proceed to his true goal, namely the development of a new Christian humanism. ⁷⁰ This was the third step of his argumentation. In reaction to the development of a new global humanism, Christianity had to present its own specificities. Moeller argued that he saw glimpses of this new humanism all around – in particular in the works of contemporary writers – but the true meaning could only be found and in the mystery of Christ. Only Christianity offered a view on the human person that would enable them to develop and promote a true Christian humanism. This he called the “Humanism of Beatitudes.” The development of this life-changing and life-giving humanism, that would be appealing to his contemporaries, in the end could be considered as Moeller’s ultimate aim. Both his lectures and his books testified of this, and the coronation of this thought would have definitely been the – always unwritten – book L’Humanisme des Béatitudes: Etudes scripturaire et théologique. ⁷¹

V Conclusion Humani generis had defined the limits of orthodoxy wherein a legitimate pursuit of philosophical and theological development had to be situated. Working in a Neo-Thomist frame Dondeyne, Grégoire and Moeller aimed to continue the Louvain tradition of philosophy and theology that kept a finger on the pulse of modern times while remaining loyal to traditional thought. Their efforts to deal with this situation was individually designed, yet constantly contested among themselves. According to the preceding research similarities and differences can be situated in three broad categories: their position towards Neo-Thomism and the guidelines set out by Humani generis, their theoretical engagement with phenomenology and existentialism, and their development of a Christian humanism. Concerning the first aspect, that of their relation to Neo-Thomism, all three professors were without doubt well trained in the principles of this preferred Ecclesial current of thought and method. Their attitude towards its authoritative

 “Je signale au lecteur que, depuis la publication de la première édition de ce livre, l’entièreté de l’œuvre de Sartre a été frappée de la condamnation de l’Index. Mes allusions à cet auteur ne sont donc pas une invitation à le lire, mais de simples exemples.ˮ Moeller, “Sagesse grecque.”  On different occasions this book was announced as forthcoming (1946; 1947; 1950; 1951). Unfortunately, it was never published and until now no manuscript of the book, searched in different archives, was found.

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status nevertheless differed. Dondeyne seemed to be well aware that his research brought him to the edges of orthodoxy, but he actively promoted his project as a contribution to the advancement of the discipline itself. Moreover, his publication Les problèmes soulevés par l’encyclique “Humani generis” even incited other researchers to engage actively in the re-actualization of Neo-Thomism to overcome its position of crisis. Grégoire shared Dondeyne’s philosophical interest in Neo-Thomism, but was clearly more careful to push its actual re-interpretation. Neo-Thomism remained in his view a safe standard that could counter other philosophical theories once their principles (and shortcomings) were exposed. Moeller, being aware of the philosophical doubts concerning Neo-Thomism, presented himself as the outsider with regards to the philosophical and theological projects of his colleagues. In his works the question of the actuality of Neo-Thomism was only mentioned in passing. A similar attitude can be perceived regarding their opinions on the integration of existential philosophies. Their attitude towards this current of thought was strongly defined by their methodological preferences. Dondeyne explicitly engaged with this form of contemporary philosophy. He not only wished to develop a systematic reflection on it, but he also hoped to integrate it synthetically into Christian thinking to better express metaphysical truths. For him it was in particular the notion of ‘existence,’ which offered a path in the renewal of metaphysics. Grégoire in his turn, remained loyal to the challenges set out by his appointment to the special chair for ‘contemporary pseudo-mysticisms.’ Like his treatment of the major ideological tendencies of the 1940s and 1950s, he also proceeded by searching for the foundations of existentialism. He found these in the figure of Henri Bergson, whose philosophy he soon mastered and who brought him to appreciate the notion of ‘implicit intuition.’ His historical philosophical approach made him also more prudent to actively develop and promote his own theories. Yet, when Dondeyne presented his project, Grégoire reacted from a Thomist viewpoint calling for even more nuance. Moeller, finally, opted for untrodden paths at the Louvain Faculty of Theology by opting for a literary approach. Moeller only interacted sporadically with existentialism in a philosophical sense. Although this may be true, in the vague borders between the philosophical and cultural project of numerous existentialists, Moeller nevertheless engaged with existential ideas. He even tried to make his insights in existentialism fruitful for theology, but his attempts were presented more as a rhetorical than of foundational use. Third, in the work of all three professors a similar concern came to the fore concerning the development of a philosophy and theology that could offer a meaningful answer to their contemporaries. This answer was often presented as a new – Christian – humanism. The urgency to develop such a humanism

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was inspired by their experiences with students, but also by socio-cultural developments. From this perspective the current of existentialism was seen as another attempt to formulate such a humanism. While all three authors doubted the eventual accomplishment of this current, it could nevertheless serve as a preparation for a full Christian humanism. This could be achieved, by urging a rediscovery of the proper foundations of Christianity in opposition to existentialism (Grégoire), by laying shared philosophical foundations (Dondeyne), or by presenting a new genre to express Christian doctrine (Moeller). In sum, all three Louvain professors looked in the light of Humani generis for their own path forward. While remaining loyal to their Neo-Thomist legacy, they nevertheless wanted to engage with phenomenology and existentialism. They all did so in their own respective manner. Dondeyne was convinced of the metaphysical possibilities of phenomenology, because of its focus on existence as ultimate principle. The encyclical Humani generis had not challenged this idea, but had most of all urged him to explain his project more in the light of NeoThomism. The call for an actualized Neo-Thomism in which the same notion of existence enabled metaphysical knowledge should be understood as his way forward. Grégoire, who through a teaching commitment had analyzed the philosophical foundations of currents of thought, also searched for the underlying principles of existential philosophies. This made him nuance Dondeyne’s focus on the notion of existence and a simple merge of these thought currents. Moeller, finally, avoided the philosophical discussion and focused more on existential choices and the literary discourse used by existentialism to appeal to the Zeitgeist. While their respective projects raised suspicions in certain milieus, as noted by Coppens, they were always further developed as legitimate philosophical and theological expressions in a Neo-Thomist context.

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Hayen, André, “L’encyclique “Humani generis” et la philosophie,” in: Nouvelle revue théologique 73 (1951): 113 – 137 Houssia, Albert, “In memoriam Mgr Charles Moeller,” in: Jean van Cangh, In memoriam Charles Moeller, Louvain-la-Neuve, 31 – 36. Kenis, Leo, “The Louvain Faculty of Theology and Its Professors. 1834 – 1889,” in: Ephemerides Theologicae Lovaniense 67 (1991): 398 – 414. Labourdette, Marie-Michel, “Les enseignements de l’encyclique,” in: Revue thomiste 60 (1950): 32 – 55. Labourdette, Marie-Michel/Nicolas Marie-Joseph/Bruckberger Raymond-Léopold, Dialogue théologique. Pièces du débat entre “ La Revue thomiste “ d’une part et les R.R. P.P. de Lubac, Danièlou, Bouillard, Fessard, von Balthasar, S.J., d’autre part, Saint-Maximin 1974. Lambert, A., “Bibliographie des travaux de Monsieur le professeur Franz Grégoire,” in: Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 37 (1961): 403 – 408. De Lubac, Henri, Le drame de l’humanisme athée, Paris 1945. Maritain, Jacques, La philosophie bersonienne, Paris 1914. Mettepenningen, Jürgen, “L’Essai de Louis Charlier (1938). Une contribution à la nouvelle théologie,” in: Revue théologique de Louvain 39 (2008): 211 – 232. Mettepenningen, Jürgen, Nouvelle Théologie – New Theology: Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican II, London et al. 2010. Mettepenningen, Jürgen/De Pril, Ward, “Thomism and the Renewal of Theology. Chenu, Charlier, and their Ressourcement,” in: Horizons 39 (2012): 50 – 68. Mirguet, Françoise/Hiraux, Françoise, L’institut supérieur de philosophie de Louvain (1889 – 1968): inventaire des archives, introduction historique, Louvain-la-Neuve 2008. Moeller, Charles. “Pierres d’attente et obstacles au ’Kèrugma’ chrétien, au XXe siècle,” in: Lumen Vitae 1 (1946): 222 – 241. Moeller, Charles, Humanisme et sainteté. Témoignages de la littérature occidentale, Paris 1946. Moeller, Charles, “Sagesse grecque et Paradoxe chrétien,” in: Revue Philosophique de Louvain, 11 (1948): 395 – 397. Moeller, Charles, “Les chrétiens ont-ils encore la foi,” in: Revue Nouvelle 11 (1950): 113 – 121. Moeller, Charles, “Existentialisme et pensée Chrétienne,” in: Revue nouvelle 13 (1951): 570 – 581. Moeller, Charles, Silence de Dieu : Camus, Gide, Huxley, Simone Weil, Graham Greene, Julien Green, Bernanos (Littérature du XXe siècle et christianisme, 1), Tournai 1952. Moeller, Charles, La foi en Jésus-Christ : Sartre, Henry James, Martin du Gard, Malègue (Littérature du XXe siècle et christianisme, 2), Tournai 1953. Moeller, Charles, “De la littérature existentialiste à l’exploration du monde,” in: Revue nouvelle 20 (1954): 588 – 601. Moeller, Charles, “Existentialisme en moderne letterkunde,” in: West-Vlaanderen (1956): 306 – 311. Moeller, Charles, Espoir des hommes : Malraux, Kafka, Vercors, Cholokhov, Maulnier, Bombard, Sagan, Reymont (Littérature du XXe siècle et christianisme, 3), Tournai 1957. Moeller, Charles, L’espérance en Dieu notre Père : Anne Frank, Miguel de Unamuno, Gabriel Marcel, Charles du Bos, Fritz Hochwälder, Charles Péguy (Littérature du XXe siècle et christianisme, 4), Tournai 1960.

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Moeller, Charles, Amours humaines : Françoise Sagan, Bertold Brecht, Saint-Exupéry, Simone de Beauvoir, Paul Valéry, Saint-John Perse (Littérature du XXe siècle et christianisme, 5), Tournai 1975. Moeller, Charles, L’exil et le retour : Marguerite Duras, Ingmar Bergman, Valery Larbaud, François Mauriac, Sigrid Undsert, Gertrude von Le Fort (Littérature du XXe siècle et christianisme, 6), Louvain-la-Neuve 1993. Muller, Camille, L’Encyclique ʻHumani Generisʼ et les problèmes scientifiques, Louvain 1951. Neirynck, Frans, “Vijftig jaar Theologische Faculteit,” in: Arthur Janssen/Gérard Philips/Joseph Coppens (ed.), De Theologische Faculteit. 1919 – 1969, Leuven 1970, 11 – 15. Neveu, Bruno, “Bergson et l’Index,” in: Revue de métaphysique et de morale 40 (2003): 543 – 551. Peddicord, Richard, The Sacred Monster of Thomism: An Introduction to the Life and Legacy of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., South Bend 2005. Ponthot, J., “In memoriam Franz Grégoire,” in: Revue théologique de Louvain 9 (1978): 129 – 132. Pope Leo XIII, “Aeterni Patris, encyclical of pope Leo XIII, 4 August 1879,” in: Acta Sanctae Sedis 12 (1879), 97 – 115. [n/a], “Congregation of the Index for Prohibited Books, 1. 06. 1914,” in: AAS 6 (1914), 314 – 315. [n/a], “Decree of the Holy Office, 14. 12. 1953,” in: Acta Apostolicae Sedis 46 (1954), 25. Pope Pius XII, “Humani generis, encyclical of pope Pius XII, 12. 08. 1950,” in: AAS 42 (1950) 561 – 578. English translation: http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/docu ments/hf_p-xii_enc_12081950_humani-generis.html (access on 24 February 2016). Pope Pius X, “Pascendi dominici gregis, encyclical of pope Pius X, 08. 09. 1907,” in: AAS 40 (1907), 593 – 650 De Pril, Ward, De Leuvense theoloog en oriëntalist René Draguet (1896 – 1980). Studie van zijn theologische positie en zijn conflict met de kerkelijke overheid, Dissertation, KU Leuven Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies (2010). De Pril, Ward, “Modernism and the Problematic Relation between History and Theology. The Search for a Compromise by Louvain Historians and Theologians (1870 – 1910),” in: Church History and Religious Culture 91 (2011): 59 – 78. De Raeymaeker, Louis, “Les origines de l’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie de Louvain,” in: Revue Philosophique de Louvain 49 (1951): 505 – 633. Van Riet, Georges, “Le titre de l’encyclique ‘Aeterni Patris’: Note historique,” in: Revue Philosophique de Louvain 80 (1982): 35 – 63. Rigaux, Béda, “Une importante réunion à la Faculté de Théologie de l’Université de Louvain,” in: Annua Nuntia Lovaniensia 17/16 (1937): 10 – 13. Schelkens, Karim, “The Louvain Faculty of theology and the Modern(ist) Heritage. Reconciling History and Theology,” in: Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 104 (2009): 856 – 891. Van Steenberghen, Frans, “Les Thomistes en dialogue avec la pensée moderne,” in: Benedetto D’Amore (ed.), Tommaso d’Aquino nel I centenarzio dell ‘Enciclica ‘Aeterni Patris’, Rome 1981, 137 – 158 Suenens, Léo-Joseph, Souvenirs et espérances, Paris 1991. Tollebeek, Jo, “New Periodicals for New Ideas: On the Birth of the Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique,” in: Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 95 (2000): 391 – 429.

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van Waeyenbergh, Honoré, “Hommage de l’Université Catholique à M. le chanoine Grégoire, professeur à la Faculté de Théologie,” in: Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 37 (1961). Weigel, Gustave, “Gleanings from the Commentaries on “Humani Generis,” in: Theological Studies 12 (1951): 520 – 549.

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Gilson’s Poietics In the existing body of research on Neo-Thomism, not much attention has been paid to its aesthetic theory. On the basis of this lacuna, we scholars are forced to approach the works concerned in a fresh manner. Gilson’s reflections on art, hence, offer us an insight into this almost uncharted area. The aim of the article is therefore to present the general principles and characterizations of Gilson’s philosophy of art. This will be done by presenting his ideas in the context of acknowledged and highly possible influences, while simultaneously examining a series of critical perspectives shedding light on his theory of art. Gilson’s philosophy of art is contained in three principal works:¹ Painting and Reality (1957); Introduction aux arts du beau (1962, translated into English as an Introduction to the Art of the Beautiful) and Matières et Formes: Poiétiques particulières des arts majeurs (1964). These books stand in tandem to his metaphysical works and his writings on the history of philosophy. To some extent, Gilson’s theory of art can be distinguished from his canonic philosophical and metaphysical writings, yet we can still discern resonances between the two groups of work. The most evident point of contact between Gilson’s artistic theory and his metaphysical inquiries is where he discusses the notion of realism, to which we will return in what follows. In the domain of the philosophy of art, as in other domains of Gilson’s philosophy,² we should situate Gilson’s perspective alongside that of his fellow neoScholastic and rival, Jacques Maritain.³ Although Maritain and Gilson pose two

 Gilson, Etienne, Painting and Reality, New York 1957. This book is based on a series of lectures delivered at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. A French parallel (And not a translation, says Gilson in the forward) was published in 1972 as Gilson, Etienne, Peinture et réalité, Paris1998. Gilson, Etienne, Introduction aux arts du beau, Paris 1998; Gilson, Etienne, The Arts of the Beautiful, USA: Dalkey Archive Press, 2000; Gilson, Etienne, Matières et Formes: Poiétiques particulières des arts majeurs, Paris 1964, and Peinture et réalité (1972) (Paris 1998); Etienne Gilson, Painting and Reality). In each instance, I quote the French versions of the texts.  On Maritain and Gilson as rivals and correspondents, see Fitzgerald, Desmond J., “Maritain and Gilson on Painting,” in: Alice Ramos (ed.), Beauty, Art and the Police, Washington 2000, 190 – 200; Fitzgerald, Desmond J., “Gilson and Maritain on the Principles of Sufficient Reason,” in: Douglas A. Olivant (ed.), Jacques Maritain and the Many Ways of Knowing, Washington 2002, 120 – 127.  On Maritain’s work see Hudson, Deal W./Mancini Matthew J. (ed.), Understanding Maritain: Philosopher and Friend, Macon GA 1987; Olivant, Douglas A. (ed.), Jacques Maritain and the Many Ways of Knowing, Washington 2002. On the debates within Neo-Scholasticism see Sadler, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110588255-009

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competing positions on art, we cannot understand Gilson’s Poietics without first introducing Maritain’s concepts. Gilson’s philosophy of art can therefore be seen as a response to Maritain’s. With both thinkers working within a Catholic Thomist framework, their definition on art shared a common point of reference; however, their ideas diverged in many crucial respects. Their points of contention are to a large extent based on their different interpretations of Bergson’s philosophy, in particular of his work L’évolution créatrice. ⁴ This influential book, published in 1907, is based on Bergson’s lectures at the College de France delivered a year before, where many prominent intellectuals and artists were present. Although the lectures seldom focused on artistic production, and rather engage with questions pertaining to the evolution and methodologies of the life-sciences, these lectures catalyzed a novel understanding of art and creative activities within the French intellectual arena of the belle époque. Such creative activities, Bergson maintained, were relevant for a methodological investigation of the various sciences. Rather than making the scientific domain more “aesthetic,” L’Evolution créatrice insisted on the creative and productive nature of human activity and existence as such. This gesture of drawing artistic discussions into the sphere and spectrum of human action is a guiding principle in understanding the manner in which Gilson conceives of the place of art amongst man’s engagement with reality. Gilson’s Poietics should be viewed as a unique synthesis between Bergson and Aristotle, correcting Bergson with the help of Aristotle (assisted by the generous aid of ethnology and art history, as we shall see in what follows).

I The Neo-Scholastic Approach to Art The origins of the 20th century neo-Scholastic aesthetics are situated in Maritain’s writings, not in those of Gilson.⁵ In a similar manner to Gilson, Maritain was persistently occupied with questions relating to art and creativity. However, Maritain began his investigations much earlier. In Art et scolastique (1920),⁶ Maritain pres-

Gregory B., Reason Fulfilled by Revelation: The 1930s Christian Philosophy Debates in France, Indiana 2011, 46 – 98.  Bars, Henri, “Sur le rôle de Bergson dans l’itinéraire philosophique de Jacques Maritain,” in: Cahiers Jacques Maritain 9 (1984): 5 – 31  On the Thomist Renaissance in France see Foucher, Louis, La philosophie catholique en France au XIXe siècle Avant la renaissance thomiste et dans son rapport avec elle (1800 – 1880), Paris 1955.  Maritain, Jacques, Art et scolastique, Paris 1920.

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ents the Scholastic approach to art in strict Orthodox-Catholic terms. However, differently from a simple conservative approach seeking to return to the orthodox view of the matter, Maritain reflects on the role which the traditional conception of art can play in modern times and tries to find a fitting compromise. From the outset, it is clear that Maritain views the Scholastic approach to art as demanding a conceptual framework which differs from the philosophical domain conventionally known as “aesthetics.” In the opening pages of Art et scolastique, Maritain discusses the kern fallacy of modern aesthetics, which corrupts our conceptions of art and beauty. According to Maritain, the kern fallacy lies in the consideration beauty to be art’s ultimate objective, the latter limited to what we understand by the term “fine arts,” thus deeming any useful artefacts or decoration as superfluous.⁷ In contrast to this, Maritain thinks that art’s objective is not limited to the delectation received by sensing harmonious relations of qualities, but entails, instead, an intuition of a spiritual kind. What remains ineluctable, however, is the fact that the neo-Scholastic approach to art is not a genuinely modern one. Instead, Maritain is guided by the Thomist Medieval formulations his endeavour to approach creative activity.⁸ Indeed, for both Maritain and Gilson, there is a markedly religious function contained in artworks, which is immanent and indispensable to their existence.⁹ This does not entail that the insights which medieval artworks offer are confined to the past. As both theorists aver, Scholastic art theory can provide us with fresh perspectives on contemporary issues. When reflecting on the aftermath of 20th century aesthetic discourse, it is somewhat surprising within the wide array of the theories the century spawned, these were two neo-Scholastic theorists who insisted on art being first and foremost as active a form of making, before giving rise to the experience of a spectator, based on a passive receptor of sensually-caused inspiration.¹⁰ Furthermore, both Gilson and Maritain focused their attention on a realist conception of art. We should not understand realist in the sense of art being a faithful “representation” of reality, but rather in the sense of art having a concrete and precise reality actualized in its own occurrence, prior to their happening in the subjective arena of the aestheticized spectator. Additionally, and notably, both thinkers consider art as a kingdom of habitus or skill. As Maritain notes, within the framework of Scholastic theory, art is considered as belonging to the practical intel-

 Ibid, 2.  On the importance of Medievalism to 20th century French thought, see Holsinger, Bruce, The Premodern condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory, Chicago et al. 2005.  For example, see Gilson, Introduction, 145 – 159. Maritain, Art et scholastique, 93 – 98.  On Passivity in Aesthetics, see Seel, Martin, Aktive Passivität. Über den Spielraum des Denkens, Handelns und anderer Künste, Frankfurt am Main 2014.

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lect;¹¹ and as such, it is located within the most fundamental level of practical activity, and hence of virtuous comportment. Also, here, Gilson agrees with Maritain. He reminds the reader that according to Aristotle art is an “hexis poietike,”¹² hexis being the Greek equivalent (and origin) of the Latin habitus.¹³ Yet from this point onwards, the positions of the two neo-Scholastics differ significantly. For Maritain, as an orthodox Thomist, art in its essence is not to be found in the laborious process of the execution of the work, in artistic production, but dwells rather in the domain of the spirit.¹⁴ Art is fundamentally a spiritual activity, being as such more than “merely” a corporeal or technical making. Maritain’s later work further accentuates this intuitive orientation when he speaks of “creative intuition” as the kern and essence of artistic reality.¹⁵ Maritain writes: “Creative intuition is an obscure grasping of his own Self and of things in knowledge through union or through con-naturality which is born in the spiritual unconscious, and which fructifies only in the work.”¹⁶ Creative, or poetic intuition is only expressed by work of art, the latter remaining a servant to intuitive experience.¹⁷ This is very different from Gilson’s position for whom art is definitively a technical and a physical making. Conceived in this light, art is realized in the corporeal and material realm, and is manifested in the duration of the making of the work of art. Therefore, in Gilson’s conception, the essence of the work of art is not determined by its end-product but through and by the material process of production. In general, the difference between the two positions can be outlined in the following way: in as much as Maritain held onto an orthodox Thomist conception of art as fully integrated into theurgy and theology, Gilson revived the Aristotelian roots of the Scholastic conception of artistic making. That is the point where Gilson parts ways with Maritain in

 Maritain, Art et Scolastique, 15.  Gilson, Matières et formes, 17.  Efal, Adi, “Naturalization: Habits, Bodies and their Subjects,” in: Phenomenology and Mind 6 (July 2014), accessible here: http://www.fupress.net/index.php/pam/article/view/19555.  Maritain, Art et Scolastique, 17: “l’habilité manuelle ne fait pas partie de l’art, elle n’en est qu’une condition matérielle et extrinsèque; le travail (…) l’art se tient tout entier du côté de l’esprit.”  Some of the arguments of Creative Intuition repeat earlier ones contained in Art et Scolastique. The original edition is Maritain, Jacques, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, Michigan 1953.  Maritain, Creative intuition, see in the available online text at http://www.catholicculture. org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=9099, accessed 24.11. 2016.  On Maritain’s artistic intuition see Dimler, G., “Creative Intuition in the Aesthetic Theories of Croce and Maritain,” in: New Scholasticism 37 (October, 1963): 472– 492; Hanke, John W., “Poetic Intuition,” in: Maritain’s Ontology of the Work of Art, The Hague 1973, 68 – 99.

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a crucial manner: for Gilson, execution and production, art in the sense of a Techné, is the kern of artistic making; without it, art loses its essential poietic nature. This is the basis of Gilson’s Poietics, understanding art as a work of production, as a making of things. Only after being productive in its essence, can art subsequently also create aesthetic experiences and gratifications.

II Gilson’s Poietics Gilson’s Poietics can be considered a polemic on two fronts: it is both a polemic with Maritain’s spiritualism, and with the Bergsonian conception of creativity. Insofar as the polemic against Maritain is essential and irreconcilable, Gilson had more sympathy for Bergson’s philosophy and the tradition which emerged from it.¹⁸ Indeed as mentioned above both Gilson and Martian were present at Bergson’s lectures in the College de France.¹⁹ Gilson also mentions both Bergson and his predecessor in the Spiritualist tradition, Felix Ravaisson-Mollien, in a few important passages in his writings on art.²⁰ Bergson’s conception of “creative evolution,”²¹ and even more so his conception of intuition,²² are central in shaping both Maritain’s and Gilson’s approaches to art. It appears that both authors, having intimately known the philosophy of Bergson and having overcome it and criticized it in their respective ways, were returning to the Bergsonian suggestions and engaging with them in a critical manner in the domain of their philosophies of art. Gilson’s Poietics, accentuating the productive character not only of artistic making but also of human existence as such, finds in Bergson’s formulations of the Homo Faber a useful antecedent.²³ Homo Faber is the fabricating man: “Fabrication consists in forming matter, softening and folding it, converting it into an instrument in order to be its master.”²⁴ Indeed Gilson’s Poietics is one of the clearest elaborations of Bergson’s fabricationist view of life and

 On the Spiritualist tradition, there has yet to have been a better report written than the already old Dominique Janicaud, see Ravaisson et la métaphysique. Une généalogie du spiritualisme français, Paris 1997.  See Gilson, Etienne, “Souvenir de bergson,” in: Revue de metaphysique et de morale 64/2 (1959): 129 – 140.  For example, in Gilson, Introduction, 110.  In Bergson, Henri, L’évolution créatrice, Paris 2009.  On Bergsonian intuition and its relation to art, see De Mille, Charlotte, ‘‘Sudden gleams of (f) light’: ‘Intuition as Method’?” in: Art History 34/2(2011): 370 – 386. On Intuition and art in Maritain see Sampaio, Laura Fraga, L’Intuition Dans La Philosophie de Jacques Maritain, Paris 1993.  Bergson, L’évolution créatrice,140 – 159.  Ibid., 184.

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of man. Furthermore, Gilson interprets Bergsonian intuition as a process and as a method of production and realization, rather than a passive moment of inspirational apprehension like Maritain. In the context of 20th century “aesthetics,” Gilson’s concept of Poiesis offers us a singular and radical perspective. While within post-Kantian and phenomenological conceptions of aesthetics art is considered as an event, an experience, a hermeneutic happening.²⁵ In Gilson’s Poietics, by contrast, art, conceived as productive techné, is first and foremost a concrete making, nearing the radical conceptions of art in materialist, socialist or Marxists frameworks. In these materialist approaches, art is understood as being the production of things that actively participate in the maintenance (or revolution) of society.²⁶ Art is not considered as a metaphysical event “happening to someone” who remains passive and receptive (either the audience or the artist- “genius”), but rather it is conceived as an active and a concrete making performed by a trained and skilled producer. This, however, was not the usual direction in which Christian aesthetics developed throughout the 20th century. In this context, it is enlightening to canvas Gilson’s Poietics on the Catholic aesthetics of Jean-Luc Marion, whose theories, grounded in phenomenology as well as in negative theology, understand art in terms of a saturation of the passive viewer by the iconic work.²⁷ In comparison to Marion’s eventful aesthetics, Gilson’s approach seems indeed coarse. Yet if art, as Aristotle and Gilson argue, is simply a form of making, its products are essentially things, before being experiences or sensations. And their effect is not saturating but rather incentive: they call forth and summon further actions, deeds and productions. Gilson differentiates between two kinds of things: things produced by nature and things produced by art. As the vast collection of things produced by art, the world of nature also contains artefacts, produced spontaneously, without the hands of men (acheiropoieta, αχειροποίητα).²⁸ Yet human production is essential to artworks, and the artist as the executor of the work is always primarily an artisan, participating in what is delineated in

 As for example in Gadamer, following Heidegger: “Art is an ontological event: In it Meaning becomes meaningfully visible.” Gadamer, Hans Georg, Truth and Method, transl. Garrett Harden and John Cumming, New York 1982, 127.  On the Stalinist approach to art, building social material reality, see Groys, Boris, Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin: Die gespaltene Kultur in der Sowjetunion, Munich 1988.  Gschwandter, Christina M., “Revealing the invisible: Henry and Marion on Aesthetic Experience,” in: The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 28/3 (2014): 305 – 314 ; Gschwandter, Christina M., Degrees of Givenness: On Saturation in Jean-Luc Marion, Bloomington 2014.  Gilson, Introduction, 118: “Il existe donc un monde poiétique, composé d’etres poiétiques, résidant dans le monde de la nature, mais spécifiquement distincts de lui.”

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socialist literature as the proletarian “working-condition” (condition oeuvrière). When Gilson refers to the “worker condition” he is nearing a theme widely discussed in modern socialist literature, notably by the Catholic mystical Marxist thinker Simone Weil,²⁹ who also wrote around the middle of the 20th century, about factory labor as a form of mystical experience of purification. For Gilson, art’s unique place among the various human activities is distinguished for its capacity to make and do with the body and from the body, before being a spiritual purging. Gilson explicitly speaks about “rendering back to art its body.”³⁰ The artwork follows the destiny of its matter; it endures like it, it ages for better or worse, and is completed in like manner.³¹ In other words, artworks are material tout court. This of course is directed against Maritain’s spiritual understanding of creative intuition. Again, Gilson’s position is to be understood as a critique of the idea of aesthetics which is interested in mystifying, intoxicating “degustation.” In terms of ideology, he attacks this stance for promoting the concept of the “genius” and the immateriality of art, which safeguards this sensualisation, the liquidation of the materiality of the artistic production.³² Art is the type of human free activity which is most related to work and labor. And this is why for Gilson technical virtuosity has value in-itself, having its own beauty.³³ What guides the development of the artwork and motivates its ripening in Gilson’s Poietics is the realization of an “interior project,” initiating a vital productive process by an internal orientation which is not always conscious.³⁴ This accounts for what Gilson calls “poietical finality”: the internal project that directs the progress of the “working-out” of the thing from within the framework of the productive process. As we shall see this internal project is what Gil-

 Weil, Simone, La condition ouvrière, Paris 1951.  Gilson, Introduction, 115.  Ibid.: “Rendre à l’œuvre d’art son corps aide à dissiper des erreurs de toutes sortes. (…) l’œuvre d’art suit le destin de sa matière ; elle dure comme elle, vieillit bien ou mal comme elle et finit comme elle.”  Ibid., 115.  Gilson, Matières et formes, 140.  Gilson, Introduction, 1 f., 112 : “Le projet intérieur de l’œuvre se présente aussi comme sa fin. La philosophie traditionnelle d’Aristote manifeste une fois de plus de cela sa fécondité, surtout si l’on se souvient de maintenir ces notions dans l’ordre biologique, c’est-à-dire de la vie. La finalité ne s’y exprime pas sous la forme d’une activité de simple copiste, mais plutôt comme l’orientation intrinsèque d’une productivité vitale vers un terme auquel elle tend sans avoir claire conscience de ce qu’il est. La finalité poiétique n’est rien si elle n’est pas cette détermination interne qui, à travers mainte hésitation, reprise et, comme on dit, repentir, n’en maintient pas moins l’inflexiblement de l’œuvre à naitre sur la droite ligne de son propre devenir.”

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son also calls a “germinal form.” This internal project operates like an internal seal, shaping matter and drawing it towards the accomplishment of the work. The project, or the model does not have to be consciously intuited in order to be realized. It rather guides the process of production internally, out of the characters and specificities of the instruments and materials involved: also, here, of course, Gilson is taking contention with Maritain’s theory of art, who placed creative intuition at the ground of any artistic work.³⁵ In Matières et Formes Gilson engages in a series of detailed analyses of the central genres of the arts: Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Music, Dance, Poetry, and Theater. Here, his aim is to give an account of the various arts according to the production procedures that are demanded by each of them. This is what he coins as the “poiétiques particulières” of the arts. In his ample discussions of abstract painting, Gilson is more favorable and enthusiastic than Maritain. For Maritain, abstract, non-representative art is characterized as being a kind of an intuitive void, tending to exist as bare-things rather than genuine poetic creatures. Representation and figurative language is for Maritain essential to art.³⁶ Whereas abstract painting, according to Maritain, dematerializes its reference, and thus its material content in favor of immaterial forms, art, for Maritain is eternally bounded with figuration. For Gilson, however, as we emphasized already, it is exactly the “thingly” character that is so essential in the definition of the work of art. For Gilson, moreover, painting is in its essence abstraction, it can in fact be defined as a work of abstraction.³⁷ In order to support his hypothesis he quotes theories of modern painters and artists, all of whom are associated with the turn towards gradual abstraction in painting and the making-distinct of the sovereign painterly elements, like Eugene Delacroix, Maurice Denis and Henri Matisse. From the theoretical elaborations of these artists, Gilson draws not only an understanding of abstract painting but of art in general. And it is the strive towards the making seen of “being a thing” that makes the core of artistic reality for Gilson, in a blunt contrast to Maritain.

 Sampaio, Laura Fraga, “Intuition et création artistique,” in: L’Intuition Dans la philosophie de Jacques Maritain, Paris 1963, 136 ff.  Maritain, Creative intuition, 216 – 218. See also Fitzgerald, “Maritain and Gilson on Painting,” 193.  Gilson, Matières et forms, 116 – 117. Gilson refers here to the artistic theory of the painter Maurice Denis, who was one of the first theoreticians of painterly abstraction in late 19th century.

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III Homo Faber: An Ethnological Influence? The most likely influence on Gilson’s “technical” position regarding art would be the Ethnological circle at the Sorbonne led by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl.³⁸ Gilson once said that it was Lévy-Bruhl who taught him the quality of “Thingness –(“Chosisme”).”³⁹And it is in fact Lévy-Bruhl who proposed to Gilson to write his thesis on the Scholastic presence in Descartes’ writings, which turned-out to be the worldrenowned and revolutionary Index scolastico cartésien. ⁴⁰ Gilson was also following Lévy-Bruhl’s lectures on Descartes between 1904 and 1906 which he later commented upon.⁴¹ Beneath the Scholastic agenda posed by Gilson’s theory of art, we can find a vocabulary very similar to the one to be found in the contemporaneous debates in ethnology in Paris. It was here than Gilson drew on these ideas in order define the topos of the Homo Faber: “Homo Faber likes to do things. On this aspect, painters do not differ in nothing from any other artisans, they enjoy giving an existence to objects, that, without them, will not exist.”⁴² It was as if this sentence was taken out of a text which was produced by the institute of Ethnology instituted by Lévy-Bruhl in the Sorbonne.⁴³ Lévy-Bruhl, as we have just noted, is one of the most important influences on the young Gilson. We also know that Gilson was attending the lectures that later became Lévy-Bruhl’s La mentalité primitive. ⁴⁴ For Lévy-Bruhl, the homo faber mentality is connected to a pre-logical, primitive state in which concretization of the relation between man and reality is incorporated. It was another follower of Lévy-Bruhl, André LeroiGourhan, who exemplified ethnological thought in the terms of the research of the plastic arts.⁴⁵ Gilson was developing a concept of artistic production which

 The Institute of Ethnology at the Sorbonne was instituted by Marcel Mauss and Lucien LevyBruhl at 1925.  Murphy, Francesca Aran, Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Etienne Gilson, Columbia et al. 2004, 33 – 36.  Gilson, Etienne, Index Scolastico Cartésien, Paris 1979.  Gilson, Étienne, “Le Descartes de L. Lévy-Bruhl,” in: Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger 147 (1957): 432– 451.  Gilson, Peinture et réalité, 224 : “Homo faber aime faire des choses. A cet égard, les peintres ne diffèrent en rien des autres artisans, ils prennent plaisir à donner l’existence à des objets, qui, sans eux, n’existeraient pas.”  See Patterson, Bradley W., Redefining Reason: The Story of the Twentieth Century “Primitive” Mentality, USA: XLibris 2011, 120 – 151.  Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, La mentalité primitive, Paris 1922.  Leroi-Gourhan, André, “Home Faber, Homo sapiens,” in: Revue de Synthèse 30 (1952): 92– 93. For relevant literature on Leroi-Gourhan, see Audouze, Françoise, “Leroi-Gourhan, a Philosopher of Technique and Evolution,” in: Journal of Archaeological Research 10/4 (December 2002): 277–

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not only addressed the anthropological question of what characterizes human existence, but also took into account the question of realism, a specific realism concerning a primordial, proto-rational engagement with bare things, instruments and techniques (see below at section V).

IV Germinal Forms One of the most Aristotelian conceptions that Gilson uses is the one of germinal forms (“formes germinales”),⁴⁶ being the prototypes that effectively generate artworks. This concept obviously returns to a hylomorphist conception of the relation between matter and shape. Gilson knows this is not an especially original idea. He recognizes that the notion of germinal forms can already be found in both the work of his rival Maritain as well in the philosophy of Henri Bergson.⁴⁷ Moreover, Gilson also cites and discusses the important essay by the art historian Henri Focillon, La vie des formes, published in 1934, as an example of someone engaging with the germinal capacity of forms.⁴⁸ In particular, Gilson utilises this term when discussing painting, and the manner in which within the painterly process, forms and matters interact. Germinal forms are never unto themselves isolated. They exist only in relation to the matter which they shape. It is therefore through a process of abstraction that one can in fact get to know that germinal form, let alone to follow and describe the process which it was going through in order to arrive at a state of owning a body.⁴⁹ Neither to be identified with internal form nor with the technical procedure itself, germinal forms are primary to artificially shaped matter: the productive process begins when germinal forms begin to strive for a body.⁵⁰ When matter is invaded by a form, what happens is a reciprocal, yet tensioned process of adaptation between the two.⁵¹ What matters, according to Gilson is the singularity and uniqueness of the realization of the

306; Bidet, Alexandra, “Le corps, le rythme et l’esthétique sociale chez André Leroi-Gourhan,” in: Technique et Culture 48 – 49 (2007): 15 – 38; Hildebrandt, Toni, “Bild, Geste und Hand; LeroiGourhans paläontologische Bildtheorie,” in: Image (July 2011): 76 – 88; Sigaut, François, Comment Homo devint faber. Comment l’outil fit l’homme, Paris 2013.  Gilson, Peinture et réalité, 182– 223.  Ibid., 205.  Focillon, Henri, La vie des formes, Paris 1996.  Gilson, Peinture et réalité, 206. “C’est donc seulement par une abstraction qu’on peut la concevoir d’abord en elle-même, ensuite dans son effort pour se donner un corps.”  “Le premier moment de l’opération est celui où la forme germinale se met en quete d’un corps.” Ibid.  Ibid., 206.

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form in the work. “There have never been two works, painted by the same artist, that tell the same story.”⁵² Every singular painting has its own history of strained adaptation between matter and germinal form. For Gilson, the motive of realization is essential to Art, and to the dynamics of Germinal forms. The urge (“besoin”) that the painter feels, not to be satisfied with the sketch (l’esquisse), equals the need to produce a work (œuvre). This can be expressed in the language of scholastic philosophy of Thomas Aquinas: Art does not admit the unaccomplished (l’inachevé): omnis ars infinita repudiate (Contra Gentiles, I, 63, 6). Hand and spirit occasionally struggle with or against each other in the process of realization, only to generate an end product which is completely unforeseeable.⁵³ Again, we should note that the emphasis given to the hand is rather incompatible with the French phenomenological approach to art, as is expressed for example in Merleau-Ponty’s L’œil et l’esprit,⁵⁴ in which that which directs the creative hand is first and foremost sight and vice versa. These are germinal forms that initiate the quest to produce new composites. And the realization of the artwork, its actualization is not only unpredictable but also hazardous: In the case of painting, the germinal form is incorporated into an organized matter, in order to offer to the eye a perfect object of apprehension, able to provoke a sensible contemplation. In its being a work of art of the painter, painting (Tableau) has no other end.⁵⁵

Therefore, germinal forms and the productive nature of art are bound together to shape Gilson’s overall view of his Poietics.

 “Il n’y a jamais eu deux tableaux, peints par le même artiste, dont l’histoire ait été la même.” Ibid., 205.  : “D’autres fois, les échanges entre la main et l’esprit deviennet si animés qu’on dirait une contestation et presque une bataille (…) c’est qui arrive jamais c’est que l’œuvre finie résulte de la forme germinale suivant un cours entièrement prévisible.” Ibid., see also 239.  For whom the artistic deed is based on something like this: “…Immergé dans le visible par son corps, lui-même visible, le voyant ne s’approprie pas ce qu’il voit : il l’approche seulement par le regard, il ouvre sur le monde.” Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, L’œil et l’esprit, Paris 1964, 17– 18.  Gilson, Peinture et réalité, 238: “Dans le cas de la peinture, la forme germinale s’incorpore à une matière organisée pour offrir à l’œil un objet parfait d’appréhension et, pour ainsi dire, en vue de provoquer une contemplation sensible. En tant qu’œuvre de l’art du peintre, un tableau n’a pas d’autre fin.”

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V Three Levels of Realism: Existence, Form, Realization The realism that Gilson mobilized was also at work in his metaphysical writings. In a similar manner to the way he employed the concept in the Poietics, his metaphysical realism, which he deployed as an interrogation of Kantian critical standpoints, is a radical one.⁵⁶ In Gilson’s particular realism, truth is not subsumed under the reign of any transcendental subject, and reality is not constituted by the conditions of the possibility of experience. Rather, the act of consciousness is itself caused and constituted by its known object, which is to say by the thing which is being grasped.⁵⁷ At no place in his corpus, nevertheless, does Gilson address the relation between the realist nature of his Poietics and his realist metaphysical stance. Given this silence, it remains an impending scholarly task to interpret the interrelationship between the two realisms in his work. In this respect, I will attempt a preliminary sketch towards a unification of the two. For Gilson, realism means first and foremost existence: ⁵⁸ “That which the senses perceive exist and existence includes that which the sense perceives in it, but it nevertheless carries a message that it cannot read and it is only the intellect which will decipher it.”⁵⁹ This existential, methodical realism regards subject and object as convoked simultaneously in the act of knowledge itself. Metaphysics and epistemology, according to this model, are concerned with deciphering this above-mentioned message of the existent thing. On the other hand, artistic work is the human activity which constitutes things without deciphering them, leaving other agents the task of decoding the “message” of the thing and implicating it again in further interpretations or works. It is not that art itself is a process of knowing (Gilson emphatically argues against an epistemological understanding of art),⁶⁰ but rather that art’s task is to produce things that can be known and deciphered, and in that, necessarily, to give rise, to convoke subjective positions. To the side of this existential methodic realism, Gilson also holds a classical Aristotelian realism regarding the existence of forms. This is detectable both in

 Gilson, Etienne, Le Réalisme Méthodique, Paris 1935; Gilson, Etienne, Réalisme Thomiste et Critique de la connaissance, Paris 1939.  Gilson, Réalisme Méthodique, 38 – 51.  Gilson, Réalisme Thomiste, 213 – 239: “L’appréhension de l’existence.”  Ibid., 218.  Gilson, Introduction, 84– 90, 84: “il n’y a pas d’intuition créatrice, car la connaissance ne crée rien.”

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his metaphysics and in his artistic theory (see above the discussion of “germinal forms”). These two realisms coincide. Germinal forms retain the cohesion of existence, without being always evident or conscious. Nevertheless, these forms are realized and made distinct by the convocation of the work of art, as well as by the deciphering process performed by hermeneutics or metaphysics. Therefore, Gilson’s realism is a strong and a threefold one: it begins with the identity between subject and object, continues with the forms holding the moments of apprehension together, and is completed by the consistent procedure of realization that characterizes human existence.

VI The Concept of Beauty In relation to the question of beauty, both Gilson and Maritain are revealed in their most conservative guises. In their conceptions of beauty both theorists return to a Neo-Platonist conception.⁶¹ For one, they both place the concept of beauty as differentiated from artistic activity itself, protecting beauty’s place as a kind of an untouchable, one can say transcendental, idea. In this way, their respective radical attitudes towards artistic activity have very little influence on their concept of beauty. Gilson claims that what differentiates art from nature is that the latter does not have as its ultimate goal to be beautiful,⁶² whereas the telos of art lies in precisely this. It is the essence, substance and target of the fine arts to offer an object to the gaze, an object whose very view will indulge the one gazing.⁶³ Indeed, it is around the concept of beauty that Gilson retreats into the limits of aesthetics and the rather traditional parameters of art criticism. Moreover, the experience of beauty according to Gilson, has at its core to be an enjoyable, sensually rewarding one. Aesthetic experience causes pleasure. In this, Gilson in fact conserves an essentially Kantian framework of “aesthetic” discourse, when he says, for example, in the third Critic, that “Das Schöne ist das, was ohne Begriffe als Objekt eines allgemeinen Wohlgefallens vorgestellt wird.”⁶⁴ This does not mean that the entire poietic reality is to be understood on the basis of pleasure, but nevertheless pleasure is an inseparable

 See Alexandrakis, Aphrodite/Moutafakis, Nicolas J. (ed.), Neoplatonism and Western Aesthetics, Albany 2002, 3 – 52.  Gilson, Peinture et réalité, 232.  Ibid., 233: “l’œuvre du peintre n’a d’autre substance, d’autre structure, d’autre réalité que ce qu’elle doit en avoir pour offrir aux regards un objet dont la perception même soit donneuse de joie.”  Kant, Immanuel, Kritik der Urteilskraft, Hamburg 2004, 58.

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part of that poietic reality.⁶⁵ Perhaps this is also the place where we should return to Maritain, as in his writings beauty holds a central place as well, yet with a different meaning altogether. In Art et scolastique, Maritain poses an explicitly intellectualist conception of beauty. For Maritain, beauty is essentially an object of intelligence, resulting from creative contemplation; it is intelligence that can know beauty as the zenith of harmony.⁶⁶ So even if Gilson and Maritain were contesting regarding what the beautiful essentially means,⁶⁷ they were in fact both conserving the concept of beauty as an untouchable concept. In any case, it seems that Gilson stopped short of realizing how the concept of beauty itself can be revolutionized and re-calibrated according to the parameters his Poietics promises to enable: a concept of beauty embedded in making and production, portraying technical virtuosity, or “knowhow” as an end for itself.

VII The Limits of Gilson’s Poietics As we observed above, although Gilson’s Poietics propounds a radical thesis which is situated in an irregular position in the field of 20th century aesthetics, his theoretical reflections on art appear to be only the beginning of a construction which still calls for a serious application and elaboration. There is still a lot of work to be done in order to bring to light the theoretical potential contained in his notion of Poietics. Such a potential emerges in the domain between liturgy, art, design and engineering, with design being the all-encompassing sphere in which artistic deeds as productive entities become fully realized. This conception highlights the relation between art and philosophy of technics. Consequently, he invites us to reflect on the following question: instead of the experience of art as being located within the field which is universally referred to as “aesthetics,” can the philosophy of art be re-located to a terrain which we might rename as something like Poietics, understood simply as the philosophy of technology? Gilson was extremely convincing in re-delineating the nature of both art and its philosophy, but unfortunately, he did not arrive at an elaboration of concrete conclusions and principles that derive from his radical poietic suggestions. His concept of beauty, for example, and his endorsement of aesthetic pleasure, remain within the rigidly conventional and traditional borders of aesthetics. When Gilson en Gilson, Peinture et réalité, 236.  Maritain, Art et scolastique, 6 f., 31. “La beauté est essentiellement objet d’intelligence, ça ce qui connait au sens plein du mot, c’est l’intelligence, qui seule est ouverte à l’infinité de l’être.”  See Murphy, Aran Francesca, “Battle Over the Beautiful,” in: Redpath, P., (ed..), A Thomistic Tapestry. Essays in Memory of Etienne Gilson, Atlanta et al. 2002.

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ters a discussion with particular cases, or particular arts, he returns to lean on conclusions and assertions that are closely tied to the aesthetic tradition which he attempts to distance himself from. The most obvious example of this is his distinction between fine and functional art, where he suggests that it is the nature of “beautiful art” to be realized without any utilitarian teleology behind it, only for the sake of the beautiful itself. In that sense, he is, unwillingly or unknowingly perhaps, returning to the Kantian determinations regarding beauty as causality without cause and to modern aesthetic positions of l’art pour l’art. ⁶⁸ Nevertheless, a Poietic approach to art can advance in the direction of a concrete, de-mystified, habitual conception of art-making,⁶⁹ a poieitic reality extending in the vast space opened between engineering and liturgy.⁷⁰

VIII Is Gilson’s Poietics a Neo-Thomist Concept? On the basis of the observations made thus far, it would make more sense to locate Gilson’s theory of art within the sphere of neo-Aristotelianism than neoThomism. On many occasions, Gilson prefers to return directly to Aristotle rather than to Thomas Aquinas in order to find the principles for his Poietics. In fact, it seems that Gilson’s Poietics is one of the most Aristotelian theories of art to have been written in the 20th century. And as it is the case that in the Thomistic corpus no theory of art exists as such, it will be fair enough to claim that Gilson’s Poietics is the least neo-Thomist articulation of his philosophy, since all other parts lean strictly and explicitly on an accepted corpus from the Scholastic tradition. On the other hand, his writing in the Poietics is one of the places where Gilson puts his Thomism to work, testing it against a field of inquiry which was not yet theorized within Scholastic literature. In this sense, his writing in the Poietics should be considered as an integral part of his neo-Scholastic oeuvre. As a closing remark, we can place Gilson’s and Maritain’s conceptions of art together, as  See Ullrich, Wolfgang, “L’art pour l’art. Die Verführungskraft eines ästhetischen Rigorismus,” in: Was war Kunst? Biographien eines Begriffs, Frankfurt am Main 2005, 124– 143. See also Avenassian, Armen/Menninghaus, Winfried/Völker, Jan (ed.), Vita aesthetica – Szenarien ästhetischer Lebendigkeit, Berlin 2009.  I tried such an elaboration in my forthcoming Efal-Lautenschlaeger, Adi, Habitus as Method: Revisiting a Scholastic Theory of Art, Peeters: forthcoming.  One of the sole examples of an endeavor to develop explicitly a “Poietics” is the work of René Passeron, for example relatively recent article “Poïétique et histoire,” in: Espaces Temps 55 – 56 (1994): 98 – 107, but also in his earlier publications. Nevertheless, Passeron only rarely refers to Gilson, and there is no real basis to suppose that he consciously saw himself as continuing Gilson’s legacy.

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two complimentary neo-Scholastic positions on art, furnishing together a satisfying and comprehensive theory of art. Maritain compensates where Gilson is too much of an aesthetician, and Gilson nuances the points where Maritain is too much of an orthodox Thomist.

References Alexandrakis, Aphrodite/Moutafakis, Nicolas J. (ed.), Neoplatonism and Western Aesthetics, Albany 2002. Audouze, Françoise, “Leroi-Gourhan, a Philosopher of Technique and Evolution,” in: Journal of Archaeological Research 10/4 (December 2002): 277 – 306. Avenassian, Armen/Menninghaus, Winfried/Völker, Jan (ed.), Vita aesthetica – Szenarien ästhetischer Lebendigkeit, Berlin 2009. Bars, Henri, “Sur le rôle de Bergson dans l’itinéraire philosophique de Jacques Maritain,” in: Cahiers Jacques Maritain 9 (1984): 5 – 31. Bergson, Henri, L’évolution créatrice, Paris 2009. Bidet, Alexandra, “Le corps, le rythme et l’esthétique sociale chez André Leroi-Gourhan,” in: Technique et Culture 48 – 49 (2007): 15 – 38. Dimler, G., “Creative Intuition in the Aesthetic Theories of Croce and Maritain,” in: New Scholasticism 37 (October, 1963): 472 – 492. Efal, Adi, “Naturalization: Habits, Bodies and their Subjects,” in: Phenomenology and Mind 6 (July 2014), accessible here: http://www.fupress.net/index.php/pam/article/view/19555. Efal-Lautenschlaeger, Adi, Habitus as Method: Revisiting a Scholastic Theory of Art, Peeters: 2017. Fitzgerald, Desmond J., “Gilson and Maritain on the Principles of Sufficient Reason,” in: Douglas A. Olivant (ed.), Jacques Maritain and the Many Ways of Knowing, Washington 2002. Fitzgerald, Desmond J., “Maritain and Gilson on Painting,” in: Alice Ramos (ed.), Beauty, Art and the Police, Washington 2000. Focillon, Henri, La vie des formes, Paris 1996. Foucher, Louis, La philosophie catholique en France au XIXe siècle Avant la renaissance thomiste et dans son rapport avec elle (1800 – 1880), Paris 1955. Gadamer, Hans Georg, Truth and Method, transl. Garrett Harden and John Cumming, New York 1982. Gilson, Etienne, Le Réalisme Méthodique, Paris 1935. Gilson, Etienne, Réalisme Thomiste et Critique de la connaissance, Paris 1939. Gilson, Étienne, “Le Descartes de L. Lévy-Bruhl,” in: Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger 147 (1957): 432 – 451. Gilson, Etienne, Painting and Reality, New York 1957. Gilson, Etienne, “Souvenir de Bergson,” in: Revue de metaphysique et de morale 64/2 (1959): 129 – 140. Gilson, Etienne, Matières et Formes: Poiétiques particulières des arts majeurs, Paris 1964. Gilson, Etienne, Index scolastico cartésien, Paris 1979. Gilson, Etienne, Introduction aux arts du beau, Paris 1998.

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Gilson, Etienne, Peinture et réalité, Paris 1998. Gilson, Etienne, The Arts of the Beautiful, USA: Dalkey Archive Press, 2000. Groys, Boris, Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin: Die gespaltene Kultur in der Sowjetunion, Munich 1988. Gschwandter, Christina M., Degrees of Givenness: On Saturation in Jean-Luc Marion, Bloomington 2014. Gschwandter, Christina M ., “Revealing the invisible: Henry and Marion on Aesthetic Experience,” in: The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 28/3 (2014): 305 – 314. Hanke, John W., “Poetic Intuition,” in: Maritain’s Ontology of the Work of Art, The Hague 1973, 68 – 99. Hildebrandt, Toni, “Bild, Geste und Hand; Leroi-Gourhans paläontologische Bildtheorie,” in: Image (July 2011): 76 – 88. Holsinger, Bruce, The Premodern condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory, Chicago et al. 2005. Hudson, Deal W./Mancini Matthew J. (ed.), Understanding Maritain: Philosopher and Friend, Macon GA 1987. Janicaud, Dominique, Ravaisson et la métaphysique. Une généalogie du spiritualisme français, Paris 1997. Kant, Immanuel, Kritik der Urteilskraft, Hamburg 2004. Leroi-Gourhan, André, “Home Faber, Homo sapiens,” in: Revue de Synthèse 30 (1952): 92 – 93. Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, La mentalité primitive, Paris 1922. Maritain, Jacques, Art et scolastique, Paris 1920. Maritain, Jacques, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, Michigan 1953. Maritain, Creative Intuition, see in the available online text at http://www.catholicculture.org/ culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=9099, accessed 24. 11. 2016. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, L’œil et l’esprit, Paris 1964. De Mille, Charlotte, ‘‘Sudden gleams of (f)light’: ‘Intuition as Method’?” in: Art History 34/2 (2011): 370 – 386. Murphy, Aran Francesca, “Battle Over the Beautiful,” in: Redpath, P., (ed..), A Thomistic Tapestry. Essays in Memory of Etienne Gilson, Atlanta et al. 2002. Murphy, Aran, Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Etienne Gilson, Columbia et al. 2004. Olivant, Douglas A. (ed.), Jacques Maritain and the Many Ways of Knowing, Washington 2002. Passeron, René, “Poïétique et histoire,” in: Espaces Temps 55 – 56 (1994): 98 – 107. Patterson, Bradley W., Redefining Reason: The Story of the Twentieth Century “Primitive” Mentality, USA: XLibris, 2011. Sadler, Gregory B., Reason Fulfilled by Revelation: The 1930s Christian Philosophy Debates in France, Indiana 2011. Sampaio, Laura Fraga, “Intuition et création artistique,” in: L’Intuition Dans la philosophie de Jacques Maritain, Paris 1963. Sampaio, Laura Fraga, L’Intuition Dans La Philosophie de Jacques Maritain, Paris 1993. Seel, Martin, Aktive Passivität. Über den Spielraum des Denkens, Handelns und anderer Künste, Frankfurt am Main 2014. Sigaut, François, Comment Homo devint faber. Comment l’outil fit l’homme, Paris 2013.

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Ullrich, Wolfgang, “L’art pour l’art. Die Verführungskraft eines ästhetischen Rigorismus,” in: Was war Kunst? Biographien eines Begriffs. Frankfurt am Main 2005, 124 – 143. Weil, Simone, La condition ouvrière, Paris 1951

Part III. Reconciling Science and Religion

The University of Leuven (Belgium), around 1900: Periodicals Room in the library of the Higher Institute of Philosophy, then a Neo-Thomistic powerhouse. The periodical was a crucial part of the scientific infrastructure. In a remarkable separate building, seminarians could consult journals from Belgium and abroad. The new research conducted in-house was presented in the Revue néo-scolastique. On this see: Geert Vanpaemel, Marc Derez and Jo Tollebeek, Album van een wetenschappelijke wereld. De Leuvense universiteit omstreeks 1900. Album of a Scientific World. The University of Louvain around 1900. Leuven: Lipsius Leuven, p. 102.

Sigrid Leyssen and Annette Mülberger¹

Psychology from a Neo-Thomist Perspective. The Louvain-Madrid Connection. I Introduction The program of neo-Thomist philosophy, heralded in 1879 by the encyclical Aeterni Patris, was characterised by a call to open up Catholic philosophy to the modern sciences.² Thomas Aquinas, who was praised for enriching philosophy by studying the sciences of his day, was seen as the best guide to put this rapprochement with the sciences on the right track.³ If we want to further our understanding of the relation between neo-Thomist thinking and science, we have to study neo-Thomism’s contributions to science as well as how neo-Thomist philosophy was changed by its new relation to the sciences.⁴ In the same year of the publication of Aeterni Patris, psychology had received a new impulse by the foundation of the first laboratory in experimental psychology by Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig (Germany). This new experimental psychology would obtain a predominant place in the neo-Thomist interaction with the sciences. As a religious movement, the Thomists’ primary aim was to take care of the human soul. Therefore, it was in their interest to establish themselves as experts in that young science which aspired to produce new knowledge on man and which, in the eyes of the public, would soon acquire authority. Not surprisingly, among all the sciences, psychology was one of the most hotly debated among neo-Thomist thinkers.

 This research received support from the Spanish Ministry (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, HAR2014– 58699P) and the Catalan Government (AGAUR, 2017 SGR 1138).  Van Weddingen, Alois, L’encyclique de SS Léon XIII et la restauration de la philosophie chrétienne, Paris et al. 1880, 33.  Mercier, Désiré, Rapport sur les études supérieures de philosophie présenté au Congrès de Malines le 9 septembre 1891 par Mgr D. Mercier, Louvain 1892, 21.  On Neo-Scholasticism and physics, see e. g.: Benk, Andreas, “Neuscholastik und moderne Physik. Ein vergessenes Kapitel im Verhältnis von Theologie und Naturwissenschaften,” in: Wissenschaft und Weisheit, Vol. 64, No. 1 (2001): 129 – 153. On Neo-Scholasticism and astronomy, see e. g. Kragh, Helge/Lambert, Dominique, “The Context of Discovery: Lemaître and the Origin of the Primeval-Atom Universe,” in: Annals of Science, Vol. 64, No. 4 (2007): 445 – 470; Kragh, Helge, Entropic Creation: Religious Contexts of Thermodynamics and Cosmology, Aldershot 2008. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110588255-010

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In studies of the relation between science and religion, both psychology and Catholicism remain underrepresented. In the standard historiography of psychology, neo-Thomist approaches have systematically been ignored.⁵ There are but a few works that have started to give an account of this story: Henry Misiak and Virginia Staudt put the topic on the map in the 1950s,⁶ but only recently has this line of research been pursued intensively by Robert Kugelmann and others.⁷ Misiak and Staudt present Désiré Mercier (1851– 1926; Cardinal from 1907) as “the Catholic Pioneer of Scientific Psychology” and they give him and his student Albert Michotte (1881– 1965) a central place in their account as prestigious representatives of the “Catholic participation in psychology”.⁸ The two historians point out three aspects with regard to the pioneering task undertaken in Louvain at that time: a) the regular course on scientific psychology, organized since 1891, would be for about three decades the only training of this kind offered at a Catholic University; b) the psychological laboratory of the Institute was considered as one of the first and best outside Germany, and c) Armand Thiéry was the first

 See, for example Hergenhahn, B. R., An Introduction to the History of Psychology, Belmont CA 2009; King, D. Brett, A History of Psychology: Ideas and Context, Boston MA 2009; Goodwin, James, A History of Modern Psychology, Hoboken NJ 2008.  Misiak, Henryk/Staudt, Virginia, Catholics in Psychology: A Historical Survey, New York NY 1954.  Kugelmann, Robert, Psychology and Catholicism: Contested Boundaries, Cambridge 2011. More than experimental psychology, it is the relation between psychoanalysis and Catholicism, or on different therapies and religion, that has received scholarly attention in recent years. These studies present a particular history, in many points different from that of experimental psychology: e. g. Colombo, Daria, “Psychoanalysis and the Catholic Church in Italy: The Role of Father Agostino Gemelli, 1925 – 1953,” in: Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39, No. 4 (2003): 333 – 348; Desmazières, Agnès, L’inconscient au paradis: Comment les catholiques ont reçu la psychanalyse, Paris 2011; Kugelmann, Robert, “Imprimi Potest: Roman Catholic Censoring of Psychology and Psychoanalysis in the early 20th Century,” in: History of the Human Sciences, Vol. 27, No. 5 (2014): 74– 90; Guillemain, Hervé, Diriger les consciences, guérir les âmes: une histoire comparée des pratiques thérapeutiques et religieuses (1830 – 1939), Paris 2006. Also intersecting with our story are the studies that more particularly deal with psychology, Catholicism and totalitarian regimes, e. g.: Lafuente, Enrique/Loredo, José Carlos/Ferrándiz, Alejandra, “Catholicism and Psychology in Postwar Spain: The Contribution of Manuel Úbeda-Purkiss (1913 – 1999),” in: Mülberger, Annette/Gómez-Zúñiga, Benigna (ed.), Recent Contributions to the History of the Human Sciences, München 2005, 35 – 48; Foschi, Renato/Giannone, Anna/Giuliani, Alessia, “Italian Psychology under Protection: Agostino Gemelli between Catholicism and Fascism,” in: History of Psychology, Vol. 16, No. 2, (2013): 130 – 144; or the account on Gemelli under Mussolini in: Desmazières, L’inconscient au paradis.  Misiak/Staudt, Catholics in Psychology, xiii.

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Catholic priest in Europe who dedicated himself to the teaching and experimental research in scientific psychology.⁹ Moreover, Misiak and Staudt show how the Louvain philosophy institute exerted a broad influence as an intellectual centre, attracting numerous international students and visitors by the comprehensive and thorough training on offer. Nevertheless, when listing the “large army”¹⁰ of collaborators, none of their Spanish admirers and co-workers are mentioned. This omission is rather surprising since both Mercier and Michotte cultivated close contacts with Spanish scholars: among Mercier’s and Michotte’s first students were Spanish priests, and Michotte’s appreciation of a young Spanish scholar, Mariano Yela Utrillo (1821– 1994), went as far as proposing him to become his successor and inviting him for the prestigious Francqui chair in Louvain in 1962.¹¹ In this chapter, we take a closer look at the interactions between Louvain and Madrid psychologists during the first two thirds of the 20th century.¹² Studying these exchanges allows us to show how Mercier’s Neo-Scholastic model of practicing science, and scientific psychology in particular, was transmitted and adapted by others at different places and times. It permits a dynamic and comparative perspective on how, in these two countries with strong Catholic traditions, a neo-Thomist framework was employed to enable and shape a new scientific psychology. Before we proceed, a short comment on the expressions “Neo-Scholasticism” and “neo-Thomism” is in order. Following Schmidinger (1988¹³), the first concept was introduced by the theologians Jacob Frohschammer (1821– 1893) and Alois Schmid (1825 – 1910) in 1862 as a political keyword, mostly propounded by Jesuits who saw themselves as the guardians of orthodoxy. The second concept (neo-

 Ibid., p. 41, 57.  Ibid., p. 108 – 109.  Yela, Mariano, “La forja de una vocación,” in: Psicothema, Vol. 8 (Supl.) (1996): 49.  We will not deal in detail with all instances of the scientific exchange between psychologists in Belgium and Spain. The topic has been addressed more broadly already by Carpintero, Helio, “Bélgica y la psicología española,” Revista de Historia de la Psicología, Vol. 35, No. 2 (2014): 7– 36. Here we will concentrate on the main figures related to the psychology practiced in Louvain and their Spanish interlocutors located in and around Madrid. In this exchange more figures on both sides played a role, such as Federic Dalmau Gratacós (1874– 1926) and the phenomenologist Xavier Zubiri (1898 – 1983), or Michotte’s successor in Louvain Joseph Nuttin (1909 – 1988).  Schmidinger, Heinrich M., “’Escolástica’ y ’neoescolástica’: historia de dos conceptos,” in: Coreth, Emerich/Neidl, Walter M./Pfligersdorfer, Georg (ed.), Christliche Philosophie im katholischen Denken des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Vol. 2), Graz 1988 (we have used the Spanish translation of 1994, Madrid, 23 – 50).

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Thomism) appeared later in 1879 in discussions between the group of disciples of Antonio Rosmini-Serbati (1797– 1855) and the editors of the journal “La Civiltà Cattolica” (the Jesuits M. Liberatore and G.M. Cornoldi). The authors who are discussed in our paper use the terms “Neo-Scholasticism” and “neo-Thomism” interchangeably. Mercier used both terms: for example, at the founding of the journal of the Louvain Institute in 1894, Mercier had envisaged the name Revue Thomiste, but this name had just been taken by French Dominicans for their journal.¹⁴ The choice was made for Revue néo-scolastique: a lucky choice, as, when historical investigations proceeded and the variety of scholastic scholarship became obvious, it became clear that scholasticism could not be reduced to Thomism. In the early twentieth century, the Louvain school would come to identify with the “Neo-Scholastic” label. However, for a long time and in different places, both terms continued to be used interchangeably.¹⁵ The Spanish psychologist Arnáiz explicitly equated both expressions as referring to the same kind of approach,¹⁶ and Zaragüeta also used them indistinctively. For the purposes of this paper, we will use as much as possible the terms the historical actors have used themselves in their various circumstances. Our argument will proceed in three main steps. First, we study how Mercier’s model for psychology was translated and promoted in Spain by Marcelino Arnáiz. Second, we show to what extent it was followed and modified in Louvain by Mercier’s student Albert Michotte. Third, we look at how the program was developed later, when figuring once again as a point of reference in Madrid in the decades after the Civil War (1936 – 1939).

II Bringing Experimental Psychology to Louvain In 1891, at the Scientific Catholic Congress in Paris, Father Maisonneuve declared that scientific psychology was an enemy of Christian philosophy.¹⁷ This declara de Raeymaeker, Louis, Le Cardinal Mercier et l’Institut supérieur de philosophie de Louvain, Louvain 1952, 99.  Compare: Mercier, Désiré-Joseph, Les origines de la psychologie contemporaine, Louvain et al. 1897, Chapter 8 “Le néo-thomisme”; or Strasser, Stephan/Michotte, Albert/Marc André, “Désiré Mercier et le problème de la psychologie néothomiste. Échange de vues,” in: Revue Philosophique de Louvain, Vol. 49, No. 24 (1951); with Mercier, Désiré-Joseph, “La philosophie néo-scolastique,” in: Revue néo-scolastique, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1894): 5 – 18.  Arnáiz, Marcelino, Diccionario manual de filosofía, Madrid 1927.  Misiak/Staudt, Catholics in Psychology; see also Kugelmann, Robert, “Contradictions between Catholicism and Psychology in the United States,” in: Mülberger/Gómez-Zúñiga (ed.), Recent Contributions to the History of the Human Sciences, München 2005, 13 – 33.

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tion expressed a general mistrust and antagonism felt by many members of the Catholic Church at that time. Besides such tensions and academic rivalries, bridges were also built. One of these initiatives stemmed from Louvain, where Désiré Mercier strongly allied Catholicism to psychological science. In 1889 he founded the Institut supérieur de philosophie, also called Ecole St.-Thomas d’Aquin, with the personal support of Pope Leo XIII. It was conceived of as an institute of advanced study, devoted to bringing Aristotelian, Scholastic philosophy in dialogue with contemporary philosophy and the modern sciences. One of its fundamental areas of activity was teaching and research in psychology, a field in which it would soon gain an international reputation. Mercier was well informed about the recent advances in this science because of his broad knowledge of the philosophical and scientific literature. He had also visited, undercover in secular clothing, Jean-Martin Charcot’s clinic and courses in Paris in 1882.¹⁸ His textbook Psychologie (1892) showed an elaborative attempt to reconcile his Aristotelian and neo-Thomist perspective with the newest scientific findings.¹⁹ His Les origines de la psychologie contemporaine (1897) was one of his most appreciated works in which he studied and thoroughly criticized the dominant views and presented his neo-Thomist approach.²⁰ Mercier not only urged Catholics to study closely the results of psychological science, he also emphasized the importance of doing science.²¹ The best evidence that this was more than a vain call was the fact that, from the very start, a psychological laboratory was included in the design of the institute (1891), and a course in experimental psychology was organized. Mercier sent one of his first students, the Canon Armand Thiéry (1868 – 1955) to Wundt’s laboratory in Leipzig to specialize in the new experimental science. Upon his return in 1894, Thiéry would be put in charge of the laboratory and was assigned the

 de Raeymaeker, Le Cardinal Mercier, 55.  Mercier, Désiré-Joseph, Cours de philosophie. La psychologie, Ed. 5, 3 Vols., Louvain 1899 [1st printed edition 1892].  Mercier, Les origines, especially Chapter 8, “Le néo-thomisme”. On Mercier’s psychology, see e. g. his successor Léon Noël’s “Le Psychologue et le logicien,” in : Revue néo-scolastique de philosophie Vol. 28, No. 10 (1926): 125 – 152.  Mercier would however reject the label of a Catholic or Christian philosophy, or a Catholic science. There are Catholic scientists and philosophers, but there is no Catholic science, nor a Catholic philosophy. For a short overview, from the perspective of a representative of the Louvain school, of the extensive debates on whether there is something like a Christian philosophy, see Van Steenberghen, Fernand, “Philosophie et Christianisme. Épilogue d’un débat ancien,” in: Revue philosophique de Louvain, Vol. 86, No. 70 (1988): 180 – 191.

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teaching of psycho-physiology courses.²² Joining the laboratory in 1905, Albert Michotte would become for a long time the main representative of the psychology practiced in Louvain, even after his retirement in 1952.

III The Arrival of Mercier’s Neo-Thomist Psychology in Spain In Louvain publications, Spain was often praised for keeping Scholastic thinking alive through epochs when it fell into decay everywhere else.²³ Amidst the social changes connected to industrialization and to the impact of liberal, socialist and anarchist movements, the traditional religiosity of the Spanish population had diminished. Nevertheless, the political situation of the “Restoration period” in Spain (1874– 1931), characterized by institutional stability and a politically oligarchic and centralist government, proved to be fertile soil for a general revitalization of Catholicism. Within the monarchic and Catholic state, religious life became more intense, with new orders and congregations arriving and others strengthening their presence.²⁴ A revival of Thomism took place, influenced by the works of Francisco Marín-Sola (1873 – 1932), Manual Barbado Viejo (1844 – 1945), Luis Alonso Getino (1877– 1946), and Santiago Ramírez (1891– 1967).²⁵ However, this movement was not without internal frictions, and people disagreed about how such a revival should be shaped. Traditionalist Thomists such as Juan Manuel Orti i Lara (1826 – 1904), for example, censured all efforts of modernization. The coinage of the term “Mercierists” in Spain shows, moreover, how Mercier’s neo-Thomist program met a strong reception there; it enthused some, but was also rejected by many as too progressive.²⁶

 Awaiting Thiéry’s return from Germany, Mercier asked the Ghent professor Jan Frans Heymans, a former assistant of Emil Du Bois-Reymond, to start teaching the course Psychologie expérimentale in 1891– 1892 (de Raeymaeker, Le Cardinal Mercier, 74). On the beginnings of the Louvain psychological laboratory, see also Brock, Marleen (ed.), Verlengstukken van het Bewustzijn. Psychologische Onderzoeksapparatuur uit de Collectie Michotte, Leuven 2010. On Thiéry: Smeyers, Maurits, Armand Thiéry: Apologie voor een Geniaal Zonderling, Leuven 1992.  E. g. de Raeymaeker, Le Cardinal Mercier, 39.  For more information see Callahan, William J., La iglesia católica en España (1875 – 2002), Barcelona 2003.  Bernal, Jesús/Delgado, Mariano, “El mundo español y portugués,” in Coreth et al. (ed.), Christliche Philosophie, 704– 709.  Latinus, J. “Une excursión philosophique en Espagne,” in: Revue néo-scolastique, Vol. 8, No. 30 (1901): 182– 195.

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Mercier read Jaime Balmes’ Filosofia fundamental before he started teaching, and he referred to this book as an important inspiration for his work.²⁷ By the turn of the 20th century, it became clear that the connection between Louvain and Madrid was also firmly established on a personal level. One of the first Spanish clerics who established a friendship with Mercier was the Augustinian Monk Marcelino Arnáiz (1867– 1930). During an early period of his career he was interested in psychology and attended lectures at Louvain University. In 1904 (proposed by Mercier) he became a member of the Société philosophique de Louvain, ²⁸ a society founded to maintain contact between Mercier’s alumni. Letters show that Arnáiz was not alone but shared his admiration for Mercier with other colleagues.²⁹ Together with the priests Miguel Asín Palacios (1871– 1944) and Alberto Gómez Izquierdo (1870 – 1930) he introduced and disseminated neo-Thomist philosophy in Spain. In this collaborative effort, Arnáiz was clearly the visible leader. In 1901 his translation of Mercier’s book on “The origins of contemporary psychology” appeared. In the same year, his widely read article presenting the new Louvain Philosophical Institute was published.

IV Against the Enemy: Arnáiz’s Call for a Catholic “Reconquista” Arnáiz’s article on the Louvain Institute of 1901 is the first report in Spain on the institutional effort made in Belgium.³⁰ In this booklet, Arnáiz refers to a speech given by Mercier in 1891 in which the latter presented his Institute to win the support of the Belgian church authorities.³¹ The long quotations exemplify how Arnáiz echoed and used Mercier’s arguments to promote a neo-Thomist program in his country. The Spanish monk defined himself as disciple of Mercier. He considered Mercier’s program as a way for Spanish Thomism to regain its status and dominance of earlier times. He frames it as going back to the Spanish roots or traditions. He thought that the Louvain model was especially well adapted to this  See Van Riet, Georges, “La critériologie de Mgr Mercier,” in: Revue Philosophique de Louvain, Vol. 44, No. 1 (1946): 7– 9.  See Carpintero, “Bélgica y la psicología española”.  Marín Niño, Manuela/de la Puente González Cristina, Los Epistolarios de Julián Ribera Tarragó y Miguel Asín Palacios, Madrid 2009.  Arnáiz, Marcelino, El Instituto Superior de Filosofia de la Universidad de Lovaina, Madrid 1901.  Mercier, Rapport sur les études supérieures de philosophie présenté au Congrès de Malines.

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aim, because he saw a parallel between Belgian and Spanish institutions. In Spain as well as in Belgium, Krausism and positivism had become strongly established. Krausist idealism was a kind of rationalism based on the thinking of the post-Kantian German philosopher Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781– 1832). Julián Sanz del Río became one of his most fervent followers who spread this panentheistic philosophy in Spain in the mid-19th century as a way to defend academic tolerance and liberalism.³² In the last decades of the century positivism was also popularized and merged with the former approach. Within this Krausist-positivist tradition, the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, founded as a confession-free school, an alternative to Catholic education, became the main promoter of psychology. The group of psycho-pedagogues led by Francisco Giner de los Ríos (1839 – 1915) translated and edited foreign works of authors such as Théodule Ribot, Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill.³³ In his book on psychological phenomena, Arnáiz³⁴ attacked Krausism directly, calling it “philosophical exotism”, “enveloped in mist and expressed in an unintelligible language.”³⁵ He observed how Mercier’s neo-Thomist movement had successfully taken roots in a context that was, similarly to the Spanish one, dominated by Krausist–positivist traditions.³⁶ Therefore, he thought that the same ‘remedy’ which had been successful in Belgium could also work in Spain.

 For more information, see Stoetzer, O. Carlos, Karl Christian Friedrich Krause and His Influence in the Hispanic World, Köln 1998; Capellán de Miguel, Gonzalo, La España armónica: el proyecto del krausismo español para una sociedad en conflicto, Madrid 2006; and Álvarez Lázaro, Pedro F./Vázquez-Romero, José Manuel, Krause, Giner y la Institución Libre de Enseñanza: nuevos estudios, Madrid 2005.  Quintana, José/Rosa, Alberto/Blanco, Florentino (ed.), La Incorporación de la psicología científica a la cultura española: siete décadas de traducciones (1868 – 1936), Madrid 1997; Lafuente Niño, Enrique, “Sobre los orígenes de la psicología científica en España: El papel del movimiento Krausista,” in: Estudios de Psicología, Vol. 1 (1980): 139 – 147.  Arnáiz, Marcelino, Los fenómenos psicológicos (cuestiones de psicología contemporánea), Madrid 1903.  Arnáiz, Los fenómenos psicológicos, 10 – 11 [“exotismo filosófico, envuelto en nebulosidades y expresado en jerga ininteligible”]  At the Free University in Brussels, founded in 1834 and with an explicit liberal and freemasonry orientation, Krausism got a strong hold, much to the concern of Catholic parties who attacked it forcefully. More on this and on the spread of positivism in Belgium, see Wils, Kaat, De omweg van de wetenschap: het positivism en de Belgische en Nederlandsche intellectuelle cultuur, 1845 – 1914, Amsterdam 2005. Pope Leo XIII had motivated his choice for founding the neo-Thomist philosophy institute in Belgium by referring to this liberalism gone astray in Belgium at the time: SS. Léon XIII, “Brefs de S.S. Léon XIII relatifs à la fondation d’un Institut supérieur de philosophie à l’Université Catholique de Louvain,” Revue néo-scolastique, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1894): 77.

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In general, Arnáiz’s rhetoric in presenting the Louvain initiative is strikingly different from Mercier’s. His deep dissatisfaction with the current situation probably induced him to choose a more belligerent tone. He evoked danger when using terms like “invasion”, “slow infiltration”, “battle field” and “triumph” of the “enemy”. He warned his fellows that they should not “(…) sleep in calm possession of the truth, while the enemy invades the field with growing strength, conquering the minds.”³⁷ Using such rhetoric gives the impression that he was calling Christians to start a new “reconquista” in Spain. His text invites his fellow Catholics “to imitate the expansive and propagandistic spirit [of the enemies], to first get knowledge and then to enter the battle field (…).”³⁸

V Arnáiz’s Criticism and Program for Psychology In his book on “sensitive life”³⁹, Arnáiz appropriates criticism voiced by psychologists such as Alfred Binet (1857– 1911) with regard to experimental psychology not being able to resolve most psychological questions. Because of its reductionist stance, modern psychology is not able to offer any true or new knowledge. Among all its new results, there is not one conclusion that had not been both proved and contradicted through the same experimental procedure. Despite these drawbacks, he agreed with Mercier that there were two important reasons for Catholics to get involved in the new psychology: first because this tendency had gained such prominence that it was not possible to ignore it, and second, because any philosophy of the soul has to take facts as its basis, and for collecting those, the new psychology seemed promising. Such criticism was brought forward during the first decade of the 20th century by the experimentalists themselves (e. g. Binet, Titchener, and others), and would soon give way to declarations of experimental psychology being in a state of crisis.⁴⁰ Probably this philosophical (theoretical) disorientation and feeling of

 Arnáiz, El Instituto Superior, 18. [“No nos parece buen modo de favorecer los intereses de una idea, el) dormirse en la posesión tranquila de su verdad, mientras que el enemigo invade el campo con fuerza creciente é impetuosa, apoderándose de las inteligencias”]  Ibid. [“imitar el espíritu expansivo y propagandista, conocer bien primero y acudir después al terreno de la lucha (…).]  Arnáiz, Marcelino, Elementos de psicologia fundada en la experiencia: La vida sensible, Madrid 1904.  Carson, John, “Has psychology ‘found its true path’? Methods, objectivity, and cries of ‘crisis’ in early twentieth-century French psychology,” in: Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, Vol. 43, (2012): 445 – 454; Sturm, Thomas/Mülberger, Annette, “Crisis discussions in psy-

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crisis among psychologists convinced the neo-Thomists that it was the right moment to step onto the scientific scene, armed with the “strong philosophy” of Thomism. In particular, Wundt’s comment in his famous Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie ⁴¹ reinforced the idea of a certain receptiveness of their approach among experimental (and positivist) psychologists,⁴² as well as of an intrinsic compatibility (or the possibility of a harmonious synthesis) between the empirical facts collected by them and Thomist metaphysics. Wundt’s physiological psychology was thus viewed as a promising step towards an Aristotelian psychology. Neo-Thomists argued that the experimentalists were not advancing because neither idealism nor positivism were able to explain the relation between the physical and the psychical. For them only the Thomist idea of the soul as a substantial unity with potential faculties could explain the inherent connectivity between body and soul. Thus, citing De Veritate of St. Thomas Aquinas (26, art. 10), Arnáiz states: “the principle of substantial unity is deduced from a general biological fact: the solidarity, influence and mutual penetration of consciousness and organism, among the functions of the soul and the body.”⁴³ Arnáiz diagnosed that these modern psychologists had followed the recent trend of the division of labour in society and as such had restricted their work exclusively to the study of consciousness. The Spanish philosopher and psychologist had no problem with this separation of tasks as long as experimental psychology, which constitutes the “empirical or analytic part”, was complemented with what he called a “rational psychology.” The latter was defined as a synthesis that would be achieved by ordering the facts and organizing them into a coherent philosophical system. Together they constitute two essential parts of psychology. For Arnáiz, one of the philosopher’s tasks is to point out underlying metaphysical conceptions in contemporary psychology. This is outlined in his book on the “metaphors of the human sciences,”⁴⁴ where he denounces the “invasion” chology – New historical and philosophical perspectives,” in: Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Vol. 43, (2012): 425 – 433.  Wundt states that the results of his experimental work in psychology neither fit the materialist hypothesis, nor Platonic or Cartesian dualism, but only Aristotelian animism. See Arnáiz, Los fenómenos, 10; Mercier, Les origines, 455.  For Arnáiz these were Wilhelm Wundt, Hugo Münsterberg, Eduard B. Titchener, Hermann Ebbinghaus, Willam James, George T. Ladd, and Theodor Ziehen.  Arnáiz, Los fenómenos, 76. [“el principio de la unidad substancial es deducido de un hecho general biológico: la solidaridad, influencia y compenetración mutuas de la conciencia y el organismo, de las funciones del alma y las del cuerpo”].  Arnáiz, Marcelino, Las metáforas en las ciencias del espíritu, Madrid 1908.

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of physical analogies within the modern psychological, social and moral sciences. As examples he cites Richet’s hypothesis of the physiological reflex, which was used by experimental psychologists as a mechanism to explain all psychological phenomena, and he refers to their talk about psychological atoms or elements. These metaphors show that psychologists adopted the principle of the mechanical synthesis of the universe and applied it to human consciousness. Life is hereby reduced and forced into a physical framework, ruled by concepts such as extension, force, elements, etc. Arnáiz criticized this habit for its philosophical inconsistency, something only a professional philosopher like him could recognize because he knows which domains are commensurable and those which are not. On the whole, Arnáiz was proud of presenting himself as member of the Louvain philosophical circle and shared the neo-Thomist approach that Mercier proposed in his early writings. To some extent, his texts can be interpreted as an effort to emulate Mercier’s strategies, reasoning and arguments. He presents neo-Thomist psychology as a middle way between positivism and idealism, a compromise to which he hoped to win over his compatriots (including non-Catholics), especially those scholars willing to engage with science, but who were at the same time suspicious or unsatisfied with its materialism and scepticism. Most urgently, he wanted to show how one could simultaneously be a Catholic and a scientist. In his view, Spain should follow the example of Louvain, and thereby participate more actively in the scientific undertaking and philosophical debates of the time. Arnáiz’s dream was that in Spain a similar Philosophical Institute and training program would be established. Meanwhile, however, he urged sending students to Louvain to study and bring back home the science practiced there. His defence of neo-Thomist psychology was supported by several colleagues and together they managed to contribute to a long-lasting Catholic psychological tradition in Spain.

VI Zaragüeta and the Institutional Links Between Louvain and Madrid On of the students who visited Louvain was the Basque priest Juan Zaragüeta Bengoechea (1883 – 1974), a younger member of the group of neo-Thomist clerics surrounding Arnáiz. After taking his PhD in Zaragoza, he went to the Institut supérieur de philosophie in Louvain, where he obtained a Licence degree in 1906,

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and became “docteur en philosophie de l’Ecole Saint Thomas” in 1907.⁴⁵ Upon his return to Spain, he obtained a professorship in philosophy at the Academia Universitaria Católica in Madrid,⁴⁶ a new institution which he co-founded in 1908. It was inspired by the model of Mercier’s institute, aimed at promoting training in social and political sciences, courses that had not been offered at Spanish universities until then.⁴⁷ It was a rival organization to the successful Krausist Institución Libre de Enseñanza. The Academia Universitaria Católica offered free studies in law, economy, history, language, and fundamental logic,⁴⁸ but it seems that it did not include specific training in psychology. Mercier wrote a letter published in the Louvain Revue néo-scolastique to support the founding of this institution.⁴⁹ Zaragüeta presented himself as the last of Mercier’s disciples and one of the very first students of Albert Michotte.⁵⁰ Throughout his career he was eager to keep in contact with the Louvain Institute, travelling to Belgium whenever there was an opportunity. He was present at most celebrations: the international homage to Michotte for his 40 years of teaching (1947), the centenary of Mercier’s birth (1951), and the 50-year teaching jubilee of Michotte (1956).⁵¹ Due to the long timespan of his active professional life and the wide array of personal contacts he maintained, Zaragüeta represents the historical link between the two moments of increased interaction that we are focusing on in this chapter: on the one hand, the interactions in the first decade of the 20th century between Mercier

 Annuaire de l’Université Catholique de Louvain, Vol. 72, Louvain 1907: 166; Annuaire de l’Université Catholique de Louvain, Vol. 73, Louvain 1908: 161.  This new post was announced in the Louvain Philosophy home journal Revue néo-scolastique, Vol. 15, No. 60 (1908): 561.  Marín et al., Los epistolarios.  See “Anales de la Academia Universitaria Católica”, Madrid: Tipografia de la Revista de Arch. Bibl. Enrique Reig Casanova was the director and Juan Zaragüeta was secretary. It had an “elementary section” and a “superior section”.  Letter of Mercier, quoted in Noël, Léon, “Mouvement néo-Thomiste,” in: Revue néo-scolastique, Vol. 15, No. 60 (1908): 558 – 559.  Zaragüeta, Juan, Los veinte temas que he cultivado en los cincuenta años de mi labor filosófica, Madrid 1958; and Zaragüeta, Juan, “Discours de M. le Professeur J. Zaragüeta,” in: Jubilé Albert Michotte, Louvain 1947, 12– 13. Zaragüeta was a student in Louvain between 1905 – 1907 (for more information about this philosopher and his work see Bernal, Jesús/Delgado, Mariano, “Juan Zaragüeta Bengoechea,” in: Coreth et al. (ed.), Christliche Philosophie, 714. Michotte started to teach in 1905. After 1905, Mercier gradually diminished his teaching at the Institute. In 1906 he was made archbishop and in 1907 cardinal (see de Raeymaeker, Le Cardinal Mercier, 173).  Misiak/Staut, Catholics in Psychology, 50; Zaragüeta, Juan, “La escuela de Lovaina: su evolución,” in: Revista de Filosofía, Vol. 7, No. 25 (1948): 350 – 389.

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and his collaborators in Belgium, and Arnáiz and his group of philosophers promoting neo-Thomism and psychology in Spain; on the other hand, the relations between Albert Michotte and his Louvain laboratory, and the group of Spanish psychologists led by the psychiatrist and psychologist José Germain Cebrián (1897– 1986), who gained prominence after the Civil War.

VII Michotte’s Experimental Psychology in the Light of Mercier’s Model Mercier, Arnáiz and Zaragüeta were philosophers who promoted experimental psychology,⁵² eager to pave the way (ideologically and institutionally) for Catholics to get involved in psychological science. They influenced a younger generation of psychologists who would receive a thorough training in both Neo-Scholastic philosophy and modern science. Here we will mention two representative figures who were able to foster the interaction among the Belgian and Spanish psychologists: Albert Michotte and his student Marino Yela. Michotte was one of the early lay students of Mercier. Mercier sent him to Wundt’s laboratory in Leipzig – in the footsteps of Thiéry – and he continued his specialization in experimental psychology with Oswald Külpe in Würzburg. Michotte would bring the Louvain psychological laboratory to international recognition among Catholics and non-Catholics alike. How did he interpret the program Mercier had outlined for psychology? Like Mercier, Michotte had great confidence in the experimental method (mainly in the German tradition) and from the start he presented himself as an experimental psychologist. He made for himself a strong scientific reputation through his experimental work and the design of instruments.⁵³ Soon he founded his own school – and then institute – for experimental psychology, independent

 It is important to note that at the turn of the century in France and Spain the term “experimental” was often used to refer to empirical psychology, but not necessarily practiced with the help of instruments and experiments in the laboratory (see Carroy, Jacqueline/Ohayon, Annick/ Plas, Regine, Histoire de la psychologie en France (XIXe-XXe siècles), Paris 2006, 31 ff. For different interpretations of experimental psychology, see Carroy, Jacqueline/Schmidgen, Henning, “Psychologies expérimentales: Leipzig-Paris-Würzburg (1890 – 1910),” in: Mil Neuf Cent. Revue d’histoire intellectuelle, Vol. 24, No. 1 (2006): 171– 204.  Starting in 1905, Michotte presented his instruments at international conferences. Several were taken into production by the prestigious scientific instruments company Zimmerman.

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of the philosophy institute.⁵⁴ Once a stable disciplinary and institutional demarcation was in place, he would continue to practice and promote Mercier’s ideal that valued a close relation between experimental science and philosophy. Nevertheless, after some time, his concrete exchanges as an experimental psychologist with the philosophers of the institute made him reinterpret the nature of this relation considerably. Michotte would no longer adhere to Mercier’s view of the scientist as delivering facts to philosophy and the philosopher as ordering and interpreting these facts. For Michotte, “experimental psychology provides hardly any data that can be used in metaphysics.”⁵⁵ However, his work shows in different ways how he hoped to continue the discussion with the philosophers. Michotte never presented himself as a Neo-Scholastic psychologist. Nevertheless, one can easily notice how the topics he worked on (voluntary choice, activity, causality, reality, etc.) show his ongoing concern with some of the main themes studied by his philosopher colleagues at the institute.⁵⁶ Michotte would investigate what experimental science could say, empirically, about these topics. Where experimental psychology had not yet developed adequate methods to reach these phenomena, he would develop new experimental approaches. In his work on phenomenal causality, Michotte showed, against the dominant empiricist accounts, how impressions of causality are directly given in perception. He was thinking of mechanic causal interactions between objects, such as when you see one billiard ball colliding with another one and causing it to move.⁵⁷ With an instrument characterised by big paper rotating discs he created

 In 1923, Michotte founded the Ecole de Pédagogie et de Psychologie appliqué à l’éducation. There was actually very little applied psychology in the program and the research, but the philosophers objected to using the term psychology to refer to experimental psychology. For them psychology referred first and foremost to a branch of philosophy. In 1944 the school became an institute, offering a full university education: the Institut de psychologie appliqué et de pédagogie/Instituut voor Psychologie en Opvoedkunde.  Strasser, et al. “Désiré Mercier et le problème de la psychologie néothomiste,” 714. In this roundtable discussion (in which also Zaragüeta took part) Michotte gave a clear account of where he saw fruitful interactions between psychology and philosophy.  Cf. Leyssen, Sigrid, Perception in Movement. Moving Images in Albert Michotte’s Experimental Psychology (1881 – 1965), Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Paris 2017 (esp. Ch.3 “A Neo-Scholastic Experiment in Psychology”).  Michotte, Albert, La perception de la causalité. 2nd. ed. Studia Psychologica. Louvain 1954 [first edition 1946]. On Michotte and the further developments of this research project, see Thinès, Georges/Costall, Alan/Butterworth, George (ed.), Michotte’s Experimental Phenomenology of Perception, Hillsdale NJ 1991.

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abstract animated displays of moving and colliding quadrangles in hundredths of variations in order to understand the genesis of this impression of causality. He made clear to his philosopher colleagues that his work was not about the principle of causality (a key notion in Scholastic philosophy)⁵⁸ and that his argument was not epistemological but remained entirely within the phenomenal and empirical domain.⁵⁹ However, with his experiments, he did suggest ways to stretch what counted as the empirical domain beyond its empiricist confines. For Mercier’s Aristotelian, Neo-Scholastic approach, all knowledge was based in observation. However, in his opposition to the positivists, who only accepted one way of knowing (that of sense perception) and who restricted the object of knowledge to the sensory, Mercier argued that observation need not be restricted to observation by the external senses, and that different sorts of knowledge exist that go beyond the sensory.⁶⁰ He showed how scientific concepts were malleable, and how they could have a broader or different reach than some scientists would expect. Michotte would inherit this flexible view on received methods and concepts. When he showed how certain causal impressions are given in sense perception, he was extending considerably the received view on what could be given directly in sense perception, and he was redefining the notion of perception. He also modified the notion of observation, adapting it, he argued, to a science like psychology. As such, he made it plausible that even more abstract notions could have a basis in observation. It is especially in Michotte’s methodological designs that we find the continuing influence of Mercier’s Aristotelian hylemorphic view that posited the intrinsic unity of man, and we can see how this view was translated into the experimental sphere. Thiéry had developed what this could mean for a science of psychology in his inaugural lecture in 1895, arguing that a scientific psychology in line with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas had to be a psycho-physiology, in which instrumental measurements were combined with some form of introspection.⁶¹ The directive to consider the unity of the human being, in all his actions, seems to have remained a general guideline for Michotte, and we see him exploring the methodological possibilities of this perspective for the science of psychology (cf. 2.2): when the physiological and psychological were so closely con-

 Michotte, La perception de la causalité, 251.  Idem, v.  Mercier, Désiré-Joseph, Cours de Philosophie. Vol. IV. Critériologie générale ou théorie générale de la certitude, Louvain 1899: 224 ff (§ Critique du positivisme).  See the inaugural lecture of the course Psycho-physiologie at the institute: Thiéry, Armand, “Introduction à la psycho-physiologie,” in: Revue néo-scolastique, Vol. 2, No. 6 (1895): 176 – 187; Mercier, Psychologie, Préface.

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nected, changes in the one could be used experimentally to study changes in the other.⁶² In his early work, adopting the introspective methods of the Würzburg School, Michotte emphasized the need to complement introspection with controlled instrumental measurements.⁶³ Later, in his causality investigations, when introspection techniques had fallen into almost complete disrepute, he developed a new way to work experimentally with the free verbal reports that reflected the introspective states of his experimental subjects. It was this aspect of his method that he would identify as a main characteristic of his experimental phenomenology. ⁶⁴ This name, which he adopted only in 1961,⁶⁵ was also the label under which his work was to become known in Spain through his student Mariano Yela, who worked with him on this project during his stay in Louvain in 1950 – 52.⁶⁶ In general, Michotte was strongly devoted to developing experimental methods that, as he formulated it in a talk he delivered in Spain in 1935, enabled “a more human perspective”⁶⁷ in psychology.

VIII Strong Collaboration in the Post-War Period Between Madrid and Louvain After the Civil War (1936 – 1939), the academic panorama had changed in Spain, with some scientists going into exile, others being sentenced or at least removed

 See e. g. the joint use of introspection reports and different measurement techniques of performed hand movements in Michotte’s “morphology of movement” project in the late 1920s and 30s: Leyssen, Sigrid, “Postkarten aus dem psychologischen Labor. Fotografische Lichtlinien als visuelle Synthesen,” in: David Keller/Steffen Siegel (ed.), Photogeschichte (Special Issue Psychologie und Fotografie), Vol. 36, No. 140 (2016): 25 – 36.  Michotte, Albert, “A propos de la méthode d’introspection dans la psychologie expérimentale,” in: Revue Néo-Scolastique, Vol. 14, No. 56 (1907): 507– 532.  Michotte, Albert, “Théorie de la causalité phénoménale. Nouvelles perspectives – 1961,” in: Causalité, permanence et réalité phénoménales: Études de psychologie expérimentale, Louvain 1962, 9 – 90.  See Leyssen, Sigrid, “La phénoménologie expérimentale d’Albert Michotte : un problème de traduction,” in: Philosophia Scientiæ, Vol. 19, No. 3 (2015): 45 – 71.  Yela, Mariano, “La Forja de una Vocación”, Psicothema, Vol. 8 (Supl.) (1996): 49.  Michotte, Albert, “La psicologia y los psicólogos,” in: Revista de Pedagogía, Vol. 14, No. 168 (1935): 568 – 572. A more extended version of this talk is published in French: Michotte, Albert, “Psychologie et philosophie,” in: Revue néo-scolastique, Vol. 50, No. 39 (1936): 208 – 229. His talk was part of a summer school in Santander, organised by José Germain (1897– 1986) and Emilio Mira (1896 – 1964), see Michotte, “La psicologia y los psicólogos”. In 1927, Michotte had already been invited to give a lecture series in Barcelona.

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from their posts.⁶⁸ While the Krausists and the Institución Libre de Enseñanza had disappeared from public life, the clergy (and among them especially the Jesuits) were in the privileged position of regaining power over education and of strengthening their influence on society. Manuel Barbado Viejo (already mentioned above) was called back from Rome to reform and re-organize philosophical training programs in Spain. As psychology was part of philosophy, and as he entertained a strong personal interest in psychology, one of his primary aims was to found an institute that would increase the importance of psychology. He died before he could realize this plan, but he had recruited a group of psychologists who would continue the project. In 1940 a philosophical institute called “Luis Vives” was founded at the Higher Council of Scientific Research (Consejo Superior de Investigación Científica, CSIC) with Manuel Barbado as director, Juan Zaragüeta as first vice director.⁶⁹ The Franco regime imposed Neo-Scholasticism as the official philosophy, a prescription which renewed the interest in psychology and in officially maintaining contacts with the pioneering Louvain Neo-Scholastic institute. Mercier had died in 1924 and it was now Michotte’s experimental psychology that was the reference point for the Madrid psychologists. They also established and entertained contacts with other Catholic psychologists such as Agostino Gemelli (1878 – 1959).⁷⁰ The group around Zaragüeta and José Germain were recruiting colleagues to organize the institutionalization of psychology in the country. In 1946 their attempts reached fruition with the launching of the journal Revista de Psicología General y Aplicada and in 1948 with the foundation of the Department of Experimental Psychology at the CSIC, which would mark the starting point of the gradual institutionalisation of psychology in Spanish universities.⁷¹ At this point the contact with Louvain played a crucial role once more. Michotte was invited to

 Mülberger, Annette, “Un psicólogo abandona su mundo: el exilio de Emilio Mira Y López,” in: Barona, J.L. (ed.), El Exilio Científico Republicano, Valencia 2010, 157– 172.  For more information on the Institute, the department, and their activities, see Jiménez García, Antonio, “El instituto ‘Luis Vives’ de Filosofía del CSIC,” in: Actas del II Seminario de historia de la Filosofía Española, Salamanca 1982, 23 – 66.  For more on the work of this influential Italian Neo-Scholastic psychologist and founder of the Milan Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore see the bibliography cited in footnote 7.  Later they founded a Spanish Psychological Society (SEP) in 1952 and a Psychological School (Escuela de Psicología y Psicotécnia) linked to Madrid University in 1953, which offered specialized training. To organize official university studies would still take until the 1970s. See Carpintero, Heliodoro, Historia de la psicología en España, Madrid 2004.

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give the inaugural speech of the new department and his article on phenomenal causality opened the first issue of the new journal.⁷² At this moment, when the decisive institutional steps were taken in Madrid, another long article on the Louvain School was published, this time by Zaragüeta, who had just visited Louvain for Michotte’s 1947 jubilee. This publication⁷³ shows how closely the Spaniards were still following the publications of their Belgian colleagues. In contrast to Arnáiz, Zaragüeta not only praised but also dared to comment critically on the direction the Louvain research was taking. One of the important landmarks and recent “scientific products” was Michotte’s book on La perception de la causalité (1946). After pointing out the value of such work, he expressed some doubts with regard to the results, which in his view would need further research to be fully acceptable or verified. Committed to another notion of perception, he was not convinced that these causal relations were indeed perceived, as Michotte argued, and not subjectively projected. Zaragüeta also wanted to make his Spanish readers aware of the change in direction of the institute: “However, when reading at ease all this new production, I have to warn that there is a certain evolution of the philosophical thinking to be noted. There is not only a development, but at times also a correction of the initial directions given by Mercier.”⁷⁴ The Louvain school seems to be more true to the spirit than to the letter of Mercier’s teachings, Zaragüeta continued, using the freedom of movement that Mercier had encouraged. As in earlier times, Louvain remained the place to send students for specialization in psychology. One of the most talented students of the group that visited Michotte was Mariano Yela. He had already studied abroad with Thomas Verner Moore (1877– 1969), who introduced him to factor analysis, with Louis Leon Thurstone (1946 – 1948), and with other pioneers of psychometrics. When Germain asked for Yela’s collaboration for the foundation of the Revista and the department, the latter decided to return to Spain, despite the difficulties his country was facing. Germain, who had studied in Belgium himself, sent Yela to Louvain to work in Michotte’s laboratory between 1950 and 1952. In his autobiographical article, Yela stated that these years were the best of his life. He evoked: “[I]n this quiet atmosphere, in the calm of gothic Leuven, in the secluded garden of Car-

 Michotte, Albert, “La causalidad física, es un dato fenoménico,” in: Revista de Psicologia General y Aplicada, Vol. 1, (1946): 12– 52. This article was a translation of Michotte’s 1941 article and at the same time the first translation of his new research. His (1946) book would become available to the English reader only in 1963.  Zaragüeta, Juan, “La Escuela de Lovaina: Su Evolución,” in: Revista de Filosofía, Vol. 7, No. 25 (1948): 349.  Ibid., 351.

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dinal Mercier and at the foot of the Husserl Archives” he found “an atmosphere of experimental research, open to the anthropological and philosophical perspectives of psychology, where, once, my countrymen Luis Vives, Zaragüeta, and Zubiri had also meditated.”⁷⁵ In his autobiography, Yela remembers the research he had carried out with Michotte, thirty years before, where he had been able to demonstrate the primary role of temporal over spatial conditions in causal impressions.⁷⁶ Michotte, from his side, would continue to mention Yela’s work at the laboratory as an important contribution to his project.⁷⁷ For Yela, it was precisely the combination of experimental rigor and openness to philosophical questions that made Michotte’s work a model to follow. Once back in Madrid, however, Yela would mostly leave fundamental experimental research aside, probably due to a lack of technical support. He would soon become a leading figure in his country in the field of statistical analysis and psychometrics. Like Michotte, Yela did not present his point of view as a Neo-Scholastic one. As we have seen, he lived and worked in a country dominated by the Catholic Church and a restrictive regime, which had made Neo-Scholasticism the official doctrinal guideline for education. Urged or willingly, he was part of the NeoScholastic network.⁷⁸ He presented himself as a student of neo-Thomist clerics such as Zaragüeta and Barbado, but he only referred to Thomas Aquinas’s works in the introduction and conclusion of his books.⁷⁹ Yela and other members of the new department often referred to Michotte.⁸⁰ They invoked his name to warrant orthodoxy and rigour on two levels, seeking to satisfy the criteria of both Catholic administrators and scientific colleagues. They thought that the institutional model of psychology developed in Louvain by Michotte, with an au-

 Yela, “La Forja de Una Vocación,” 43 – 51.  Yela, Mariano, “Esbozo de Autobiografía,” in: Revista de Historia de La Psicología, Vol. 3, No. 4, (1982): 281– 332. The work he did with Michotte was published as: Yela, Mariano, “Phenomenal causation at a distance,” in: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Vol. 4, No. 4 (1952): 139 – 154; and Yela, Mariano, “La nature du ‘rayon d’action’ dans l’impression de causalité mécanique,” in: Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique, Vol. 3 (1954): 330 – 348.  For example in Michotte, “Théorie de La Causalité Phénoménale,” 49.  On scientists and engineers working in Franco Spain, see e. g. Camprubi, Lino, Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime, Cambridge MA 2014.  E. g. in Yela, Mariano, Psicología de las aptitudes: el análisis factorial y las funciones del alma, Madrid 1956.  E. g. Yela introduces Michotte by highlighting both “his research skills” and how “he was animated in his principles by the broad and renovating genius of Cardinal Mercier”, see Michotte, Albert, “Nuevos aspectos de la psicologia de la perception,” in: Revista de Psicologia General y Aplicada, Vol. 7 (1952): 297.

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tonomous department of psychology yet with close ties to the philosophy institute, would also work well in Madrid.

IX Conclusion Our research documents a close, long-lasting, and scientifically fruitful relation between psychologists working in Belgium (Louvain) and Spain (Madrid). We focused on two periods of increased interaction, the first around 1900 and the second after the Civil War. The core of the first network of relations was the contact between Mercier and Arnáiz. This connection included several historical actors on both sides: on the one hand, Arnáiz went to Louvain where he got to know other members of the institute (such as Thiéry), on the other hand, Arnáiz encouraged a group of philosophers in Spain to support this neo-Thomistic strand of psychology. A little later, Michotte would take charge of the Louvain psychological laboratory where he would develop his interpretation of Mercier’s program for experimental psychology. He would be the key contact for a group of psychologists working in Madrid under the leadership of Germain, including Yela, i. e. the second network of interactions that we identified. Our research has singled out Juan Zaragüeta, who defined himself as the last student of Mercier and the first student of Michotte, as a key figure and link between the two periods in both countries. Our study explored some similarities and differences between the ways in which experimental psychology was shaped in neo-Thomist contexts. Arnáiz took Mercier’s institute as a model to follow. He recognized the similarities between the situation of Catholics in both countries who were being challenged by rationalist, Krausist philosophy. He coded Mercier’s message into a more bellicose rhetoric calling for a new Catholic Reconquista. Arnáiz put much effort into implementing neo-Thomism in his country. He was able to exert a lasting influence on other philosophers of his time, and though he never became an experimentalist himself, he strongly promoted experimental psychology. In a similar vein, Zaragüeta would develop his more personal style of neo-Thomist psychology.⁸¹ They both followed Mercier’s program in the sense that they tried to show to their contemporaries that a Catholic philosopher should move with the times and know about recent philosophical trends and scientific research. In Louvain as well as in Madrid, neo-Thomist clergymen such as Mercier, Arnáiz or Zaragüeta, prepared the terrain for the experimental work of lay psychologists

 Zaragüeta, Juan, Curso de Filosofía (Vol. 1 and 2), Madrid 1968.

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such as Michotte in Belgium and Germain and the rest of his group of collaborators, including Yela, in Madrid. The smooth back and forth between neo-Thomist philosophy and science was possible because of the distinction that was emphasized in the neo-Thomist curricula between empirical and rational psychology. While Mercier and Arnáiz appreciated empirical data, they insisted on the need to insert these data into a coherent philosophical system based on the rational foundation of Aristotelian and Thomist metaphysics. The next generation of Catholic psychologists such as Michotte, Germain and later Yela, would to a large extent drop these metaphysical conditions. Michotte explicitly jettisoned ulterior aims of philosophical synthesis, although we saw how some clear traces of a neo-Thomist origin are still present both in the choice of his research objects and in his methods. During the entire first half of the 20th century, Louvain exerted a strong influence on several generations of psychologists in Spain and elsewhere. This was above all due to the special training program of the philosophy institute, where young scholars were introduced to philosophy, psychology and science in general. These teachings were appropriated by Catholic scholars and adapted and applied to their respective professional and cultural settings.

References [n/a], Annuaire de l’Université Catholique de Louvain, Vol. 72, Louvain 1907: 166. [n/a], Annuaire de l’Université Catholique de Louvain, Vol. 73, Louvain 1908: 161. Arnáiz, Marcelino, El Instituto Superior de Filosofia de la Universidad de Lovaina, Madrid 1901. Arnáiz, Marcelino, Los fenómenos psicológicos (cuestiones de psicología contemporánea), Madrid 1903. Arnáiz, Marcelino, Elementos de psicología fundada en la experiencia: La vida sensible, Madrid 1904. Arnáiz, Marcelino, Las metáforas en las ciencias del espíritu, Madrid 1908. Arnáiz, Marcelino, Diccionario manual de filosofía, Madrid 1927. Benk, Andreas, “Neuscholastik und moderne Physik. Ein vergessenes Kapitel im Verhältnis von Theologie und Naturwissenschaften,” in: Wissenschaft und Weisheit, Vol. 64, No. 1 (2001): 129 – 153. Bernal, Jesús & Delgado, Mariano, “El mundo español y portugués,” in: Coreth, Emerich/Neidl, Walter M./Pfligersdorfer, Georg (ed.), Christliche Philosophie im katholischen Denken des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Vol. 2), Graz 1988 (Spanish translation Madrid 1994), 704 – 709. Bernal, Jesús/Delgado, Mariano, “Juan Zaragüeta Bengoechea,” in: Coreth, Emerich/Neidl, Walter M./Pfligersdorfer, Georg (ed.), Christliche Philosophie im katholischen Denken des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Vol. 2), Graz 1988 (Spanish translation Madrid 1994).

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Brock, Marleen (ed.), Verlengstukken van het Bewustzijn. Psychologische Onderzoeksapparatuur uit de Collectie Michotte, Leuven 2010. Callahan, William J., La iglesia católica en España (1875 – 2002), Barcelona 2003. Camprubi, Lino, Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime, Cambridge 2014. Carpintero, Heliodoro, Historia de la psicología en España, Madrid 2004. Carpintero, Heliodoro, “Bélgica y la psicología española,” in: Revista de Historia de la Psicología, Vol. 35, No. 2 (2014): 7 – 36. Carroy, Jacqueline/Ohayon, Annick/Plas, Regine, Histoire de la psychologie en France (XIXe– XXe siècles), Paris 2006. Carroy, Jacqueline/Schmidgen, Henning, “Psychologies Expérimentales : Leipzig-Paris-Würzburg (1890 – 1910)”, in: Mil Neuf Cent. Revue d’histoire intellectuelle, Vol. 24, No. 1 (2006): 171 – 204. Carson, John, “Has psychology “found its true path”? Methods, objectivity, and cries of “crisis” in early twentieth-century French psychology,” in: Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, Vol. 43, (2012): 445 – 454. Colombo, Daria, “Psychoanalysis and the Catholic Church in Italy: The Role of Father Agostino Gemelli, 1925 – 1953,” in: Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39, No. 4 (2003): 333 – 348. Desmazières, Agnès, L’Inconscient au paradis : Comment les catholiques ont reçu la psychanalyse, Paris 2011. Foschi, Renato/Giannone, Anna/Giuliani, Alessia, “Italian psychology under protection: Agostino Gemelli between Catholicism and fascism,” History of Psychology, Vol. 16, No. 2, (2013): 130 – 144. Goodwin, James, A History of modern psychology, Hoboken NJ 2008. García, Antonio Jiménez, “El instituto ‘Luis Vives’ de Filosofía del CSIC,” in: Actas del II Seminario de historia de la Filosofía Española, Salamanca 1982, 23 – 66. Guillemain, Hervé, Diriger les consciences, guérir les âmes : une histoire comparée des pratiques thérapeutiques et religieuses (1830 – 1939), Paris 2006. Hergenhahn, B. R., An Introduction to the History of Psychology, Belmont CA 2009. King, Brett D., A History of Psychology: Ideas and Context, Boston MA 2009. Kragh, Helge/Lambert, Dominique, “The Context of Discovery: Lemaître and the Origin of the Primeval-Atom Universe,” in: Annals of Science, Vol. 64, No. 4 (2007): 445 – 470. Kragh, Helge, Entropic Creation: Religious Contexts of Thermodynamics and Cosmology, Aldershot 2008. Kugelmann, Robert, “Contradictions between Catholicism and Psychology in the United States,” in: Annette Mülberger/Gómez-Zúñiga, Benigna (ed.), Recent Contributions to the History of the Human Sciences, München 2005, 13 – 33. Kugelmann, Robert, Psychology and Catholicism: Contested Boundaries, Cambridge 2011. Kugelmann, Robert, “Imprimi potest: Roman Catholic censoring of psychology and psychoanalysis in the early 20th century,” in: History of the Human Sciences, Vol. 27, No. 5 (2014): 74 – 90. Lafuente, Enrique/Loredo, José Carlos/Ferrándiz, Alejandra, “Catholicism and Psychology in Postwar Spain: The Contribution of Manuel Úbeda-Purkiss (1913 – 1999),” in: Annette Mülberger/Benigna Gómez-Zúñiga (ed.), Recent Contributions to the History of the Human Sciences, München 2005, 35 – 48.

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Latinus, J., “Une excursión philosophique en Espagne,” in: Revue néo-scolastique, Vol. 8, No. 30 (1901): 182 – 195. SS. Léon XIII, “Brefs de S.S. Léon XIII relatifs à la fondation d’un Institut supérieur de philosophie à l’Université Catholique de Louvain,” in: Revue néo-scolastique, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1894): 76 – 84. Leyssen, Sigrid, “La phénoménologie expérimentale d’Albert Michotte : un problème de traduction,” in: Philosophia Scientiæ, Vol. 19, No. 3 (2015): 45 – 71. Leyssen, Sigrid, “Postkarten aus dem psychologischen Labor. Fotografische Lichtlinien als visuelle Synthesen,” in: David Keller/Steffen Siegel (ed.), Photogeschichte (Special Issue Psychologie und Fotografie), Vol. 36, No. 140 (2016): 25 – 36 Leyssen, Sigrid, Perception in Movement. Moving Images in Albert Michotte’s Experimental Psychology (1881 – 1965), unpublished doctoral dissertation, Paris 2017. Mercier, Désiré, Rapport sur les études supérieures de philosophie présenté au Congrès de Malines le 9 Septembre 1891 par Mgr D. Mercier, Louvain 1892. Mercier, Désiré-Joseph, “La philosophie néo-scolastique,” in: Revue néo-scolastique, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1894): 5 – 18. Mercier, Désiré-Joseph, Les origines de la psychologie contemporaine, Louvain et al. 1897. Mercier, Désiré-Joseph, Cours de philosophie. La psychologie, Ed. 5, 3 Vols. Louvain 1899. Mercier, Désiré-Joseph, Cours de Philosophie. Vol. IV. Critériologie générale ou théorie générale de la certitude, Louvain 1899. Misiak, Henryk/Staudt, Virginia, Catholics in Psychology: A Historical Survey, New York NY 1954. Michotte, Albert, “A propos de la méthode d’introspection dans la psychologie expérimentale,” in: Revue néo-scolastique, Vol. 14, No. 56 (1907): 507 – 532. Michotte, Albert, “La psicologia y los psicólogos,” in: Revista de Pedagogía, Vol. 14, No. 168 (1935) 568 – 572. Michotte, Albert, “Psychologie et philosophie,” in: Revue néo-scolastique, Vol. 50, No. 39 (1936): 208 – 229. Michotte, Albert, “La causalidad física, es un dato fenoménico,” in: Revista de Psicologia General y Aplicada, Vol. 1 (1946): 12 – 52. Michotte, Albert, “Nuevos aspectos de la psicologia de la perception,” Revista de Psicologia General y Aplicada, Vol. 7 (1952): 297. Michotte, Albert, La Perception de la causalité, Louvain 1954. Michotte, Albert, “Théorie de la causalité phénoménale. Nouvelles perspectives – 1961,” in: Causalité, permanence et réalité phénoménales: Études de psychologie expérimentale, 9 – 90, Louvain et al. 1962. Michotte, Albert/Thinès, Georges/Costall, Alan/Butterworth, George, Michotte’s Experimental Phenomenology of Perception, Hillsdale NJ 1991. Mülberger, Annette, “Un psicólogo abandona su mundo: el exilio de Emilio Mira Y López,” in: Barona, J.L. (ed.), El Exilio Científico Republicano, Valencia 2010, 157 – 172. Niño, Enrique Lafuente, “Sobre los orígenes de la psicología científica en España: El papel del movimiento Krausista,” in: Estudios de Psicología, Vol. 1 (1980): 139 – 147. Niño, Manuela Marín/de la Puente González, Cristina, Los Epistolarios de Julián Ribera Tarragó y Miguel Asín Palacios, Madrid 2009. Noël, Léon “Mouvement néo-thomiste,” in: Revue néo-scolastique, Vol. 15, No. 60 (1908): 549 – 559.

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Noël, Léon, “Le Psychologue et le logicien,” in: Revue néo-scolastique de philosophie, Vol. 28, No. 10 (1926): 125 – 152. Quintana, José/Rosa, Alberto/Blanco, Florentino (ed.), La Incorporación de la psicología científica a la cultura española: siete décadas de traducciones (1868 – 1936), Madrid 1997. de Raeymaeker, Louis, Le Cardinal Mercier et l’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie de Louvain, Louvain 1952. Schmidinger, Heinrich M., “ʻEscolásticaʼ y ʻneoescolásticaʼ: historia de dos conceptos,” in: Coreth, Emerich/Neidl, Walter M./Pfligersdorfer, Georg (ed.), Christliche Philosophie im katholischen Denken des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Vol. 2), Graz 1988 (Spanish translation Madrid 1994), 23 – 50. Smeyers, Maurits, Armand Thiéry: Apologie voor een geniaal zonderling, Leuven 1992. Stoetzer, O. Carlos, Karl Christian Friedrich Krause and His Influence in the Hispanic World, Köln 1998. Van Steenberghen, Fernand, “Philosophie et Christianisme. Épilogue d’un débat ancien,” in: Revue Philosophique de Louvain, Vol 86, No. 70: 180 – 191. Strasser, Stephan/Michotte, Albert/Marc André, “Désiré Mercier et le problème de la psychologie néothomiste. Échange de vues,” in: Revue Philosophique de Louvain, Vol. 49, No. 24 (1951). Sturm, Thomas/Mülberger, Annette, “Crisis Discussions in Psychology – New Historical and Philosophical Perspectives,” in: Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Vol. 43, (2012): 425 – 433. Thiéry, Armand, “Introduction à la psycho-physiologie,” in: Revue néo-scolastique, Vol. 2, No. 6 (1895): 176 – 187. Van Riet, Georges, “La critériologie de Mgr Mercier” in: Revue Philosophique de Louvain, Vol. 44, No. 1 (1946): 7 – 35. Van Weddingen Alois, L’encyclique de SS Léon XIII et la restauration de la philosophie chrétienne, Paris et al. 1880. Wils, Kaat, De omweg van de wetenschap: het positivism en de Belgische en Nederlandsche intellectuelle cultuur, 1845 – 1914, Amsterdam 2005. Yela, Mariano, “Phenomenal causation at a distance,” in: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Vol. 4, No. 4 (1952): 139 – 154. Yela, Mariano, “La nature du ‘rayon d’action’ dans l’impression de causalité mécanique,” Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique, Vol. 3 (1954): 330 – 348. Yela, Mariano, Psicología de las aptitudes: el análisis factorial y las funciones del alma, Madrid 1956. Yela, Mariano, “Esbozo de Autobiografía,” in: Revista de Historia de La Psicología, Vol. 3, No. 4, (1982): 281 – 332. Yela, Mariano, “La forja de una vocación,” in: Psicothema, Vol. 8 (Supl.) (1996). Zaragüeta, Juan, “Discours de M. Le Professeur J. Zaragüeta,” in: Jubilé Albert Michotte, Louvain 1947. Zaragüeta, Juan, “La escuela de Lovaina: su evolución,” in: Revista de Filosofía, Vol. 7, No. 25 (1948): 350 – 389. Zaragüeta, Juan, Los veinte temas que he cultivado en los cincuenta años de mi labor filosófica, Madrid 1958.

Jaume Navarro

Science contra Science. The Battle for Legitimate Knowledge in the Spanish Catholic Journals in the Early Twentieth Century In 1898 Spain lost the last remnants of an old, agonizing empire: Cuba, Puerto Rico and The Philippines ceased to be Spanish territories and the country fell into a collective depression, a never-ending soul-searching process and a warfare of internal mutual blame. The “disaster of ’98” gave wings to the so-called “regenerationist” movement, which blamed the defeat on the lack of reform in all aspects of Spanish society, and its backwardness in science and technology. As an example, the professor of pharmacy at the University of Madrid, José Rodríguez Carracido, demanded a reform in the education system in the following terms: “someone once said that our defeat was inevitable, because the United States was a country of Physics and Chemistry, and Spain one of Rhetoric and Poetics.”¹ Talking about science in Spain is often problematic. As the above quote exemplifies, scientists and historians, then and now, often work on the basis that Spain was a country almost intrinsically incapable of science. Certainly, as the historian of science Agustí Nieto pointed out some time ago, the “Polémica” about Spanish science—this pessimistic view of Spanish scientific culture— may be partly the un-critical result of a Protestant, anti-Catholic historiography, of British origins.² Be that as it may, however, both the regenerationist movement and the literary and philosophical “generation of ‘98” stressed the need to follow in the steps of the more advanced European countries since they often considered that change was unlikely to come from within the Spanish institutions and culture. If talking about science in Spain is problematic, arguing about science and religion in Spain is twice as difficult. For many actors in the regenerationist movement, the traditionally all-powerful Catholic Church was responsible for Spain’s backwardness, including the lack of scientific research and social and technological innovation. Similar to what was happening throughout Europe,

 Cited by Sanchez-Ron, J.M., (ed.), Ciencia y Sociedad en España, Madrid 1988, 14.  Nieto-Galan, A., “The images of science in modern Spain. Rethinking the “Polémica,” in: K. Gavroglu, (ed.), The Sciences in the European Periphery during the Enlightenment, 73 – 94. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110588255-011

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“science” became a weapon in the fight against clericalism by positivists, socialists, materialists, liberals, and also in the context of the Kulturkampf. It is usually argued that “Contemporary liberal and anticlerical publicists framed the culture wars as a struggle between ‘modernity’ and a reactionary, backward-looking worldview that had no legitimate place in a modern society.” But as historian Christopher Clark argued, “Liberalism, anticlericalism and socialist secularism were all artefacts of political modernity, but so was the New Catholicism, with its networks of voluntary associations, newspapers, mass-produced imagery and mass demonstrations. Like its contemporaries, socialism and nationalism, the New Catholicism was deeply implicated in the epochal sharpening of collective identities that reshaped political cultures across Europe.” Thus, “the fundamental problem that faced all the great ideological formations of late nineteenthcentury Europe was not whether to embrace or reject ‘modernity’ but how best to respond to the challenges it posed.”³ In this chapter I want to focus on the reactions in some Spanish Catholic quarters to the accusations that Catholicism and the Catholic Church were enemies of modernity, of science and progress. I will concentrate on the public reactions in two very influential Jesuit-run periodicals, Razón y Fe and Ibérica, and on the ways these two magazines addressed their defense of Catholicism at the time of the revival of neo-Thomism. To be clear: the interest of this paper is not so much on the influence of neo-Thomism in the development of one particular science or theory, to which other chapters in this volume are devoted, but in the rhetoric about what true science was or had to be under the influence of the neo-Thomist agenda. This chapter intends to contribute to the new scholarship on the history of the configuration of the so-called conflict between science and religion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Following Peter Harrison’s seminal work, I start from the premise that the boundaries between science and religion are the side-product of a long itinerary that led to the professionalization and institutionalization of science in the nineteenth century, as well as the battles between scientific disciplines to gain social, epistemic and political legitimacy.⁴ I also take a non-essentialist stand on what science is or is meant to be, which enables me to regard the conflicts between some self-appointed science

 Clark, Christopher, “The New Catholicism and the European culture wars,” in: Christopher Clark/Wolfram Kaiser (ed.), Culture Wars. Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Cambridge 2003.  Harrison, Peter, The Territories of Science and Religion, Chicago 2015; Harrison, Peter, “‘Science’ and ‘Religion’: Constructing the Boundaries,” in: The Journal of Religion 86, (2006): 81– 106.

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spokespersons and some religious authorities as clashes that transcend a simplistic science-anti-science narrative. In the first section I will review the state of neo-Thomism in Spain in the late nineteenth century. I will pay attention to three of the most influential characters, each exemplifying different ways of addressing the relationship between science and philosophy from neo-Thomist perspectives. Sections two and three will cover the early years of the journals Razón y Fe and Ibérica, the first a generalist cultural periodical, the latter a specifically scientific magazine, both run by the Spanish Jesuits. We shall encounter a complex array of strategies regarding the role of science in the modern world and the importance of neo-Thomist ideas in the understanding of the natural world.

I The Spanish revival of Thomism The revival of Thomism in Spain was triggered by the work and influence of the Dominican Zeferino González y Díaz Tuñón (1831– 1894), priest, bishop and one time cardinal primate of Spain. His major work, a three volume History of Philosophy in 1878, the first of this kind in Spanish, earned him much prestige with Pope Leo XIII. His 1891 two-volume The Bible and Science was a response to the Spanish translation of John W. Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science. Zeferino Gonzalez did not receive a systematic and thorough scientific training in mathematics or natural history and his excursions into the implications of natural science were in the main limited to issues such as the nature of space, the necessity of creation or the contingency of the world. In The Bible and Science, however, he made a defense of what he called the Christian notion of science in comparison with positivist and monist views. Far from rejecting modern science, Zeferino González argued for its limited validity. In his chapter on positivistic science, he stressed its limitations but granted instrumental validity to positivism. Distinguishing between positivism and monism, he agreed with the former view that experience alone cannot lead to direct and full understanding of substances, but opposed the monist stance of rejecting the existence of what cannot be empirically known.⁵ Being the earliest and most influential Spanish Neo-Thomist of the second half of the 19th century, his approach was characteristic of many Catholic philosophers and theologians of his generation: a mixture of respect and defensiveness towards “positive science.” In the long preface to The Bible and Science, he ar-

 González, Zeferino, La Biblia y la Ciencia, Madrid 1981, 187—190.

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gued that “it is beneficial and even indispensable that men of Christian exegetics and theology address their object without losing sight of the discoveries made by science and the legitimate conclusions reached from them.” However, at the same time he urged the representatives of science to act “in good faith and in harmony with the laws of reason and logics” when delving with matters “at the boundary between Catholic theology and natural or physical sciences.”⁶ Based on his Thomist agenda, Zeferino González stressed that modern experimental science was legitimate only when remaining within the limits of its methods and staying away from metaphysical conundrums and illegitimate extrapolations. Later in the book we get a clear sense of the areas where science should remain silent: “problems referring to the origin and ultimate destiny of things, to the first production of matter, to the initial state of movement; to the original constitution of the laws of Nature,” and so on.⁷ Incidentally, the last two examples—the initial state of movement and the origin of the laws of Nature—are modern questions that Thomism did not naturally address, at least not in a first instance. This is because, in the Scholastic worldview, action and causation are intrinsic to natural substances and not external to or temporally ulterior to the existence of inert matter. As is well known, neo-Thomism was often inconsistent with the philosophy of Aquinas in that it was trying to address modern notions of Nature alien to the medieval world.⁸ Others such as the Catalan chemist, pharmacist and, later in life, priest Jaime Arbós i Tor offer a different perspective. Arbós saw himself as the embodiment of the “missing link” in the supposed conflict between science and religion.⁹ Complaining about the anti-clericalism of many naturalists and the ignorance of theologians in scientific matters, he regarded his as the optimal profile: the scientist-priest: Why should there not be among the clergy those who devote their time to the study and improvement of every science that make human knowledge? Would it not be a great testimony to see that scientific progress comes from Clergymen or, at least, that Clergymen are involved in it? Who does not see the respect and admiration bestowed on some clergymen when they are regarded as first-rate scientists? But this, which is only the exception, we would want to be the norm: we would like to see among the Clergy great men of all branch-

 Ibid., 36.  Ibid., 246.  For a history of modern Thomism, its contradictions and its complicated relationship with the spirit of Aquinas and the Second Scholasticism of the 15th and 16th centuries see McCool, Gerald A., From Unity to Pluralism: The Internal Evolution of Thomism, New York 1989.  On Arbos see Bernat, Pasqual, “Jaume Arbós i Tor: Científic i tecnòleg osonenc del segle XIX,” in: Ausa 21, (2003): 51– 74.

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es of knowledge. We cannot think of a better event here on earth than the alliance of theology and the sciences in the person of the priest.¹⁰

More significant for the purpose of this paper is his 1879 Fundamental Treatise in Chemistry and Physics in agreement with St Thomas’ Aquinas Doctrine of Matter and Form. In the introduction to the book, and after praising pope Leo XIII, he argued that even though Aquinas did not speak about “electric telegraphy, electric lighting, electroplating, photography, steam engines, batteries, electromagnetism, electrodynamics, induction currents, multiple proportions, equivalents, gases, metalloids, many metals, immediate principles of animals and plants, alkaloids, ferment, dyes…” his light was more relevant than ever “since his purely rational light, far from being eclipsed by the experimental [light] … proves the inability of simple facts to find by themselves the true cause.”¹¹ This idea permeates the rhetoric of the introduction and of the whole book: yes, “science has increased the number of facts, and enlarged the circle of observations, but … it has remained silent … when it comes to the causes of those facts or the relationships between them.”¹² Moreover, since modern science started from matter and ended up in matter, it could not give any true knowledge but a mere description of material facts. When discussing a hierarchy in the sciences, not surprisingly, he claimed that chemistry was foremost among all natural sciences since it was the one that addressed “the nature or essence of material bodies,” leaving for “other branches in the natural sciences the study of their state, classification, reproduction and life of living beings.”¹³ His ultimate goal with this treatise was to give a top-down justification of the chemical facts from universal principles for which, only as an intermediate step, did he delve into all modern theories in physics and chemistry “before leading the reader into the world of intellectual abstractions, which is required so as to understand the causes of the greatest phenomena in the universe.”¹⁴ Consequently, the book first gave an account of modern theories like atomism, multiple proportions, affinity, thermo-chemistry… then to move to the Thomist principles of matter and form, substance and accidents. In this treatise, atomism was accepted only as a pragmatic, instrumental theory, with little bearing into the nature of things. This was in part due to the, in prin-

 Arbos, Jaume, El clero y la ciencia moderna, Barcelona 1876, 12.  Arbos, Jaume, Ensayo de Física y Química trascendentalmente consideradas con arreglo a la doctrina de Santo Tomás de Aquino, Barcelona 1879, xi – xii.  Ibid., xiii.  Ibid., xxxi.  Ibid., xxxiv.

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ciple, infinite divisibility of bodies, and the fact that only with atomism and thermo-chemistry the very existence of chemistry was jeopardized. He claimed that if all there is in Nature is only atoms and their movements, “goodbye to substantial changes”¹⁵ and, therefore, goodbye to chemistry. The Fundamental Treatise in Chemistry and Physics is an odd piece of work, an uneven mixture of Thomist philosophy, Catholic theology and practical chemistry, but very clear on the supposed hierarchy of true and instrumental sciences: “in order to know the true essence of bodies we should use Metaphysics while Chemistry can only show us their ways of operating; and Physics only that which refers to their ways of being in a place.” In other words, Physics and Chemistry were sciences only insofar as “they are a true light which does not erode the mystery” but give us a “broader picture for sublime contemplation,”¹⁶ the latter being a role which was left to faith-informed metaphysics. In practice, however, in this book Scholasticism also played, the role of discriminating between valid and illegitimate extrapolations from the theories of the modern sciences. For example, in his rejection of atomism as valid only at an instrumental level but fundamentally impossible, or in his praise of the wave theory of light since it proved (sic) that Aquinas was right on the subject, i. e., that light was a quality (a movement) and not a substance (Newtonian corpuscles of light). A third name to bring to the fore is Juan González Arintero (1860 – 1928), possibly one of the most scientifically-informed Spanish priests of his generation. A disciple of Zeferino González, the Dominican González Arintero became a moderate defendant of evolution as compatible with the Catholic faith, against those who “invoke faith against evolution, as if faith and evolution were opposite realities,” thus “paying lip service to the cause of faith.” Arintero had in his earlier days in the Seminary, and under the influence of Zeferino Gonzalez, opposed evolution since he could see contradictions with the philosophy of Aquinas. But after serious study, he moved closer to evolution and became one of the moderate supporters of Darwin in Spain.¹⁷ Arintero distinguished between biological and zoological species and metaphysical species (species and class, in modern terminology): the latter would certainly be immutable, while the former could be changeable as part of their intrinsic organicity. He even claimed that Aquinas could be regarded as the father of teleological evolutionism.¹⁸

 Ibid., 161.  Ibid., 218.  See Glick, Thomas, Darwin en España, Barcelona 1982, 43.  Arintero, Juan Gonzalez, La Evolución y la Filosofía Cristiana, Madrid 1898, 95: “Not only is there no opposition between transformism and Thomist doctrines, but also should the Angel of the Schools be regarded as one of the fathers of theological evolutionism.”

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In a clear criticism of the conservative attitude of the over-zealous in protecting faith and “sound philosophy,” Arintero countered those who preferred to make “a clean break” from modern theories since this might lead them to “compromise or refute those truths we most love”: We see advantages in cutting … in the right place, that is, between truth and error, rejecting what any daring or dangerous system contains that is wrong, but very carefully so as to concede whatever is true. If we reject experimental science in order to defend metaphysics, we shall find those who will equally use the former to reject the latter with no reason. Whoever wants to rightly decide any question in which several sciences are involved, should give each science what is due, and not to reject any of them without serious reason.¹⁹

In other words, Arintero was pointing to the fact that neo-Thomism was not, of itself, a natural science and that notions such as substance and accident should not be taken as essential in the development of practical physics, chemistry or biology. Arintero was not alone, but certainly not among the majority of Spanish Catholic intellectuals who largely adopted a reactionary interpretation of Leo XIII’s promotion of Thomism. Incidentally, according to Gerald A. McCool, Leo XIII spoke about Scholastic wisdom rather than doctrine, corpus or system in his 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris so as to promote the engagement of the old philosophy with the modern world rather than as a reactionary entrenchment.²⁰ This agenda was largely misunderstood either by turning Thomism into an alternative to modern science, or by trying, like Arbós or Arintero, to find excessive harmony between modern science and Thomist philosophy. I have chosen these three characters from the last third of the 19th century as they represent three possible stances on the legitimacy of modern science from a neo-Thomist point of view. Zeferino Gonzalez is typical of an early generation of neo-Thomists who defended the old philosophy in the context mainly of theology and metaphysics and only indirectly as a means of arresting the globalizing pretensions of positivism and materialism. From his point of view, modern science was only valid instrumentally and, therefore, was not “true” science. In the case of Arbos we encounter a practicing chemist struggling to make his positive chemistry and his newly acquired Thomism compatible. And he did so by creating a two-tier system: practical chemistry instrumental for work in the laboratory and fundamental or philosophical chemistry as a mechanism for going deep into the nature of substances. Finally, Gonzalez Arintero epitomizes the

 Ibid, footnote 95.  McCool, Gerald A., “Is Thomas’s way of philosophizing still viable today?” in: D. W. Hudson/ D. W. Moran, (ed.), The Future of Thomism, South Bend 1992.

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openness of a later generation of neo-Thomists who tried to make their philosophy compatible with evolution. This latter case is important because he condemned the abuses against modern science from an excessively dogmatic and inflexible notion of substance, a key concept in Scholastic philosophy.

II Razón y Fe. A Spanish Jesuit periodical First issued in September 1901, Razón y Fe was a major attempt by the Company of Jesus to influence the Spanish public opinion after a troublesome history in the 19th century. Three times the Company was expelled from the country (in 1820, 1835 and 1868), which translated into a state of short-lived projects and uneven, if not inadequate, formation of its members. After the restoration of the monarchy in 1874, the Catholic Church at large and the Jesuits in particular regained much of their traditional power, establishing new schools and two new universities: Comillas and Deusto, both in the north of Spain. As for Razón y Fe, this was a project that had been in the minds of some Jesuits since the early 1880s, in an attempt to emulate the successful, ultramontane Italian journal, La Civiltà Cattolica. Razón y Fe finally materialized after the provincial of the order in Castilia became superior general of the order and promoted the activities of the Jesuits both among intellectuals and working classes in Spain, as well as encouraging neutrality in political questions on which Catholics were divided.²¹ The first issue contains a programmatic editorial with a rather belligerent tone, common at the time, against what they called the misuse of writing: “In other times the arts and literature turned the fierce soldier into a discrete gentleman; nowadays, they turn the kind gentleman into an enraged revolutionary. Then science helped to teach the ignorant, now it misleads the intelligent.”²² The editorial went on to say that one of the main goals of the periodical was to combat the “clamoring from false science, delusive philosophy and corrupting literature” against the Catholic faith, and even against natural truths.²³ Although the journal was meant to have a broad coverage, with theological, social, legal and ethical issues as the main target, the first article after the edi-

 Due to the many expulsions of the Jesuits from Spain throughout the century, Razón y Fe had, at least in prinicple, a less partisan agenda than La Civiltà Cattolica in Italy. See de Diego, Rafael Maria Sanz, “Una aportación regeneracionista de los jesuitas españoles: La revista Razón y Fe (1901),” in: Anuario Filosófico, 31 (1998): 147– 177.  Razón y Fe, “A los lectores,” vol. 1 (1901): 1.  Ibid., 2– 3, my emphasis.

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torial in the first issue was devoted to “Free Science and Revelation.” In the usual pattern that was common at the time, the article started praising the “vast intellectual work amassed by the scientific activity of the last one-hundred years” only to continue with a complaint about the misuse of scientific production to combat Revelation. Later in the article reference was made to the key element in elucidating what “good science” should be; i. e., the role of God and Revelation. After criticizing the Enlightenment’s “philosophism” and 19th-century “rationalism” the article complained that “the elimination of God from the field of human science is the fundamental axiom of modern philosophy, separating itself radically from the Christian and Scholastic dualism.”²⁴ It should be noted that due to the lack of a strong scientific tradition in Spain and the formation in the Humanities of early-20th-century Spanish apologists, the main attack on the Catholic faith and Revelation was not perceived to come from the natural sciences or technology, but from the philosophy of Hegel and all idealisms, as well as from Biblical criticism. The author of this article, the Jesuit scholar in Scripture Lino Murillo, claimed that the anti-religious movement in Spain still drew from the ideas of the French Revolution, having had little contact with later German debates. Moreover, “[t]he main consequence of the irreligious movements in Spain has been to form, not men of science, but practical sceptics, … and political revolutionaries.”²⁵ This attitude is significant in the context of Spanish early-twentieth-century “regenerationism” and the rhetoric of science. Implicit in this statement we perceive the underlying war between tradition and revolution in which “science” was a weapon used on both sides of the fence. If liberals, socialists and anti-clericals were blaming the Church for the Spanish scientific and technological backwardness, many Catholic intellectuals thought of themselves as sciencepromoters, in seeming harmony with the documents of Pius IX and Leo XIII. The battle was not between pro- and anti-science but about what science was and who was doing the most to develop it. In other words, the battle was not strictly scientific but rhetorical, with all sides presenting themselves as “scientific.”²⁶ A few years later, in 1904, the magazine claimed that Razón y Fe, as much as the Augustinian Ciudad de Dios, was helping the prestige and development of Spanish science by frequently publishing “original work,” “while other not very recommendable newspapers, claim to fill their pages with hints of Natural  Murillo, Lino, “La ciencia libre y la Revelación,” in: Razón y Fe, vol 1 (1901): 8 – 9.  Ibid., 22.  A famous exception to this was Miguel de Unamuno, the most influential philosopher in the early 20th century, who famously rejected a turn towards Europe and science with his famous sentence: “let them invent!”

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History, ordinarily the result of cut-and-paste or biased selection.”²⁷ The same mixture of patriotism and Catholic self-aggrandizement appears in a report on the meeting of the Spanish Association for the Advancement of Science of 1910 in which the successes of members of the Company of Jesus and other religious orders are overstated in the face of “impious and bad science.”²⁸ The latter article is however interesting due to a reply to it in the following issue from another Jesuit, Ricard Cirera, a practicing seismologist. Criticizing the bias and hostility of the previous article, Cirera argued that good science was independent from who did it and where. Both articles, by Jesuits in the same journal, show that Razón y Fe did not have a monolithic point of view as far as the role of clergymen in science is concerned, or in relation to the supposed belligerence of secular science against the Church. Not surprisingly, Ricard Cirera was a practicing scientist with many international contacts and an actor in a network of scientists beyond the Company of Jesus. He would later become director of Ibérica, a journal specifically designed to popularize science also run by Jesuits. A young Jesuit and physicist, Jaime María del Barrio, wrote a series of 5 articles on the new science of radioactivity in 1909 and used the conundrums brought forward by this unexpected new phenomenon to counteract the arrogance and certainty of scientism: Never had science found itself with such rebellious phenomena as radioactivity; it looks as if, on purpose, God revealed it so as to give a lesson to wise men when, arrogant with their triumphs over matter and energy, stated that human language should stop using the word impossible. Radioactivity laughs at such boasting by wise men…²⁹

Looking at the highly documented and contemporary content of these articles, the short statement just quoted can be understood not as a manifesto against scientism only, but mainly as a way to stress the provisional nature of modern science as opposed to the absolute truth of traditional (i. e., Scholastic) metaphysics. Following the tradition initiated by Zeferino González, del Barrio was keen to praise modern science as a limited, provisional and partly instrumental way to understand the natural world. From that point of view, the early days of what turned to be a “revolution in science” was only playing in the Jesuits’ camp.

 “Cronica Científica,” Razón y Fe, vol. 10 (1904): 544.  Navás, Longinos, “El segundo Congreso de la Asociación Española para el Progreso de las Ciencias celebrado en Valencia los días 15 – 20 de Mayo de 1910,” in: Razón y Fe, vol. 27 (1910): 364– 368.  del Barrio, Jaime Maria, “Doce años de Radioactividad. Parte 4,” in: Razón y Fe, vol. 23, (1909): 355.

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I do not mean to say here that the so-called quantum revolution or the discovery of new radiations or particles acted as a proof for neo-Thomism. Rather a growing instrumentalism in the philosophy of science was convenient to the apologetic task of some neo-scholastics insofar as it could protect metaphysics from a supposed absolute truth of the sciences. Not a neo-Thomist himself, Pierre Duhem also famously developed an instrumentalist philosophy of science that preserved metaphysics from the extrapolations from the sciences, only at the expense of rejecting truth in the latter. Certainly, a true neo-Thomist would not dismiss lightly modern science as a purely instrumental endeavor, but argue for a hierarchy of the sciences on top of which metaphysics would reign supreme. Materialistic explanations of life were one of the usual targets in Razón y Fe. Juan José Urráburu, former professor in philosophy at the Gregorian University, contributed to the first issues of the journal before his death in 1904. In an article “The vital principle and materialism in the face of science and philosophy” the author criticized organicism because he thought it was just a new form of materialism that denied not only the spirit but also the very existence of animal and even vegetative life by reducing everything to physical and chemical forces. Certainly, he argued, the advance of materialism was due to the abandonment of the “sound philosophy” ever since the days of Bacon and Descartes. In a clearly Thomist tone, similar to the argument by Jaime Arbos i Tor in his defence of philosophical chemistry, Urráburu argued that “every phenomenon demands an adequate principle … one cannot have an effect without a proportionate cause,” and, therefore, “mechanical, physical and chemical forces, alone or in any possible combination, cannot produce vital phenomena.”³⁰ The main target in this article was Ernst Haeckel’s materialism. In opposition to Haeckel, Urráburu used a vitalist principle in Thomist terms: if “the chemical elements of organized matter are the same as those of inorganic matter” this means “that the vital chemical syntheses take place under the influence and direction of a superior and distinct principle,” a principle that “if the microscope cannot discover, it is the philosophical spectacles” that lead us to its knowledge.³¹ In other words: animal souls in the sense of substantial forms were indispensable so as to explain the difference between organic and inorganic matter. Also related to the question of “forms,” a young Jesuit and medical doctor Jose Antonio de Laburu wrote an article in 1918 in which he discussed the problem of the souls of cells and tissues cultivated in the laboratory. The question

 Urráburu, Juan José, “El principio vital y el materialismo”, in: Razón y Fe, vol. 8 (1903): 319.  Ibid, 326.

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was whether the life of those human cells and tissues was due to a division of the human soul (impossible since the human soul is spiritual and, therefore, indivisible), or (more likely) they were created in the moment of separation. The discussion was not trivial since there was a third option which had been rejected by Pope Pius IX in a letter to the bishop of Cologne: that every single tissue and organ had an independent life in the organism and, thus, human beings were nothing but the aggregation of cells and organs.³² Reductionism was also the target of a review of the book Physico-chemical studies of living matter by the Chemistry professor in Zaragoza. The reviewer complained that the very subject matter of the book was an illegitimate and a priori since rather than taking for granted that there is no gap between inert and living matter, the emphasis should be precisely the existence of that gap. Granted, there should be room for “the obsessions of the spirit” since they have proved useful in the progress of science, like Carnot’s absurd but fruitful obsession with finding a perpetuum mobile. But when discussing the role of souls in living matter, the reviewer stressed something which in the article by de Laburu was at best confusing, namely, that souls should not be understood as ingredients or as the direct agents of activity in living organisms: “Who suggests such an absurd vital principle that it may need energy to exist? The soul does not give the body a single dine of force, or a thermia of energy; it does not give or take energy, it only directs it.”³³ Father Eduardo Vitoria, a well-respected chemist and later founder of the Chemical Institute in Barcelona, started his collaboration with Razon y Fe in 1904 with an essay on “the dissociation of matter.” Towards the end of the article, Vitoria delved into the issues of the eternity of matter and the identification between matter and energy. On the first, he reminded the reader that even Aquinas had accepted the possibility, in principle, of creatio ab aeterno; on the latter, he rejected the conversion of matter into energy on the basis of the following (Thomist) argument: if matter is identified with movement, this is tantamount to identifying a substance with and accident “or, ultimately, a substance that is not a substance and an accident that is no longer an accident.” And he went on: “[t]hese are some points in which modern science has always been weak; that called to analyze and explain natural phenomena, it has gone unbri-

 de Laburu, José Antonio, “Los tejidos humanos cultivados fuera del organismo”, in: Razón y Fe, vol. 51 (1918): 64– 70.  Review of Estudios físico-químicos sobre la materia viva, by Antonio de Rodrigo Rocasolano, Chemistry professor at the University of Zaragoza, Razón y Fe, vol. 56 (1920): 112.

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dled and has delved into the tangled field of the study of the essence of things, having rejected the yoke of her good mother, the healthy philosophy.”³⁴ Interestingly, however, this separation between theology, a sound philosophy, the sciences and extrapolations from any of them was often not consistent. In the same article, Vitoria regarded atomism as an instrumentally useful theory, certainly not an ultimate philosophical truth—as opposed to “chemical truth.”³⁵ But he preferred to preserve the indivisibility of the atoms rather than to accept its ultimate divisibility into the “new” electrical particles (the electrons). Before uncritically accepting the new hypothesis, chemists should not change the atomic “foundations of modern Chemistry,”³⁶ however instrumental these were. While chemical atomism could not be the full truth of matter, he was reluctant to abandon the atomistic framework with the introduction of sub-atomic particles. By 1925, a disciple of Vitoria, Ignasi Puig, had made a step forward towards atomism. In an article on the “Physical Discontinuity of Matter,” Puig argued that atomism and Thomism were not incompatible at all since, in his view, the main aspect to take into account about the unity of substances was not the spatial continuity but the coexistence of metaphysical matter and form.³⁷ Thus, atoms could be constitutive of organic compounds without challenging the essence of such compounds. Besides the particularities of his argumentation, I think it is worthwhile stressing that by 1925, a young chemist, knowledgeable of all the novelties of atoms and sub-atomic particles, found it his duty to present these results as compatible with Thomist principles. Nevertheless, Puig was also clearly separating the task of scientists and of philosophers as intrinsically different and admitted that some problems came not only from the extrapolations by scientists into the realm of philosophy but, more often than not, from an exclusively scholastic education and extrapolations from it into the realm of the natural sciences. Vitoria eventually created one of the most innovative chemical schools in Barcelona, training students in the laboratory and not only in the classroom. His instrumentalist atomism and his reliance on Thomist principles for philosophical purposes only are two sides of the same coin. Around 1910 he wrote a number of articles on the place of chemistry in the university and the need of practical, experimental training in the laboratories; something on which his institute in Barcelona (the Institut Químic de Sarrià—IQS) was a pioneer in Spain.  Vitoria, Eduardo, “La disolución de los cuerpos”, in: Razón y Fe, vol. 8, (1904): 502.  Ibid., 496.  Ibid., 497.  Puig, Ignasi, “La discontinuidad física de la materia,” in: Razón y Fe, vol. 72, (1925): 324– 346.

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His book Chemical Catalysis. Theories and Applications in the Laboratory and Industry, first issued in 1912, promoted the role of the experimental researcher in the university and in the factory as a necessary tool to train chemists.³⁸ In another article in Razón y Fe in 1912 he strongly defended the need for practical training, following after “the steps of foreign institutions, particularly German ones” so as to create a good national industry.³⁹ A last example of what “real” science was or should be comes from the psychologist Eustaquio Ugarte de la Ercilla. He was a strong opponent of Darwinism and a moderate supporter of spiritualism since it at least led to the acceptance of the supernatural and, eventually might trigger prayer to God. In reference to one of the great challenges in physics in the early 20th century, the apparent coexistence of wave and particle explanations for radiation, Ugarte de la Ercilla dismissed modern science for its instability. Taking a statement from Poincaré at face value in which the French polymath claimed that science would ultimately oscillate between atomism and continuism, Ugarte de la Ercilla reflected: “Poor science, if that may be called science, reduced to the role of mere pendulum and eternal oscillation! Where are those immutable, unchanging, unshakable principles of science?”⁴⁰ Towards the mid-1920s, the articles on matters directly related to the natural sciences became less frequent, partly because the separation between philosophy and science became more explicit and Ibérica, also a Jesuit endeavor, took over scientific matters. A pragmatic, instrumentalist science had its own media and Razón y Fe became less interested in the philosophical and theological questions related to the natural sciences. In a sense, the modern sciences were increasingly less relevant to the journal because it had become clear that they were something different, because they were not true science.

 Vitoria, Eduardo, La catálisis química. Sus teorías y aplicaciones en el laboratorio y en la industria, Barcelona 1912.  Vitoria, Eduardo, “Reseña de Química Orgánica de Agustín Murua y Valerdi,” in: Razón y Fe, vol. 32 (1925): 252.  de la Ercilla, Eustaquio Ugarte, “Review of El materialismo actual,” vol. 50, (1918) 369. His sympathy for spiritualism went in demise. In 1922 he strongly complained about the irreligiosity of spiritualists. de la Ercilla, Eustaquio Ugarte “Los fraudes del espiritismo,” in: Razón y Fe, vol. 63 (1922): 200 – 215.

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III Ibérica. Science by Jesuits Ibérica was an altogether different journal. As part of the interest of the Jesuits in promoting science, they created in 1905 the solar and seismological “Ebro Observatory” as well as a technical school and laboratory in chemistry and physics south of Barcelona. Almost ten years later, the initial local Bulletin turned into a weekly major science popularization project. Although far from the tradition in Britain, the Spanish market had a number of science popularizing ventures as well as the presence of science-related news in more generalist periodicals.⁴¹ In spite of its grand plan, Ibérica contained a mixture of original research papers and review articles by Jesuits, engineers, military personnel and university professors, together with science news from foreign publications. The content ranged from industrial and technological developments, both local and international, to naturalist expeditions, as well as a large number of militaryrelated articles. Seismology and solar physics were unsurprisingly over-represented since these were the main activities in the Observatory. Certainly, the fact that the journal began in late 1913 meant that the Great War, in which Spain remained neutral, influenced the content of Ibérica. More so, since much of the content of the journal relied on external sources. Contrary to what happened with Razón y Fe, Ibérica defended the compatibility between science and faith mainly by avoiding grand discussions and controversial topics. The rhetoric was no longer one between true or sound science (namely philosophy and metaphysics) against positive natural science but an emphasis on the development and interest of the Jesuits and Christians in the patriotic and religious duty of contributing to the development of the national natural sciences, technology and industry. Certainly, there was an indirect apologetic agenda, made explicit only on special occasions such as the introductory editorial of the first issue. There the reader found a defense of modern science and a reassurance that everything in the journal would be sound and legitimately true:

 Herran, Néstor, “‘Science to the Glory of God’. The Popular Science Magazine Ibérica and its Coverage of Radioactivity, 1914– 1936,” in: Science & Education 21(2012): 335 – 353. The history of the Observatorio del Ebro can be found in García-Doncel, Manuel and Roca-Rossell, Antoni, Observatorio del Ebro: un siglo de historia (1904 – 2004), Roquetes 2007. On Spanish popularization in the 19th century see, i. e., Pohl-Valero, Stefan, “The ‘circulation’ of energy: Thermodynamics, national culture, and social progress in Spain, 1868 – 1890,” in: F. Papanelopoulou/A. NietoGalan/E. Perdiguero (ed.), Popularising Science and Technology in the European Periphery, 1800 – 2000, London 2009: 115 – 134; Nieto-Galan, Agustí, Los públicos de la ciencia. Expertos y profanos a través de la historia, Madrid 2011.

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[T]he rationalist wanting to use science to attack the revealed truth, either using false facts or holding theories contrary to real phenomena will not be happy with this journal; but those in true and unbiased love of science will happily browse through the pages of this periodical. We shall never fear the facts as they are, we shall never deny scientific truth for fear that it contradicts revealed truth since we hold that God is the author of the natural as well as the supernatural order.⁴²

The compatibility between science and the Catholic religion was a matter of principle and not a conclusion, in line with the neo-Thomist doctrines and the antimodernist crusade of Pope Pius X. Thus, most issues report on neutral subjects insofar as the truth and epistemic limits of science are concerned. The choice to focus the attention on technological, industrial and engineering topics as well as military strategies and weaponry or naturalist expeditions created a natural safeguard against the abuses of materialists, monists and extreme positivists. The technological and applied turn of science that permeated Ibérica seems to be the result of the agenda of its managers, and not necessarily the materialization of a big plan by the Company of Jesus to avoid controversy. Indeed, Razón y Fe was based in Madrid, in a non-scientific context, and was consequently more belligerent in philosophical and theological matters than the Barcelonabased scientific journal. From this point of view, Ibérica was, at times, an instrument to promote certain more progressive pedagogical and research agendas within the Company of Jesus rather than a monolithic periodical from the order put out into the world. As we have seen in the previous section, the chemist Eduardo Vitoria promoted a U-turn in the way chemistry and the other sciences were taught in the schools, universities and seminaries of the Company, and he used Ibérica as a tool for his purposes. In the last of a series of articles on “Chemistry and Industrial Progress,” Vitoria argued in the following terms: Today…everything has taken a decisively scientific turn: even agriculture, formerly a routine activity, has been dignified: … it has become scientific, and one of the most helpful Natural Sciences in its help is chemistry. Thus, the priest coming out of the seminary with enough scientific training, particularly chemistry, will be a good adviser to his flock in his parish, will guide their … Farming Associations, will be able to prevent them from deception … since there is no shortage of traders acting in bad faith… And if priests… can manage to perform soil and fertilizers analysis, how useful will they not be to their parishioners! What an authority over them! What gratitude and affection from them! And on such secure basis, how fertile will their apostolic ministry be!… ⁴³

 Cirera, Ricardo, Ibérica, Nº Preliminar (1913): 19.  Vitoria, Eduardo, “La Química y los Progresos Industriales. VI,” in: Iberica, vol. 4, n. 8 (1915): 159.

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This piece of rhetoric is symptomatic of the existence of different opinions among Spanish Jesuits and their audiences as for the role of science in the training of the members of the order. From Vitoria’s point of view, the Company of Jesus should be engaged in the forefront of practical chemistry not because of a service to the pursuit of truth—sound or true science—but as a way to gain prestige among the people. This also shows that while the consolidation of the positive sciences as something totally other from philosophy eroded the possibility of conflicts between science and religion, at the same time, it challenged the place of the clergy in the modern sciences. Chemistry was, for the experimental psychologist Fernando Palmés, also a Jesuit, the example to follow by other sciences in keeping a distance from the extremes of total positivism or total traditionalism. Writing in 1919, Palmés said it was already clear that there was no contradiction between the philosophy based on substances and accidents, and the chemistry based on atoms and affinities: “the old philosophy gave us an insight into the very nature of substantial changes even though this did not help the advancement of positive chemical science, the synthetic production of new products and the service that Chemistry provides to Medicine, Art, Industry and the whole social economy.”⁴⁴ Palmés wanted to reform the syllabus in philosophical psychology in the curriculum of seminarians. He complained about those who dismissed experimental psychology in the name of traditional metaphysics. Yes—he argued—positivist psychology may lead to abuse if not complemented with “the serious study of rational Psychology which … lays the foundations of the solid truths of the substantiality, immortality and spirituality and freedom of the soul, as well as its intimate relationships with matter.” But he complained that nothing had changed since the 16th century in the way Psychology was taught in Seminaries, schools and universities and that too many people dismissed experimental psychology with the false argument that such study might be against the “healthy philosophy.”⁴⁵ The series of articles on positive psychology by Palmés was an attempt to defend modern psychology from the fears of conservative neo-Thomists, arguing that there was no need to confront both approaches as irreconcilable. The separation between the “healthy philosophy” and the positive sciences became more and more explicit as time went on. In 1917, the Jesuits celebrated the third centenary of the death of Francisco Suarez, a sixteenth-century Thomist, of great influence in Neo-Scholasticism. A laudatory article on his philos-

 Palmes, Fernando, “Necesidad de los estudios de psicología experimental,” in: Ibérica, vol. 11, n. 276 (1919): 282.  Ibid., 281.

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ophy and theology praised his critical method, which “did not stop him from going further and further,” except for the fact that “the sciences had not yet reached the thriving degree they have to-day.”⁴⁶ The article relates Suarez’s philosophy of space, infinites and geometrical dimensions with the new mathematics of Poincaré, Hilbert and Cantor, among others, showing the compatibility of the former’s analysis with the modern geometries. Certainly, however, “modern sciences will never see Suarez as one of their masters and doctors, but they will find in him a paragon of scientific and critical spirit.”⁴⁷ In other words, praise of Suarez was kept within the limits of his time and not as the source of scientific knowledge in the modern context. The author of this paper, the mathematician and Jesuit Enrique de Rafael, put forward a passionate defense of the truth not only in philosophy and metaphysics but also in the observational and “mixed” sciences. Writing against any form of criticism of Kantian roots in another article in 1917, de Rafael argued in favor of a mitigated realism in all forms of knowledge along the lines of Scholastic philosophy. Positive science was not, for him, the enemy against “the healthy philosophy” and the Catholic faith, but total relativism. At stake was, among other things, the very possibility of miracles: if there was no knowledge of the laws of nature, however imperfect, any supposed miracle might be attributed to our ignorance of those laws. Observational and mixed sciences gave us no absolute knowledge but they were not the enemy either. Total skepticism was.⁴⁸ As it happened with Razón y Fe, Ibérica was far from a monolithic journal. Compatibility with neo-Thomism was a requisite, but what such compatibility might be, could be left to discussion and argument among contributors to the periodical. Besides the content of specific doctrines and modern scientific theories, much of the discussion was about the epistemological scope of positive science and its relation to philosophical and theological (Thomist) truths. Never was the goal to prove science wrong, useless or dangerous; on the contrary, true science was presented as only an ally and a consequence of the “sound philosophy.”

 de Rafael, Enrique, “Francisco Suárez, S.J. (1617– 1917),” in: Ibérica 8, 194 (1917): 188.  Ibid.  de Rafael, Enrique, “Valor objetivo del conocimiento y las teorías científicas,” in: Ibérica 8, 204 (1917): 346 – 351.

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IV Conclusion In his book, History, Dogma and Critique in the Modernist Crisis, first issued in 1962, the French historian Emile Poulat argued that “none of those taking part in the [modernist] disputes rejected science, however conservative they were, and all claimed to be believers, however progressive they were. Scientific disputes were never exclusively scientific, and it did not take place among pure believers either; it is people who quarrelled, and each independently had established a relationship between the demands of faith and the demands of science.”⁴⁹ In this paper we have seen that Spanish Catholic intellectuals fit this pattern in a twofold way: none saw themselves as opponents of “true science” but as actors in shaping what science was or had to be; and there was no cohesive stand from a Catholic, neo-Thomist perspective on the limits and contents of modern or positive science. The strategies used to harmonize modern science with the neo-Thomist approach to knowledge were diverse. They all coincided in stating that there was no incompatibility between the Catholic faith, Scholastic metaphysics and positive science, but the practical consequences were different. Zeferino González was influential in an approach that was common especially among those who were not directly trained in the sciences: to look down upon positive science as unable, in principle, of developing true knowledge. For him and his followers, the main rhetorical target was to dismiss unjustified extrapolations from “positive” and “monist” sciences into the realm of metaphysics and theology. The best service to the development of modern sciences was, from this point of view, to fence them within the limits of their methodological possibilities. This triggered a twofold instrumentalist understanding of the modern sciences: first, entities such as atoms, or theories such as evolution were instrumentally valid only insofar as they were working hypothesis with no claim to truth in nature; and, second, instrumentalism in the sense that the main role of modern science was to help in the development of new technologies and predictions on natural phenomena. As we have seen, this technological approach, which permeated the contents of Ibérica, was not exclusive to neo-Thomism. In the context of the post 1898 downfall of the Spanish empire, appeals to the reconstruction of national pride from all sides of the ideological spectrum included the promotion of the sciences as providers of modern commodities and new markets.

 Poulat, Emile, La crisis modernista. Historia, dogma y crítica, Madrid 1974, French original from 1962, 15.

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One of the main challenges was, for many, how to adjust the full truth of neo-Thomist metaphysical principles with the instrumentality of positive science. The pressure on scientists and non-scientists alike created a climate in which people like the chemist-turned-priest Jaime Arbós i Tor felt the need to reformulate—unsuccessfully—the whole edifice of chemistry according to Thomist principles, or the strange balance by Eduardo Vitoria and Ignasi Puig as far as to whether chemical atomism and Aristotelian continuity were compatible. The neo-Thomist pressure was also partly responsible for the existence of a generalized conservatism against change in curricula and pedagogical practices, as the speeches of Vitoria and Palmés show. Finally, in this paper we have also witnessed an evolution in the relationship between metaphysics in the Thomist sense and modern science. By the 1920s, we find an increasing acceptance of the independence of the sciences from excessive metaphysical meddling. Philosophy was still ancilla theologiae, and the tool to fight against illegitimate extrapolations from the sciences. But the latter could and should be accepted and promoted for what they were. Proof of that are, for instance, the claims that the clergy should be scientifically literate, not just for apologetic reasons against the attacks of materialist philosophies, but also as a practical tool in their pastoral work; as a way to gain prestige among their flock for the practical benefits they obtained.

References [n/a], “Cronica Científica,” in: Razón y Fe, vol. 10 (1904) Arbos, Jaume, El clero y la ciencia moderna, Barcelona 1876. Arbos, Jaume, Ensayo de Física y Química trascendentalmente consideradas con arreglo a la doctrina de Santo Tomás de Aquino, Barcelona 1879. Arintero, Juan Gonzalez, La Evolución y la Filosofía Cristiana, Madrid 1898. del Barrio, Jaime Maria, “Doce años de Radioactividad. Parte 4,” in: Razón y Fe, vol. 23, (1909). Bernat, Pasqual, “Jaume Arbós i Tor: Científic i tecnòleg osonenc del segle XIX,” in: Ausa 21, (2003), 51 – 74. Ricardo Cirera, Ibérica, Nº Preliminar (1913). Clark, Christopher, “The New Catholicism and the European culture wars,” in: Christopher Clark/Wolfram Kaiser (ed.), Culture Wars. Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Cambridge 2003. de Diego, Rafael Maria Sanz, “Una aportación regeneracionista de los jesuitas españoles: La revista Razón y Fe (1901),” in: Anuario Filosófico, 31 (1998), 147 – 177. de la Ercilla, Eustaquio Ugarte, “Review of El materialismo actual,” in: Razon y Fe vol. 50, (1918).

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de la Ercilla, Eustaquio Ugarte, “Los fraudes del espiritismo,” in: Razón y Fe, vol. 63 (1922): 200 – 215. García-Doncel, Manuel and Roca-Rossell, Antoni, Observatorio del Ebro: un siglo de historia (1904 – 2004), Roquetes 2007. Glick, Thomas, Darwin en España, Barcelona 1982. González, Zeferino, La Biblia y la Ciencia, Madrid 1981. Harrison, Peter, “‘Science’ and ‘Religion’: Constructing the Boundaries,” in: The Journal of Religion 86, (2006): 81 – 106. Harrison, Peter, The Territories of Science and Religion, Chicago 2015. Herran, Néstor, “‘Science to the Glory of God’. The Popular Science Magazine Ibérica and its Coverage of Radioactivity, 1914 – 1936,” in: Science & Education 21(2012): 335 – 353. de Laburu, José Antonio, “Los tejidos humanos cultivados fuera del organismo,” in: Razón y Fe, vol. 51 (1918). McCool, Gerald A., From Unity to Pluralism: The Internal Evolution of Thomism, New York 1989. McCool, Gerald A., “Is Thomas’s way of philosophizing still viable today?” in: D. W. Hudson/D. W. Moran (ed.), The Future of Thomism, South Bend 1992. Murillo, Lino, “La ciencia libre y la Revelación,” in: Razón y Fe, vol 1 (1901): 8 – 9. Navás, Longinos, “El segundo Congreso de la Asociación Española para el Progreso de las Ciencias celebrado en Valencia los días 15 – 20 de Mayo de 1910,” in: Razón y Fe, vol. 27 (1910): 364 – 368. Nieto-Galan, A., “The Images of Science in Modern Spain. Rethinking the “Polémica”,” in: Gavroglu, K. (ed.) The Sciences in the European Periphery during the Enlightenment, London 73 – 94. Nieto-Galan, Agustí, Los públicos de la ciencia. Expertos y profanos a través de la historia, Madrid 2011. Palmes, Fernando, “Necesidad de los estudios de psicología experimental,” in: Ibérica, vol. 11, n. 276 (1919). Pohl-Valero, Stefan, “The ‘circulation’ of energy: Thermodynamics, national culture, and social progress in Spain, 1868 – 1890,” in: F. Papanelopoulou/A. Nieto-Galan y E. Perdiguero (ed.) Popularising Science and Technology in the European Periphery, 1800 – 2000, London 2009: 115 – 134 Poulat, Emile, La crisis modernista. Historia, dogma y crítica, Madrid 1974, French original from 1962. Puig, Ignasi, “La discontinuidad física de la materia,” in: Razón y Fe, vol. 72, (1925): 324 – 346. de Rafael, Enrique, “Francisco Suárez, S.J. (1617 – 1917),” in: Ibérica 8, 194 (1917). de Rafael, Enrique, “Valor objetivo del conocimiento y las teorías científicas,” in: Ibérica 8, 204 (1917), 346 – 351. Rocasolano, Antonio de Rodrigo, “Review of Estudios físico-químicos sobre la materia viva,” in: Razón y Fe, vol. 56 (1920). Sanchez-Ron, J.M., (ed.) Ciencia y Sociedad en España, Madrid 1988. Urráburu, Juan José, “El principio vital y el materialismo,” in: Razón y Fe, vol. 8 (1903). Vitoria, Eduardo, “La disolución de los cuerpos,” in: Razón y Fe, vol. 8, (1904). Vitoria, Eduardo, La catálisis química. Sus teorías y aplicaciones en el laboratorio y en la industria, Barcelona 1912.

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Vitoria, Eduardo, “La Química y los Progresos Industriales. VI,” in: Iberica, vol 4, n. 8 (1915). Vitoria, Eduardo, “Reseña de Química Orgánica de Agustín Murua y Valerdi,” in: Razón y Fe, vol. 32 (1925).

Part IV. Mediating Tradition

Statue of Thomas Aquinas created by August Falise in 1926 for the Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Until 1988, this statue stood in front of the central auditorium. Then, this iconic statue was removed to a new location, the Comeniuslaan. © Filip Franssen

Christopher S. Morrissey

The Analogy of Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan (1911– 1980) came to prominence when he was an English professor at the University of Toronto, teaching at St. Michael’s College. His pioneering studies of the new electronic communications media ended up paving the way for communications as an academic discipline in its own right. His unique approach also legitimized the academic study of popular culture as a way of exploring the profound effects of media on culture. Oddly enough, despite the absence of extended discussions of Thomas Aquinas in his published work, McLuhan claimed not just to be influenced by the thought of Aquinas. He actually claimed he was a Thomist. In 1969, McLuhan wrote to Fr. John Mole: “I am a Thomist for whom the sensory order resonates with the divine Logos. … Analogy is not concept. It is community. It is resonance. It is inclusive. It is the cognitive process itself. That is the analogy of the divine Logos. … [I]mmediate analogical awareness … begins in the senses and is derailed by concepts or ideas.”¹ Exactly what McLuhan may mean by this is the subject of our extended investigation here in this monograph, because McLuhan’s thoughts on analogy are a difficult and dense topic. McLuhan read widely and his meditations on metaphor coalesced in an historical context of technical Thomistic debates about analogy. Born in Edmonton, McLuhan grew up in Winnipeg, and was an undergraduate at the University of Manitoba. But when McLuhan was studying at Cambridge University, he converted to Catholicism, in 1937. Scholars continue to debate the importance of this conversion, as there is disagreement over how much his Catholicism actually shaped his theories about media. Yet there is one controversy within Catholicism, namely the debate among Thomist philosophers about “the analogy of being,” that has been largely neglected in the debate about McLuhan’s Catholicism. This omission is surprising, since metaphor and analogy were obviously explicit concerns of McLuhan the English professor. Nonetheless, his publication record did not overtly announce how central the topic of analogy was for him. With The Mechanical Bride (1951), McLuhan shared in print his earliest classroom attempts to engage a young audience through what was then an unusual approach: namely, the intellectual analysis of popular culture, especially in adver-

 McLuhan, Marshall, The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion, ed. Eric McLuhan/ Jacek Szlarek, Corte Madera 2003, 69. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110588255-012

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tisements. After incubating, for another decade, his further thoughts on how all media technologies offer new experiences of metaphor to the human brain, McLuhan went on to publish The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), which detailed the epochal cultural transformations that were effected by the technology of the printing press. Finally, with his magnum opus Understanding Media (1964), he studied the effects of over two-dozen other media technologies, focusing on how they each transform both our outer environment and our inner analogical processes of environmental perception. When McLuhan’s ideas about media soon earned him celebrity status, it eventually became fashionable to question the intellectual depth of his scholarship. His presence on the talk show circuit provoked envy and scorn. McLuhan became something of an oracular performance artist who uttered artful aphorisms that equally baffled and intrigued his audience. When he published a series of unusual and experimental pop art books, such as The Medium is the Massage (1967), War and Peace in the Global Village (1968), Counterblast (1969), From Cliché to Archetype (1970), Culture Is Our Business (1970), and Take Today (1972), he consciously defied publishing conventions and alienated academia. This caused many to question his genius and not long afterward his ideas suffered neglect. In retrospect, however, it seems clear that McLuhan was boldly experimenting with fundamentally analogical modes of communication. In the new electronic media environment, this seemed to him to be a more promising way to proceed rather than by traditional methods. By adapting his communications to the new media forms, rather than relying on older scholarly modes of logical expression and rational exposition, McLuhan aimed to preserve analogical thought in an age that he feared would become hostile to humanism’s careful literary mode of deliberation. Paradoxically, then, while logical expression and rational exposition were more suited to a literary culture that was rapidly becoming obsolete under the pressure of new media forms like television, McLuhan sought to preserve humanistic culture in a rapidly changing technological age by popularizing poetic expression via his “probes”: i. e., his term for the aphorisms and literary sound-bites that he deliberately designed for new media technological propagation. Now that the intensification of digital technologies in the twenty-first century has vindicated McLuhan’s prescience about how electronic technology would transform human cognition and experience, thoughtful readers are returning to McLuhan’s puzzling oeuvre to mine its many unappreciated depths and insights. Part of the unexpected intellectual rigor, which lies beneath the surface impressions that McLuhan’s works generated in his own lifetime, consists of his serious reflections on how analogy works in human cognition. The nature of logic as a humanistic discipline in relation to the other, more analogical disciplines of

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grammar and rhetoric, was a lifelong concern of McLuhan’s. It dates back to his time of conversion at Cambridge when he read Catholic authors like G.K. Chesterton, Christopher Dawson, and Jacques Maritain who discussed in detail the importance for humane culture of the liberal arts’ trivium. Despite the fact that this ongoing concern has not been adequately appreciated to date, the stance towards logic of McLuhan may be seen as the hidden ground of his entire intellectual career. This claim may be seen as plausible once we consider the way that his carefully cultivated ideas about logic and analogy uniquely enabled his most characteristic insights. Furthermore, how McLuhan’s view of logic contrasts with the Neo-Thomism of his times has not been well studied. Therefore, in this monograph, we seek to offer a comparison of McLuhan’s unique approach toward logic with the more common Neo-Thomist understandings of analogy. McLuhan’s approach, we argue, is an approach that must be seen as indebted to his fundamentally semiotic understanding of analogy. Moreover, from McLuhan’s unique understanding of analogy, his opposition to the Neo-Thomism of his times comes into focus. For, unlike the Neo-Thomists, McLuhan stressed a semiotic understanding of analogy that he thought was truer to Thomas Aquinas. Tellingly, McLuhan’s understanding of analogy, as expressed in his letter to Fr. John Mole quoted from at the outset, goes back to a framework found in his doctoral dissertation on Thomas Nashe. This fascinating work (first printed in 1943) is now readily available in print from Gingko Press (2006) as The Classical Trivium. Moreover, the stance on analogy taken in The Classical Trivium is an orientation still found at the opposite end of his intellectual career, when it fully comes to fruition in his posthumous Laws of Media (1988), co-authored with his son Eric McLuhan. McLuhan’s framework, which he consistently uses for his understanding of analogy in relation to logic, derives from what he sees in The Classical Trivium as “the great grammatical dispute between the analogists and the anomalists;” in this dispute, McLuhan himself takes the side of Socrates, the Stoics, and all the analogists who, like them, are convinced that “there is a universal grammar, since language is the effect of reason.”² Ultimately, the updated humanistic program for logic, which McLuhan offers to our rapidly changing technological age, is a logic that seeks a rigorously analogical articulation of how the laws of media, as a universal grammar, can relate reason back to the sensory order. This more traditional, “analogist” understand-

 McLuhan, Marshall, The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time, Corte Madera 2006, 26.

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ing of logic, and its place in the trivium, necessarily offers a corrective to the Neo-Thomists’ failure, in McLuhan’s mind, to stay true to Thomas Aquinas’s key conviction. As far as he was concerned, their logic became unmoored from the analogical structure of cognition, which is something irrevocably tied to our fundamental sensory experience of how both nature and culture are woven together in our daily experience. In short, for McLuhan, analogy is more fundamental than logic. McLuhan thus sees his deeper, analogical logic as the true Thomism, because it is what he judges will most rigorously adhere to the “realist” adage of which Thomists are so fond: nihil est in intellectu, nisi prius fuerit in sensu. The primacy of sensory experience, by which Thomists seek to relate all intellectual cognition back to its origin in the senses, demands that we recognize that this origin is analogical, according to McLuhan’s deepest conviction. Ironically, because of his maverick view of analogy, McLuhan sees himself as the most Thomistic Thomist of them all. Interestingly, in his doctoral dissertation on Thomas Nashe and the place of logic within the trivium, McLuhan derives great inspiration from his reading of the Neo-Thomist Etienne Gilson. Hence it is worth exploring McLuhan’s “analogist” view of logic in more detail, exactly as we see him carefully express it in The Classical Trivium. Because this approach expresses something so fundamental to McLuhan’s views, it deserves a wider recognition within McLuhan scholarship, especially since McLuhan’s innovatively “Thomistic” understanding of analogy—although it first took its cue from the scholarship of Gilson—is still not adequately appreciated, neither by Neo-Thomists, nor even by most ardent admirers of McLuhan’s prescient insights.

I Neo-Thomism and Analogy But first, in order to better appreciate McLuhan’s understanding of analogy, let us describe the contemporary misinterpretations of analogy on the part of the Neo-Thomists that McLuhan strove to avoid. We can contrast these misinterpretations with McLuhan’s own understanding, by offering our own assessment of McLuhan’s significance vis-à-vis the history of Neo-Thomism, in the form of this thesis: namely, we judge that McLuhan correctly interpreted the analogy of being as a logical doctrine, which he then expanded within the amplitude of the liberal arts, in order to include the wider semiotic dimensions of analogy. However, as at least one other scholar has observed, it was Przywara, Geiger, Fabro, and other likeminded late modern Neo-Thomists who wrongly postulated “an analogy in the very order of ens reale [real being],” “an analogy of being itself, not of

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the term ‘being’ or of the concept ‘being;’” yet, as this scholar judges it, this incorrect approach to analogy is “a recrudescence of Neoplatonism in the very heart of Neothomism.”³ However, it is nonetheless fortunate that Henle showed, in his “exhaustive, definitive, and magisterial study” entitled St. Thomas and Platonism, how “Aquinas fought against the confusion and conflation of our ways of knowing with the ways of existence exercised by natural beings.”⁴ We would hazard a guess that McLuhan would agree, since he afforded such primacy of place to the analogically rooted mode of human sensory perception as our unavoidable foundation for further intellection. This is because the human species is uniquely capable of thinking intellectually about God, a task for which analogical thought is the only method available to creatures. As Thomas learned from Dionysius, one way to avoid the confusion and conflation about mind-dependent and mind-independent being when speaking of God is by the threefold way of simple affirmation, qualified negation, and then an affirmation of eminence: not only can no perfection that intrinsically implies limitation … be affirmed of God, but even any perfection that has no intrinsic link with limitation … cannot be simply affirmed of God in the manner that we affirm it of creatures. Thus, I exist and God exists; but existence is not exercised in God in the manner that it is exercised in my being; existence in God is exercised in a manner that transcends my understanding but is nonetheless actual existence.⁵

Analogy is simply “how we use words to express what we know”⁶ about beings: Regardless of the ontological situation, whether the relations involved are mind-dependent or mind-independent relations does not matter. What makes a use of terms analogical for Aquinas is the placing of the definition of one term within what is understood of the definition of some other term. It is an activity of thought in relation to the objects of thought, and ranges across the whole field of objects to which thought extends: from the pure potentiality of prime matter which, because it cannot be directly experienced, Aquinas pointed out, is known only by analogy to what we directly experience, all the way to the pure actuality of God which, because it cannot be directly experienced, Aquinas pointed out, is known only by analogy …⁷

 Deely, John, “The Absence of Analogy,” in: Review of Metaphysics 55 (2002): 521– 550, at 546. See also Deely, John, Four Ages of Philosophy: The First Postmodern Survey of Philosophy from Ancient Times to the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, Toronto 2001.  Deely, “Absence of Analogy,” 547– 8.  Ibid., 535.  Ibid.  Deely, “Absence of Analogy,” 536.

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In order to clearly understand what the phrase “analogy of being” ultimately refers to for Aquinas and McLuhan, then, we should make three clarifying distinctions grounded in the texts of Thomas and his commentators: (1) Analogy is a logical doctrine, meaning that there is only a linguistic phenomenon “analogy of being” due to the fact that the word “being” has irreducibly many meanings because it is not a master-concept or genus,⁸ but rather a transcendental term, whose analogical uses can never be traced back to a categorial (i. e. simple, univocal) causal nexus of relations, because being is not merely confined to subjective and intersubjective being (but extends also to suprasubjective relations). (2) There is no epistemological “analogy of being,” but rather the epistemological “being as first known” because, relative to us, the transcendental we name “being” is deployed in language to name the irreducibly primary object of cognition, which must not be mistaken for a “concept of being,” not even were we to make the dubious assertion that this concept is somehow intrinsically “analogous,” for it is because being is first known as transcendental that we are able to name it with a word or to think it with a concept (ens commune) that is then deployed in analogous usage to name its irreducibly many transcendental meanings (but at its best the concept ens commune refers globally to esse ut significatum in its transcendental unity across objective human experience). (3) There is no ontological “analogy of being,” but rather only transcendental relativity, because all transcendental relations in ipsum esse non-subsistens are relative to God, since God (as the principle of being) is the giver of esse to the purely relative ontological hierarchy in which one subject, as relative to its environment, can be causally acted upon to become another subject, thereby demonstrating yet another way in which being is transcendental because of the innumerably many ways things can enter into and pass out of their only relatively stable existences. Let us now proceed to explain further these three distinctions just now offered. The term “analogy” can embrace three dimensions. In other words, analogy can be distinguished in three senses: logical, epistemological, and ontological. The Greek term analogia, as used by Aristotle, only has a mathematical meaning (“proportion”), which becomes – ironically enough – an analogy, used for outlining the linguistic phenomenon of ambiguous word usage (the phenomenon for which Aristotle used different Greek words, but which Aquinas

 Pace Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics III/3, transl. G.W. Bromiley and R.J. Ehrlich, Edinburgh 1961, 101– 107.

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called in Latin analogia).⁹ This first logical sense of “the analogy of being” refers to a formal schema for understanding how we deploy the name “being” and grasp relations between beings. Second, there is the ontological knowledge we have as rational beings (the epistemological phenomenon), a grasp of being that permits the possibility of understanding beings. This second possible sense of “the analogy of being” concerns the so-called concept of being; but we possess no such concept as analogous or univocal (only names can be analogous or univocal, not concepts) because being is a transcendental, not a category. The species-specific grasp humans have of being as transcendental is primary in our cognition. But just as being as transcendental is not a concept, neither is it a thing, hence it would be a gross theological error about the analogy of being to think that it is itself an ontological phenomenon. This third notion understands “the analogy of being” in a Neoplatonic sense, as if “the analogy of being” were a name for a reified absolute hierarchy of subjects ultimately caused by Being with a capital “B,” or as emanating from the One that is Beyond Being (with two capital “B”s), whereas Aquinas’s metaphysics of esse (the act of existence) arguably corrects Neoplatonism by affirming what the later scholastic tradition will call transcendental relativity, as we will explain further below. Aristotle’s own reply to Parmenides was that “[t]here is no one way to say being … but, on the contrary, many ways; irreducibly many.”¹⁰ Irreducibly many: i. e., this means that ‘being’ is a transcendental term. A categorical term has reducibly many ways of being predicated. But transcendental concepts are “linguistic expressions conveying a content that cannot be stipulatively restricted to any one category of existence.”¹¹ Ralph McInerny’s primary academic achievement has been to demonstrate, on a textual basis, that for Aquinas analogy is a logical doctrine, in other words, a function of how we name things. As John Deely has observed, “analogy names not so much a category of terms but a process whereby one term modifies the meaning of another term.”¹² Pure equivocation is total ambiguity; for example, “bark” can mean the bark of a tree or the bark of a dog: note the meanings are purely equivocal. But there is equivocation that is less ambiguous. Metaphor (equivocation in a slack sense) and analogy (the tighter, more focused sense) are not purely equivocal but reveal related meanings as they come to light in the process of naming. Metaphorically,

 See McInerny, Ralph, Aquinas and Analogy, Washington 1996.  Deely, “Absence of Analogy,” 523.  Ibid., 524.  Ibid., 522.

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“bark” can come to mean “protection,” whether that supplied by a dog (to his owner) or by a tree (to its interior), once a poet makes the connection. But: Analogy more closely approximates univocity, just as metaphor in the narrow sense approaches pure equivocity, because analogies are based on more precise relations between the different senses of a word than is metaphor. This why so much confusion has arisen between linguistic and ontological analogy, since when words are used analogically in critical thought it becomes necessary to define more precisely the nature of the real (ontological) relation between diverse things to which a common name is given.¹³

Hence it would be wrong to read Aristotle as saying analogy is a species of metaphor,¹⁴ for the opposite is the case: metaphor is an ontologically slack analogy. Deely observes that “in St. Thomas the doctrine of analogy is … not an ontological one,”¹⁵ even though its logical function does reflect the epistemological constitution of human knowers and how their minds are capable of knowing being: The notion that transliterates from Aristotle’s analogia … is nothing more than the proportion of relations in mathematics. The analogy that Aquinas is interested in, however, is not that of a science restricted to the order of the ens rationis, purely objective [i. e., mind-dependent] being; he is interested in a sense of analogy that applies directly to the order of ens reale, [i. e., mind-independent] physical being objectified. … he does so precisely to draw “God talk” within the purview of his doctrine of being.¹⁶

Therefore, the analogy of being is a [logical] doctrine about our knowledge of things and [logical] use of language to express that knowledge to others; it is not as such a doctrine about the things that are [existing] independently of our knowledge, a doctrine of being.¹⁷

Far from being an exaltation of our human way of knowing in order to rationally encompass God, or to agnostically sunder all cognitional contact with Him, the analogy of being, in its Aristotelian-Thomist sense, is rather the recognition of the limitations inherent in our finite rational power for knowing things: the

 Ashley, Benedict, The Way toward Wisdom: An Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Introduction to Metaphysics, Notre Dame 2006, 286.  Analogy of proportionality cannot be essentially differentiated from the other examples of analogy that Aristotle gives in the Poetics. The other examples can be recast as proportionalities: e. g., the name of the genus (a) is to the species (b) as the name of the species (c) is to the species (d), as in metaphorical remark, “that man is a vegetable”.  Deely, “Absence of Analogy,” 527.  Ibid., 525.  Ibid., 527.

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merely logical doctrine that we relate what is new to us to what we already know by means of using old words in new contexts, i. e., using words analogically.¹⁸ As Philip Rolnick writes, “[a]nalogy is thus not a signification of a lack of knowledge; it is a living marker that more than knowledge is being expressed.”¹⁹ Further, there are not “two models” of analogy, as some scholars would have ²⁰ it, because proportionality is simply a mathematical analogy for representing relations logically, but there is no essential difference between it and the socalled analogy of attribution. Analogy of proportionality and analogy of attribution are two ways of looking at the same phenomenon (of non-pure equivocation, viz., analogy). As Benedict Ashley notes: Cajetan tried to distinguish between analogies based on a single relation (proportion) from those based on a comparison of the relations between two pairs of terms, that is a similarity of one relation to another (proportionality). But this is not an essential difference, since any analogy can be displayed as a proportionality. … Thus, to interpret any metaphor or analogy, we must always seek to determine how the transferred uses are related to the one proper use of the word.²¹

But how then to understand the proper use of the word “cause” in theology? Admittedly, “[t]he Creator must have an utterly different relation to creatures than created causes have to their effects.”²²But then does it become purely equivocal or merely metaphorical to use the word “cause” (in the same way that is used elsewhere, as in “the quarterback is the ‘cause’ of the football’s motion”) whenever we say that God the Creator is the “cause” of creation? Ashley notes that the two meanings of cause: are in fact analogical and based on an important similarity that helps us in knowing one thing through another better known thing. Of course, the fact that they are still more dissimilar than similar must be also acknowledged. … Even so there is a definite relation be-

 See Rolnick, Philip A., Analogical Possibilities, Atlanta 1993, 259 and 295 – 296, on how analogy in Aquinas is the path of the middle way.  Ibid., 298.  Jüngel, Eberhard, God as the Mystery of the World. On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute Between Theism and Atheism, London et al. 2014. As Rolnick, Analogical Possibilities, 206, observes: “Jüngel’s warrant for this reading is less than lucid”.  Ashley, Way toward Wisdom, 287 (emphasis mine). Ashley continues: “Aquinas speaks of this as the res significata (the proper sense of the word) and the differences in modus significandi (the relation of similarity that each of its various applications have to this one proper sense).” Attribution analogies can be reduced to proportionality thus: “the cause A is to the perfection B that it possesses, as the effect C is to the perfection D it possesses.”  Ashley, Way toward Wisdom, 288.

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tween the two types of causality, namely, that both produce an observed effect, even though in utterly different ways.²³

Thus, it is wrong to say that, implicit in the so-called analogy of proportionality x:a::b:c²⁴ is the assertion that the relation between God (x) and his creatures (a, b, c) must be already known.²⁵ It is wrong because only the effect (a) need be known; the relation between (x) and (a) is analogically inferred from seeing (b) in relation to (c). Nonetheless, it is right to try and distinguish that analogy of attribution points also to something else, more so than the analogy of proportionality does. Analogy of proportionality formally highlights the purely logical phenomenon, whereas analogy of attribution seems to beg questions about the ontology of things. In other words, in the final analysis, we must admit logic presupposes reality as what is more ultimate. As McLuhan also sensed, we should not try to make analogy into more than a logical doctrine, as if there were a second, competing model of analogy (“attribution”) dealing with ontology. But, in order to see this better, we need to distinguish what the epistemological phenomenon that makes analogical thinking possible has to do with ontology. Aquinas observed that our epistemologically first cognition is of being (ens ut primum cognitum). This is the primary knowledge we have of being, not as an analogous word, but intellectually, as transcendental. The consequence of this epistemology is that “we know the existence of God [rationally] through the making of a proposition, not through direct experience”²⁶ because Existence as a predicate signifies existence as exercised. Our only direct experience of existence (outside of mystical experience as Aquinas defines it) is the existence of sensible things. Here we directly encounter existence as exercised [esse ut exercitum], and from this experience, we formulate the concept of existence. This concept has for its object not a sensible thing but existence as signified [esse ut significatum], the idea of something which exercises an act of being, something which is or possesses an actual exercise of existence; and this concept can be applied to sensible things (as when we think of a friend, rightly or wrongly, that he has not died yet) or to spiritual things (as when we judge, rightly or wrongly, that there are purely spiritual substances). … [hence God is] a pure existence knowable by us in philosophy only through the truth of a proposition. … [because] the knowledge that God exists already was an instance of knowledge through analogy.²⁷

    

Ibid. Jüngel, God as the Mystery, 277– 284. Ibid., 277. Deely, “Absence of Analogy,” 528. Ibid., 528.

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… all of our words that apply to objects experienced in the physical environment [e. g., this rock, this tree, this horse] reflect existence formally diversified through the essential structures [e. g., the intelligible species known as rocks, trees, horses] which are what distinguish the being of creatures from the divine being in whom all diversity is reduced to the single surpassing perfection of existence itself subsisting (so that, as Aquinas puts it, “knowledge in God is the same as to exist in knowing” [ita scientia est idem quod esse scientem in eo]).²⁸

Thomas’ realist epistemology recognizes that “being as exercised” (esse ut exercitum) is what is primary in cognition. As a consequence, “unless there were some agreement of creature to God according to reality, the divine essence would not be the exemplar of the creatures; and so by knowing his own essence God would not know creatures.”²⁹ Yet many people shrink back from how what is signified by the term “being” directs our minds to the transcendental: The problem lies in the idea that “being,” because it turns out that it must be said in many ways, is an intrinsically or irreducibly analogous term, when no term is intrinsically or necessarily … anything according to signification.³⁰

In other words, our concept of being isn’t analogous (because the epistemological precondition of any conceptual grasp of beings is the first grasp of being as transcendental, i. e., of esse ut exercitum [“being as exercised”] as distinguishable with respect to anything at all in experience); the primary cognition is an irreducible conception (not a reducible concept) of being as transcendental.³¹ Because this is the epistemological state of being human, the word “being” can then later signify the being of anything (in the concept of esse ut significatum [“being as signified”]). But being as first known [ens ut primum cognitum] is the formal object of our intellect (“the object distinctive of human understanding”), just as differentiated light is the formal object of sight, or sound waves of hearing, or odor of smell, or flavor of taste, or temperature and texture of touch.³² Natural theology would go astray, then, whenever it rejects the Thomistic epistemology of “being as first known” (ens ut primum cognitum), because it is

 Ibid., 530.  Ibid., 530 translating from Aquinas, De veritate q. 2 a. 11.  Ibid., 543.  See McGrath, S.J., The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken, Washington 2006, 224.  See the excellent discussion in Deely, Four Ages, 3 f., 341– 350, to which I am indebted. I quote his translation of ens ut primum cognitum from 341.

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then denying what makes humans human. It would be denying how we are naturally in touch with the divine mystery of esse from within: The mystery of being (esse) is identical with the mystery of God; if we know what esse is, we would know the essence of God, for only in him is esse an essence or nature. In creatures esse does not have the status of an essence; they have essences which are other than esse and which exist by participating in the divine esse. ³³

Even on this point, the Neo-Thomists could stray from the metaphysics of esse and mistakenly essentialize it (as Cajetan tended to do with his talk of the concept of being). Even if they would profess an existentialism that would combat the false metaphysics of Neoplatonism (as with many Neo-Thomists of the 19th and 20th centuries), the error would remain. As Deely chronicles of them in this regard: Dissatisfaction with Cajetan was everywhere expressed, yet nowhere for quite the right reasons … the criticism of Cajetan began mainly along the line that he had essentialized being, that in reducing being to a concept he was too formalistic – in a word, that he had missed the point of esse in the thought of St. Thomas. What was needed, it came to be thought, was not a logical doctrine of analogy nor a doctrine of the concept of being as analogous but a doctrine of being itself in its full extramental reality as analogous.³⁴

Even worse than speaking of concepts as analogous (a dubious metaphorical extension of the naming of linguistic functions to the realm of the human mind’s primary cognitional dependence on being) would be speaking of being itself as analogous (a dubious metaphorical extension of the naming of linguistic functions to the realm of mind-independent beings). As Deely notes: If we wish to speak of being itself … we are better advised to realize that [the] requirement [that] finite being imposes upon discourse is that discourse itself, in order to develop understanding of what is, must take account of the dependencies among things in the very order of their continued existence … These ontological dependencies are the food of analogy, but they are not themselves analogical. The hierarchy of being, insofar as it consists in a whole series of interlocking causal dependencies whereby higher evolutionary levels come about through and depend on lower levels, is more properly stated under the rubric of transcendental relation.³⁵

 Maurer, Armand, “Introduction,” in: Thomas Aquinas, On Being and Essence, Toronto 1968, 18.  Deely, “Absence of Analogy,” 545.  Ibid., 549.

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Therefore, Scholasticism precisely distinguished “transcendental relation” (relatio secundum dici) from other types of relation in the period of the great Latin commentaries on Thomas (from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries), although the Latin terminology does go back to the time of Boethius’ translations of Aristotle in the sixth century.³⁶ Hence Deely argues that: The proper counterpart to the epistemological phenomenon of analogy … is not an ontological phenomenon of analogy of being (for there is no such phenomenon independent of intellectual imagination), but the ontological phenomenon of causal interaction and consequent real relations which, when they have ceased to be real as intersubjective relations …, yet remain in their foundations as suprasubjective requirements of knowledge … Analogical relations as such may always be epistemological, but the uniqueness of relation as a mode of being is such that nothing prevents physical relations too from forming a part of understanding, according to circumstances. Whence analogical relations may indeed enfold and incorporate real relations, but the analogical relations, as epistemological, transcend the circumstances upon which the real relations as such depend in order to be real, which is why they are … ontological, but not themselves transcendental.³⁷

On this reading of the Neo-Thomists, then, there is no ontological “analogy of being.” As the better alternative to such a fanciful Neoplatonic ontology, Deely thinks Thomism should instead draw a distinction between “ontological relation” (relatio secundum esse) and “transcendental relation” (relatio secundum dici), a distinction developed by the classical Latin Thomist commentary tradition from c.1380 to 1644, for which ontological relations freely range across mind-dependent and mind-independent being as suprasubjective, all while humans try to sort out fact from fiction with respect to their shared objective world. Transcendental relativity would then, on this reading (pace Neo-Thomism), be the distinctively Thomist doctrine that denies the false aspect of the reified Neoplatonic “hierarchy of being,” by properly understanding that the ontological hierarchy is entirely relative to the transcendental phenomenon we name “being.” That is, “being” is entirely relative to the fact that being is said in many ways, because existence is given to us in irreducibly many ways, yet this very transcendental intelligibility is what is first known to us. The concept of being is not “analogous;” it is incipiently transcendental, and hence subsequently irreducibly analogous in linguistic deployment. Being, as the epistemologically first known, is unable to be categorized by cognition in any reducible way, which is another way of saying that our intellects are constitutionally incapable of conceiving anything else before “being” in the order of knowledge, meaning

 See Deely, Four Ages, 226 – 231, 357– 362.  Deely, “Absence of Analogy,” 550.

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we cannot resolve or analyze being into anything more primordial, especially not into direct knowledge of God. Yet, thanks to this fact – that there is no epistemological “analogy of being,” but rather the epistemological “being as first known” by which we are able to distinguish the existence of mind-dependent being from mind-independent being (i. e., to distinguish transcendental relation in subjective being from categorial relation in intrasubjective being and also from purely objective mental relations) – we can know that God is the principle of being: … God can be said to be both a being and to be above being and nonbeing. God is a being insofar as our term “being” is taken direct from our experience of actually existing things and applied therefrom, by analogy, … to the case of the being for whom to exist is the essence, ipsum esse subsistens. But insofar as “being” names finite being capable of ceasing to exist, then God is not a being but beyond being and nonbeing. So St. Thomas can say, with due deference to the Neoplatonists … that “according to the truth of the matter, the first cause is above being, in that it is the infinite act of existence itself; while being is that which participates in the act of existence finitely.”³⁸

All of which is to say that there is an alternative to the usual Neo-Thomist way of understanding the analogy of being. That alternative, however, which hews to an understanding of analogy as primarily a doctrine about logic (and not about metaphysics or epistemology), is what we argue McLuhan himself sensed, in his own way, was the right interpretation to make of Thomas. Therefore, when McLuhan proceeded to develop his own reading of Thomas at the outset of his intellectual career, his focus on this incipiently analogical character of logic was what permitted him to expand analogy further into the comprehensively semiotic treatment best suited for a technological age. Hence, we now turn to these foundations in the early McLuhan, upon which all his later thought on analogy builds.

II McLuhan and Analogy In The Classical Trivium, McLuhan implicitly reveals his misgivings about the Neo-Thomist understanding of logic and analogy. He contrasts their dominantly logical, rationalist approach with the many other historical variations taken within the trivium of the liberal arts that adopt a more analogist approach in their emphases. This contrast, of the analogists with the Aristotelians, also affords McLuhan the opportunity to comment on the much-misunderstood quarrel between the ancients and the moderns. McLuhan points out that, in the Middle Ages, Aristotle was the “New Logic,” against which thinkers like Ockham made  Ibid., 531 quoting Aquinas, In librum de causis, lect. 6.

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their appeals to the “Old Logic.” However, concerning the metaphysics of universals, which the nominalists denied possessed any mind-independent reality, the terms “ancient” and “modern” had the opposite meaning. It was Aquinas and the Thomists who followed the via antiqua of affirming the reality of universals, whereas it was Ockham and the nominalists who followed the via moderni by saying that the reality of universal concepts was exclusively mind-dependent.³⁹ While McLuhan as a Thomist would oppose the nominalist view of the metaphysics of universal relations, he nonetheless reveals himself as a moderate in this dispute by showing, in his dissertation, the real case to be made for the merits of the “Old Logic” as something rightfully subordinated within an analogist’s understanding of the trivium. To justify his analogist stance, McLuhan appeals, at a crucial point, to the argument and authority of the great Neo-Thomist Etienne Gilson.⁴⁰ McLuhan relies on Gilson to assert that the “guiding principles of interpretation are managed in their application not by the logic or dialectics of Aristotle which are adapted to the analysis of a world of natures … but by the reasoning of analogy;” Gilson thus ratifies McLuhan’s own return to “the camp of the ancient grammatical analogists.”⁴¹ McLuhan even repeats for a second time, later in the dissertation, the same quote from Gilson on how Aristotelian logic, “[a]dapted as it is to a universe of natures which it is able to analyze,” nonetheless thereby “leaves us without the means to explore the secrets of a symbolic world such as that of the Augustinian tradition,” a tradition which integrates logic into a wider analogist view of rhetoric and grammar.⁴² Looking back from McLuhan’s subsequent innovations in media ecology, his argument here can be appreciated as noticing that the scientific logic of Aristotle, developed to study the mind-independent realities of nature, is insufficient for the study of the mind-dependent, humanistic realities of culture. Traditionally, the liberal arts’ trivium was able to bridge the gap, because its embrace of rhetoric and grammar pointed to a wider orientation, one that subsumed logic within a wider study of language. McLuhan’s 1967 comment to Fr. John Mole, quoted above in the introduction, is an undeniable reiteration of the sympathies revealed in his Cambridge University doctoral thesis of 1943: “The analogists argued for the view that there is a universal grammar, since language is the effect of reason, which is the analogy of the universal Logos.”⁴³     

McLuhan, The Classical Trivium, 177. Ibid., 35 – 36. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 174n14. Ibid., 26.

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McLuhan’s stance should not be viewed as opposed to the Aristotelianism of the Neo-Thomists, but rather as a way of achieving a higher integration for and appreciation of Aristotle by finding his proper place within the trivium. As McLuhan notes, “Aristotle did not share the analogist’s view of words and phenomena as interrelated by proportions and etymologies. Yet, dialectics and rhetoric in the hands of the analogists were certainly refashioned until they became not merely sciences but the queens of the sciences.”⁴⁴ A Thomist can, in the spirit of Aquinas, learn from the insights of any thinker. For example, McLuhan is capable of mining Bonaventure’s “analogical grammatical exegesis” as an analogist resource, making firm reliance on the scholarship of Gilson in that regard.⁴⁵ But there is perhaps an even more significant figure, who is highlighted by McLuhan, who indirectly shows us still more of McLuhan’s interests and sympathies; namely, John of Salisbury. McLuhan writes that “John saw clearly that the mistake of the dialecticians was to separate their discipline from the trivium of which it is an indispensable part, and to make it do service for all.” And then, immediately in his next sentence, McLuhan reveals his own unshakeable conviction: “John was quite right.”⁴⁶ McLuhan seemingly learned his most important lesson about logic from John of Salisbury: “Separating itself from the main body of classical culture, setting itself up as an end was to involve Western thought in confusions from which it has not yet recovered” – this was the thesis of Salisbury’s with which McLuhan agreed wholeheartedly and, in light of his later investigations into media, programmatically. “John’s plan to circumvent the logicians was the patristic one: to bring the seven liberal arts to the service of Christian truth, grammar at the base, and logic subservient to eloquence as in Cicero,” writes McLuhan.⁴⁷ Even so, the historic achievement of Aquinas transcends the patristic program, because, as McLuhan puts it, “St. Thomas alone reconciled grammar and dialectics.”⁴⁸ Presumably it is the Augustinianism of Aquinas, open to the whole of the Logos which grounds the trivium, that allows McLuhan to understand himself as a Thomist, for it is only in the light of such a higher, Thomistic reconciliation that we can have “the means to explore the secrets of a symbolic world” (to repeat the words of Gilson of which McLuhan was so fond).⁴⁹

     

Ibid., 49. Ibid., 143. Ibid., 149. Ibid., 149. Ibid., 174n14. Ibid., 174n14.

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McLuhan makes a telling remark about Vincent of Beauvais (d.1262), who “like John of Salisbury and the ancient Stoics, extends the term Logic to include all the arts connected with speech. In this extensive but not lucid order of the encyclopedia of the arts, Cicero’s ideal stands out very sharply. Eloquence, which implies wisdom, is a principal means by which the integrity of our nature is achieved once more, for eloquence operates on the passions of men via the imagination, controlling men for a common social good.”⁵⁰ This is especially interesting, because it suggests something of McLuhan’s own self-understanding in his subsequent career. If he is a Thomist, then he is one along the lines of this more rhetorical model. The carefully-crafted “probes” sent out by McLuhan during the time of his greatest fame should be seen as designed for this kind of classically rhetorical purpose. That is, McLuhan sees himself operating rhetorically, via the imagination, using not logic alone to argue for the common good, but aiming rather to have a much wider effect by opening up our imaginative awareness to the greater whole. For McLuhan, there is a much larger sensory Logos presented to us by our technological situation. Hence mere logic is insufficient. McLuhan’s proposal, inspired by the trivium, is that we can achieve liberation from technological servitude by making a careful study of pattern recognition in our new planetary environment. Although acts of the intellect are required to fully engage in such activity, our imaginations first have to become able to grasp the hidden influences on our senses that militate against such a fully intellectual awareness. Therefore, by first spotting the patterns of our servitude, we arrive at not simply a realistic appraisal of the challenges of our new environment. We also prepare the way for the sort of logical thinking, traditionally and properly situated within the liberal arts, that will enable us to liberate ourselves from our technological slavery. McLuhan sought a Thomism that rhetorically reconciled grammar and dialectics. On his view, only such a synthesis would be able to grasp the challenge to our times presented by technology. In 1977, what McLuhan said about Vatican II is even more recognizably profound in relation to the digitized social media of the twenty-first century: “At the Council of Trent, nobody noticed that it was Gutenberg who made all the problems, and at Vatican II, nobody mentioned the hidden ground of electric information which has created all the moral and theological problems of our time.”⁵¹ Exasperated with their inability to appreciate his own efforts at unveiling this hidden ground, McLuhan wrote to John Atkin that

 Ibid., 187.  McLuhan, Marshall, “Address at Alliance for Life Festival” (Ottawa, 6 May 1977).

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he was “a bit peeved at the local Thomists for leaving it to me to discover the meaning of their own thoughts instead of helping me – they held me up for years.”⁵² Nonetheless, he resolved late in life to further the cause of the Thomist synthesis that he had endorsed in his dissertation back in 1943. McLuhan wrote to his friend, the Thomist Fredrick Wilhelmsen: “I am going to do some further work on translating myself into Thomistic terms. It is a commentary on the Thomists that I should have to tell them how to relate themselves to the contemporary world.”⁵³ Furthering this analogist Thomistic synthesis, which alone would be capable of grasping the meaning of the hidden ground, is a task that must not confine itself to the study of the texts of Aquinas. “The specific contemporary relevance of Chesterton is this, that his metaphysical intuition of being was always in service of the search for moral and political order in the current chaos. He was a Thomist by connaturality with being, not by study of St. Thomas. And unlike the neo-Thomists his unfailing sense of the relevance of the analogy of being directed his gaze not to the schoolmen but to the heart of the chaos of our time.”⁵⁴ It is hard to deny the presence of McLuhan’s own self-understanding in these words. In his own mind, his unwavering focus on “the chaos of our time” made him a better Thomist. Moreover, his recourse to the “metaphysical intuition of being,” understood as a meditation on “the analogy of being” after the manner of the analogists discussed in The Classical Trivium, is what the Neo-Thomists would have to emulate, at least if they were to have any hope of thinking beyond a scientific logic of nature to all the problems of culture set in motion by the analogical sensory rebalancing that is enforced by the technologies of our times. By focusing on technology, McLuhan’s intent was not to be fashionable or trendy. Ironically, he saw himself as being most classical, after the manner of the classical trivium. He had argued back in 1954 that: “[t]he role of the Catholic humanist is to cultivate a more than ordinary reverence for the past, for tradition, while exploring every present development for what it reveals about man which the past had not revealed. To be contemporary in this sense is no mere snobbism, not a matter of faddishness. It is an arduous but rewarding busi-

 McLuhan, Marshall, “Letter to John Atkin (March 16, 1971),” in: id. Letters of Marshall McLuhan ed. Matie Molinaro/Corinne McLuhan/William Toye, Oxford 1987.  McLuhan, Marshall, “Letter to Fredrick Wilhelmsen (March 10, 1971),” in: id. Letters of Marshall McLuhan, ed. Matie Molinaro/Corinne McLuhan/William Toye, Oxford 1987.  McLuhan, Marshall, “Introduction,” in: Hugh Kenner, Paradox in Chesterton, New York 1947, xi–xii.

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ness.”⁵⁵ Thus, his humanism was one that took the form of thinking more deeply on the human by way of daring to engage with the confusing blend of nature and culture woven together by the technologies of the present. But the unparalleled achievement of reconciliation constructed by Aquinas would not be enough for us in our current environment. Thomas’s abstract synthesis was capable of achieving its unification only because of the psychological unity of his world. In our times, however, technological innovation has created psychological chaos. Therefore, a new synthesis is required, but it will have to be one even more thoroughly analogical than Aquinas’ synthesis, because its solutions need to be more concrete than abstract in the face of such chaos: “[W]hereas St. Thomas was a great abstract synthesizer facing a unified psychological world, the modern Thomist has an abstract synthesis of human knowledge with which to face psychological chaos. Who then is the true Thomist? The man who contemplates an already achieved intellectual synthesis, or the man who, sustained by that synthesis, plunges into the heart of the chaos? I say ‘sustained,’ not guided by, that synthesis; because the Catholic Thomist does not know the answers to contemporary problems in social and political ethics. He knows only when a particular line of action is promising and analogically consistent, whether it will tend to support a valid solution, and whether it is in conformity with reason and being.”⁵⁶ What McLuhan was proposing in The Classical Trivium is now clear in retrospect. Technology creates a new sensorium in which nature and culture are woven together with an increasingly confusing complexity. Thanks to the psychological chaos introduced by its dizzily shifting and multiform effects, the result is in an ever more destabilizing effect on rational thought within human experience. In this new planetary environment, a focus simply on nature and on logic is insufficient to withstand the new media effects. Nature and logic are themselves ultimately understandable only as intellectual constructs within a wider analogist experience of reality. We cannot find our way via a Thomist “realism” that looks exclusively to nature and to logic. Rather, we must engage in the humanistic project, patterned after the tradition of the trivium to which it is indebted, of finding the wider analogies of meaning which structure our experience, in their semiotic blending of the mind-dependent and the mind-independent.

 McLuhan, Marshall, “Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters [1954],” in: id., The Medium and the Light, Reflections on Religion ed. Eric McLuhan/Jacek Szlarek, Corte Madera 2003.  McLuhan, Marshall, “Introduction,” in: Hugh Kenner, Paradox in Chesterson, xvii.

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Logic within the liberal arts, for McLuhan and the “analogists,” was meant to be integrated within a wider perspective embracing the analogical grounds of the Logos. In this regard, the following text connects the concern of the analogists (to find remedies for Western thought which is mired in “confusions from which it has not yet recovered,” to quote McLuhan’s dissertation again) with the semiotic understanding of analogy opened up by McLuhan’s later emphasis on the distinction between “figure” and “ground”: Twenty-five hundred years of rational culture are in the process of dissolution. Age-old habits of conceptualization will not serve to train observation on the effects of the new manmade forms of energy. Since Plato, philosophers and scientists have attributed constant forms and patterns of action only to the world of ‘Nature.’ Both Plato and Aristotle, and their followers, as well as all the other schools of philosophy, have refused to recognize any patterns of energy arising from man-made technologies. Having invented ‘Nature’ as a world of rigorous order and repetition, they studied and observed only ‘natural’ forms as having power to shape and influence psyche and society. The world of man’s artifacts was considered neutral until the electric age. As the electric environment increasingly engulfed the old Greek ‘Nature,’ it became apparent that ‘Nature’ was a figure abstracted from a ground of existence that was far from ‘natural.’⁵⁷

The movement between figure and ground is part of a semiotic spiral, a fact which McLuhan came to recognize with increasing awareness. McLuhan notes in his introduction to Images from the Film Spiral: “The structural theme of Spiral presents the oscillation of two simultaneously and complementary cones or spirals, constituting the synchronic worlds of birth and death. Spiral is not a diachronic or lineal structure but synchronic and contrapuntal interplay in a resonating structure whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere”. McLuhan adds: “[Sorel] Etrog comes from a rich audile-tactile background and tradition in iconic art. His imagery is always of stark confrontation and his work is always multi-levelled and multi-sensuous in ways that are not easily described in conventional literary terminology.”⁵⁸ It is thus the analogically attuned artist who can help increase our awareness of this dizzying feature of our technological culture. McLuhan counsels us to move “from the habit of data classification” to the analogical habit involving “the mode of pattern recognition,” because “instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience co-exist in a state of active interplay,” and only a semiotic approach

 McLuhan, Marshall/Nevitt, Barrington, Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, Ontario 1972, 7.  McLuhan, Marshall, “Introduction,” in: Sorel Etrog, Images from the Film Spiral, Toronto 1987, 125.

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to understanding the spiral of meaning can hope to unravel its analogical patterns.⁵⁹ While Plato may have attacked the mimetic method of “a collective psyche and mind,”⁶⁰ this sort of purely rational approach is insufficient to understand the new technologies that are creating a technologically constructed collective mind. Drawing upon the successful resources of the classical trivium, McLuhan situates logic within a wider arsenal of resources for understanding the new technological sensorium. That is, he situates logic within semiotics. His constant recourse to the key idea of the hidden ground involved in the semiosic processes unleashed by these technologies is best understood as an expression of a profoundly semiotic consciousness. It is this new consciousness that leads him to part ways with the Thomists and their obsession with a mere vindication of “realism.” Even so, he shares the humanistic concerns of the Thomists. The humanistic purpose behind McLuhan’s efforts to locate logic within semiotics may be gleaned from his fondness for retelling the story of Edgar Allen Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelström”: “Poe imagines the situation in which a sailor, who has gone out on a fishing expedition, finds himself caught in a huge maelstrom or whirlpool. He sees that his boat will be sucked down into this thing. He begins to study the action of the ström, and observes that some things disappear and some things reappear. By studying those things that reappear and attaching himself to one of them, he saves himself. Pattern recognition in the midst of a huge, overwhelming, destructive force is the way out of the maelstrom. The huge vortices of energy created by our media present us with similar possibilities of evasion of consequences of destruction. By studying the patterns of the effects of this huge vortex of energy in which we are involved, it may be possible to program a strategy of evasion and survival. … The artist’s insights or perceptions seem to have been given to mankind as a providential means of bridging the gap between evolution and technology. The artist is able to program, or reprogram, the sensory life in a manner which gives a navigational chart to get out of the maelstrom created by our own ingenuity. The role of the artist in regard to man and the media is simply survival.”⁶¹ Evidently McLuhan thought that Neo-Thomism lacked the resources for modes of pattern recognition sufficient to escape the maelstrom.  McLuhan, Marshall/Fiore, Quentin/Agel, Jerome, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, New York et al. 1967, 63.  Ibid., 113 – 4.  McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews, ed. Stephanie McLuhan/ David Staines, Toronto 2003, 285.

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In its parting of ways with the Neo-Thomist concern for “realism,” however, McLuhan’s work is the culmination of what in retrospect may be viewed as an implicitly semiotic approach to understanding the problems generated by the new technologies in our time. Historically, the classical trivium demonstrated that, beyond logic, a kind of analogical thinking was required to understand the action of signs. Unlike the Neo-Thomists, he sought to describe the wider amplitude of cultural experience; namely, the analogical structure of the wider logic by which semiotics is able to bridge both nature and culture, i. e., the mind-independent and the mind-dependent. By reading Thomas Aquinas according to the analogy of McLuhan, the inadequacies of Neo-Thomism may be overcome, as we grow in semiotic awareness and thereby comprehend the inner logic of the maelstrom’s patterns.

References Ashley, Benedict, The Way toward Wisdom: An Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Introduction to Metaphysics, Notre Dame 2006. Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics III/3, transl. G.W. Bromiley/R.J. Ehrlich, Edinburgh 1961. Deely, John, “The Absence of Analogy,” in: Review of Metaphysics 55 (2002): 521 – 550. Deely, John, Four Ages of Philosophy: The First Postmodern Survey of Philosophy from Ancient Times to the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, Toronto 2001. Jüngel, Eberhard, God as the Mystery of the World. On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute Between Theism and Atheism, London et al. 2014 Maurer, Armand, “Introduction,” in: Thomas Aquinas, On Being and Essence, Toronto 1968. McGrath, S.J., The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken, Washington 2006. McInerny, Ralph, Aquinas and Analogy, Washington 1996. McLuhan, Marshall, “Address at Alliance for Life Festival” (Ottawa, 6 May 1977). McLuhan, Marshall, “Introduction,” in: Hugh Kenner, Paradox in Chesterton, New York 1947. McLuhan, Marshall, “Letter to Fredrick Wilhelmsen (March 10, 1971),” in: id. Letters of Marshall McLuhan, ed. Matie Molinaro/Corinne McLuhan/William Toye, Oxford 1987. McLuhan, Marshall, “Letter to John Atkin (March 16, 1971),” in: id., Letters of Marshall McLuhan, ed. Matie Molinaro/Corinne McLuhan/William Toye, Oxford 1987. McLuhan, Marshall, “Introduction,” in: Sorel Etrog, Images from the Film Spiral, Toronto 1987. McLuhan, Marshall, The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion, ed. Eric McLuhan/Jacek Szlarek, Corte Madera 2003. McLuhan, Marshall, “Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters [1954],” in: id., The Medium and the Light, Reflections on Religion, ed. Eric McLuhan/Jacek Szlarek, Corte Madera 2003. McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews, ed. Stephanie McLuhan/David Staines, Toronto 2003. McLuhan, Marshall, The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time, Corte Madera 2006. McLuhan, Marshall/Nevitt, Barrington, Take Today: The Executive as Dropout, Ontario 1972.

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McLuhan, Marshall/Fiore, Quentin/Agel, Jerome, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, New York et al. 1967. Rolnick, Philip A., Analogical Possibilities, Atlanta 1993.

Herman Paul

Vetera Novis Augere: Neo-Scholastic Philosophers and Their Concepts of Tradition I Introduction Neo-Scholastic philosophy has frequently been interpreted as a system of thought so thoroughly committed to timeless truth that it was incapable of viewing historical change other than in negative terms. Gerald McCool, for instance, argued as recently as 2003 that Neo-Scholasticism aspired to be a “changeless unified system” and therefore looked with great suspicion at historicizing treatments of the medieval past, with their explicit or implicit challenge of the presumed coherence of medieval scholastic philosophy.¹ According to McCool, the history of Neo-Scholasticism between Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879) and the Second Vatican Council (1962– 1965) can even be written as a story of increasingly desperate struggles with the relativizing effects of contextual historical inquiry. Although conservative Neo-Scholastics did what they could to defend their “system” against historians like Etienne Gilson, Henri de Lubac, and Henri Bouillard, all of whom drew attention to a variety in medieval positions grossly ignored by the Neo-Scholastic synthesis, “history” eventually tore the philosophical “system” from its pedestal.² McCool’s binary oppositions between “system” and “history” or “unity” and “pluralism” allow for dramatic storylines – narrative history in a tragic key, as Hayden White would put it³ – but also run a risk of oversimplification. Were late nineteenth-century Neo-Scholastics really as afraid of “history” in the sense of change and context-dependency of philosophical positions as McCool assumes? Were they really committed to a “timelessness” incompatible with development over time? How convincing is, in other words, McCool’s master narrative (“from unhistorical thinking to historical sensitivity”) in the light of how late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Neo-Scholastic philosophers

 McCool, Gerald A., The Neo-Thomists, Milwaukee 2003, 155.  Ibid., 148 – 149. See also McCool, Gerald A., From Unity to Pluralism: The Internal Evolution of Thomism, New York 1989, 208.  White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Baltimore 1973, 9 – 10. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110588255-013

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themselves conceived of their work in relation to that of their medieval predecessors? Surprisingly, perhaps, quite a few Neo-Scholastic philosophers in the decades around 1900 explicitly denied that historical change was a threat to the project inaugurated with Aeterni Patris. For example, at the Higher Institute of Philosophy in Leuven, founded in 1889 with help from Leo XIII himself, Désiré Mercier and Maurice De Wulf expressly rejected the idea of “enslaving our philosophical thought to that of St. Thomas.”⁴ Scholasticism, for them, was not “a sort of mummy buried in a tomb around which we would only have to keep guard,” but a “young and active organism.”⁵ This led De Wulf in particular to dissociate himself from “extreme partisans of tradition, for whom all change seems to imply betrayal of truth or else doctrinal decay.”⁶ Early twentieth-century commentators on the Leuven school, such as Peter Coffey in Ireland and Clément Besse in France, likewise denounced “defenders of tradition” that had become its “prisoners” by securing scholastic philosophy in a “cavern.”⁷ Early twentieth-century Neo-Scholastics at Leuven even employed a rhetoric not unlike the rhetoric of aggiornamento in the 1960s Catholic Church. They liked to emphasize the “neo” in Neo-Scholasticism in order to stress that scholasticism “has had both its matter and form dressed up and refurbished, to suit the changed and changing mentality of the age we live in.”⁸ Not unlike Neo-Calvinists in the Netherlands, led by Abraham Kuyper, they saw themselves as engaged in “a process of overhauling and resetting” that would transform their centuriesold heritage into “an attractive modern article.”⁹ Precisely for this reason, they were also criticized for adhering too loosely to the “Angelic Doctor.” Especially in Italy, where more conservative Neo-Scholastics such as Francesco Olgiati ex-

 Mercier, Désiré, “Neo-Scholastic Philosophy” (1894), in: David A. Boileau (ed.), Cardinal Mercier: A Memoir, Leuven 1996, 361– 367, 366. For the reader’s convenience, I quote English translations instead of French or Dutch originals whenever possible. In all other cases, translations are mine.  Mercier, Désiré, “The Philosophical Assessment of the Nineteenth Century” (1900), Ibid, 323 – 343, 339.  De Wulf, Maurice, Scholasticism Old and New: An Introduction to Scholastic Philosophy, Medieval and Modern, transl. P. Coffey, Dublin et al. 1907, 158.  Coffey, P., “Philosophy and the Sciences at Louvain,” in: The Irish Ecclesiastical Record 17 (1905): 385 – 408, 485 – 516, at 400, quoting Besse, C., Deux centres du mouvement thomiste: Rome et Louvain, Paris 1902, 34.  De Wulf, Scholasticism Old and New, 157.  Ibid., 259. For analysis, see Paul, Herman, “Who Suffered from the Crisis of Historicism? A Dutch Example,” in: History and Theory 49 (2010): 169 – 193.

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ercised considerable influence,¹⁰ the “open” Neo-Scholasticism advocated at Leuven was almost routinely associated with “relativism,” especially in the era of the modernist crisis, when everything resembling “doctrinal development” had a smell of heresy.¹¹ In a sense, therefore, the Leuven Neo-Scholastics had to steer a difficult middle course between “traditionalist” identification with the past on the one hand and progressivist “disloyalty” to the scholastic legacy on the other. Simple dichotomies between “system” and “history” will therefore be of little help in understanding how Neo-Scholastic philosophers negotiated their “pastpresent relations.”¹² It will be more profitable to examine what “history” actually meant to the Neo-Scholastics and how these meanings changed over time. The question, in other words, is not whether Neo-Scholastic philosophy as taught by Mercier, De Wulf, and their successors had any space for history, but what kind of history was implied in their philosophical teaching. Interestingly, this is a question that the Leuven Neo-Scholastics themselves would have had no trouble recognizing. Although “historicity” and “philosophy of history” – McCool’s favorite terms – entered their vocabulary only after World War II, “tradition” was a term of reference through which they articulated, from the 1880s up until the 1950s, their (changing) positions vis-à-vis medieval scholastic philosophy. Accordingly, for understanding the relations that Neo-Scholastics at Leuven maintained with the scholastic past, their explanations of what it meant to them to work in a scholastic or Thomist tradition offers a promising point of departure. By focusing on four of Leuven’s most influential faculty members – Mercier, De Wulf, Louis De Raeymaeker, and Fernand Van Steenberghen – this chapter advances the thesis that Leuven Neo-Scholastics between 1880 and 1960 resembled each other in emphasizing similar or nearly similar features of tradition. They all conceived of tradition in terms of progressive development and therefore dissociated themselves from both “traditionalism” and “untraditional” attempts at thinking from anew. They all saw themselves, in Bernard of Chartres’ celebrated phrase, as “dwarfs on the shoulders of giants.” Also, from De Wulf onwards,

 Cenacchi, Giuseppe, “Agostino Gemelli (1878 – 1959) und Francesco Olgiati (1886 – 1962),” in: Emerich Coreth/Walter M. Neidl/Georg Pfligersdorffer (ed.), Christliche Philosophie im katholischen Denken des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, vol. 2, Graz et al. 1988, 702– 711.  La Piana, George, “Recent Tendencies in Roman Catholic Theology,” in: The Harvard Theological Review 15 (1922): 233 – 292, 250 – 256.  I discuss this concept in Paul, Herman, “Relations to the Past: A Research Agenda for Historical Theorists,” in: Rethinking History 19 (2015): 450 – 458. My analysis is also indebted to Phillips, Mark Salber, On Historical Distance, New Haven 2013.

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they saw themselves as belonging to a Leuven tradition inaugurated by Mercier, to which they felt loyal in spite of (growing) divergence from Mercier’s own philosophical views. If this implies that none of the four philosophers had any trouble recognizing temporal distance between the thirteenth and the twentieth centuries, they nonetheless disagreed on the nature as well as the degree of philosophical continuity between Thomas and themselves. When, from the 1930s onwards, De Raeymaecker and Van Steenberghen presented this continuity as one of philosophical attitudes more than of metaphysical commitments, their frequent appeals to Mercier could not conceal that, in fact, they exchanged a scholastic notion of philosophy as a collective enterprise over time for one that privileged individual experience and personal virtue.

II “The School of Aristotle and St. Thomas” If architecture is a language, then the Higher Institute of Philosophy is a text in Medieval Latin script. If anything, its neo-Gothic design seems to convey nostalgia for a time when the Catholic Church still reigned supreme, clergy and laity alike still revered the Almighty, and society had not yet been afflicted with the ills of secularization and individualization. It has been said that the building “gave the philosophical world at Leuven an atmosphere wherein students could easily be inducted into speculative contemplation, in spite of themselves.”¹³ And just in case neo-Gothic pinnacles and arch windows did not suffice, the message was explicated, or so it seems, in the institute’s main hall, the walls of which were decorated with quotations from the Bible, Thomas Aquinas, and Aeterni Patris. At closer inspection, though, stone and paint turned out to convey more complicated messages. This is especially true for the main banderole, right above the podium, which contained a line from Aeterni Patris: Edicimus libenti gratoque animo excipiendum esse quidquid utiliter fuerit a quopiam inventum atque excogitatum. That is: “[W]e hold that every word of wisdom, every useful thing by whomsoever discovered or planned, ought to be received with a willing and grateful mind.”¹⁴ Notably, this was not only an atypical quotation from an encyclical that above all other things recommended a return to medieval scholasticism, but also a notorious sentence. Writing in the Journal des débats, the French journalist Gabriel Charmes had made fun of it and quipped that from  Ladrière, Jean, “One Hundred Years of Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy,” in: David A. Borleau/John A. Dick (ed.), Tradition and Renewal: Philosophical Essays Commemorating the Centennial of Louvain’s Institute of Philosophy, Leuven 1993, 41– 78, 47.  Leo XIII, “The Pope’s Encyclical,” in: The Catholic World 30 (1879 – 1880): 111– 131, 130.

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now on, he was entitled to criticize Catholics unfamiliar with the latest scientific advances with reference to “the only authority before which they are willing to bow”: the Pope in Rome.¹⁵ Charmes’s irony notwithstanding, Mercier was willing to grant the point. “All this makes sense!” he wrote in response to the French journalist. “Christian philosophers feel themselves called upon by Leo XIII to take up again with renewed zeal the thorough study of natural sciences.”¹⁶ Mercier liked to quote this sentence particularly when arguing that Catholic philosophers had nothing to fear from scientific research, as it invariably confirmed the truth of their “fundamental theses.”¹⁷ Accordingly, the quotation from Aeterni Patris in the institute’s main hall must not be misread as advocating retreat into a medieval past. As far as Mercier was concerned, the banderole was not a sign of nostalgia, but an expression of confidence in the compatibility of scholastic philosophy and modern scientific research. In fact, Mercier’s philosophical program was even more ambitious than this. In his grand scheme of things, Neo-Scholasticism was uniquely qualified to integrate “analysis” and “synthesis,” or “experience” and “speculation.” Although all philosophers, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, were entrusted with the task of comprehending scientific “facts” or “findings” through the prism of “principles,” Mercier believed that most contemporary philosophy suffered from onesidednesses that effectively obstructed such synthetic understanding. In his view, modern philosophy had come under the spell of “isms” such as “positivism” and “pantheism,” which had in common that they unduly emphasized either the Cartesian res extensa (“extended thing”) or the res cogitans (“thinking thing”). The net result, in Mercier’s dramatic reading, was an inability to account for the whole of human experience, which in turn caused an intellectual fragmentation that only Neo-Scholasticism, premised on a pre-Cartesian understanding of the mind-body relation, was able to remedy: What happens when after almost three centuries of philosophy going from one extreme to another, between empiricism and idealism, until tired and exhausted in sterile efforts, it falls into the abyss of skepticism or throws itself desperately into the arms of vague and mysterious beliefs? There is only one philosophy … which responds adequately to the total-

 Ch. Gabriel [pseudonym of Gabriel Charmes], untitled article on Aeterni Patris, in: Journal des débats politiques et littéraires (19 August 1879).  Mercier, Désiré / Van Weddingen, A., “Leo XIII and the Restoration of Philosophical Studies” (1888), in: David A. Boileau (ed.), Cardinal Mercier’s Philosophical Essays: A Study in Neo-Thomism, Leuven 2002, 55 – 120, 113.  Ibid., 100.

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ity of the demands of our nature … [by taking] me as I am, in the integrity of my sensible and intelligent nature.¹⁸

Accordingly, for Mercier, the revitalization of scholastic philosophy recommended by Aeterni Patris had a significance not limited to Catholic students. NeoScholasticism carried with it a promise of synthesis, or a vision of totality, in that it “brings together the best thoughts of all systems, reunites them in a wise and harmonious ordering, preserves thinking from useless digression … and adds to the greatness a tested solidity.”¹⁹ If this amounted to a philosophical argument in favor of Neo-Scholasticism, Mercier preferred to present it in historical terms by embedding his analysis in a grand-scale narrative of decline. According to this narrative, scholasticism had emerged in ancient Greece, in the philosophy of Aristotle, and been developed to near-perfection in the thirteenth century, especially though not exclusively by Thomas Aquinas. This “golden age of scholasticism,” however, had been followed by an era of “rapid decadence,” marked by the rise of nominalism, the church schism known as the Reformation, and the emergence of Cartesian philosophy with its aforementioned mind-body dualism. “The scholastic tradition had been broken for long centuries; and from that moment … began the anarchy of minds and the confusion of systems from which we are now gathering the fatal fruits.”²⁰ For Mercier, this confusion had not only marked a break with the past; it had been caused by the hazardous experiment of thinking “independently,” without wise guidance from past masters. It was at this point that “tradition” entered Mercier’s vocabulary. In his perception, the root of modern ills was a “total rupture of the philosophical tradition.”²¹ Likewise, the “restoration of philosophical studies” advocated by Aeterni Patris had to be understood as a retrieval of “the tradition of the great scholastic Doctors” or the “scientific tradition” represented by Aristotle, Albert Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas.²² This was not the same as to elevate the Summa Theologiae to a canonical height or to expect a final answer to all questions from the “Angelic Doctor.” Whenever Mercier mentioned Thomas, he added the name

 Ibid., 59.  Ibid., 118.  Mercier/Van Weddingen, “Ibid.,” 70, 72.  Ibid., 72.  Mercier, Désiré, “Opening Discourse for the Course on St. Thomas’ Philosophy” (1882), in: Boileau, Cardinal Mercier: A Memoir, 296 – 313, 301; “The Creation of the Higher School of Philosophy at the University of Louvain (1889),” Ibid., 314– 322, 318.

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of Aristotle, “the greatest genius that humanity has ever known.”²³ The tradition that Mercier said to care about was “the School of Aristotle and St. Thomas,” the tradition of “Aristotle and … his disciples in the Middle Ages,” or, in a later formulation, “the philosophy of Aristotle, developed and made precise by St. Thomas Aquinas.”²⁴ Accordingly, what Mercier intended to revive was not Thomism stricto sensu, but a centuries-spanning tradition that broadly followed Aristotelian lines. Although Mercier never spelt out his concept of tradition, implied in the foregoing is a scholastic (though not exclusively scholastic) understanding of philosophy as a collective enterprise over time. In Mercier’s own words, philosophy is “the growing fruit of the efforts of generations that succeeded each other in the course of history.”²⁵ As illustrated by this quotation, Mercier liked to conceptualize the deepening of philosophical insight over time in biological terms. “The evolution of knowing,” he used to say, “is similar to that of an organism.”²⁶ Although architectural metaphors, comparing the work of philosophy to the building of a Gothic cathedral, also occur in his writings, his favorite images were organic ones, as they allowed him to emphasize “life” and “growth” over time and to argue that tradition has a “life-giving power,” which “modern” philosophers neglect to their own disadvantage.²⁷ And if scholastic philosophy is such a source of life, then nothing is more self-destructive than trying to think “independently,” without guidance from the past. As Mercier asked rhetorically in 1882: “Since when is newness a sign of truth? Is it not preferable to be conservative than innovative, if it is conservatism that is correct and innovation that is wrong?”²⁸ This understanding of tradition, finally, explains why Mercier decidedly preferred the designation “Neo-Scholastic” over “Neo-Thomist.” What mattered most to him was not the thirteenth-century Thomas, however rich his Summa may be, but the Aristotelian tradition in its development over the course of centuries.²⁹ “Neo-Thomism” would draw too much attention to an individual philos Mercier, “Philosophical Assessment,” 340.  Mercier, Désiré, “Talk Delivered by Msgr. Mercier on the 2nd of December, 1894,” in: Boileau, Cardinal Mercier’s Philosophical Essays, 253 – 266, at 261, 262; “The Encyclical and Philosophy” (1907), Ibid., 543 – 550, 547.  Mercier, “Philosophical Assessment,” 340.  Mercier, “Talk,” 257.  Mercier, “Philosophical Assessment,” 338.  Mercier, “Opening Discourse,” 306.  It has even been argued that Mercier was more indebted to Aristotle than to Thomas, if only because the task of synthesizing scientific results did not correspond to a Thomist understanding of philosophy. Steel, Carlos, “Aquinas and the Renewal of Philosophy: Some Observations on

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opher, thereby erroneously suggesting that philosophy is at base as individual an activity as Mercier’s bêtes noires, Descartes and Immanuel Kant, had thought it to be. The journal that Mercier launched in 1894 was therefore entitled Revue néo-scolastique, not Revue néo-thomiste. As Mercier explained in the inaugural issue, with reference to a long tradition of scholastic philosophy and with yet another paraphrase of the papal words on the wall: Leo XIII, in his encyclical Aeterni Patris, already praised the zeal of St. Thomas, of Albertthe-Great, and of, more generally, the masters of scholasticism … and recommended that we appropriate acknowledged discoveries and modern theories, no matter from whence they came, especially if they are seen to be true. … It is this kind of philosophy that we describe as neo-scholastic. ³⁰

III “Scholasticism Old and New” Although Mercier left the Higher Institute of Philosophy on becoming archbishop of Mechelen in 1906, his understanding of the scholastic tradition left an indelible mark on the institute throughout the early decades of the twentieth century. This is perhaps most visible in Mercier’s former student and co-editor of the Revue néo-scolastique, Maurice De Wulf.³¹ Like Mercier, De Wulf preferred the designation “Neo-Scholasticism” so as to avoid too close association with “the thought system of some particular individual, whereas in reality this new philosophy is sufficiently large and comprehensive to pass beyond the doctrinal limitations of any individual thinker.”³² Also, like Mercier, De Wulf conceived of phi-

the Thomism of Désiré Mercier,” in: David A. Boileau/John A. Dick (ed.), Tradition and Renewal: Philosophical Essays Commemorating the Centennial of Louvain’s Institute of Philosophy, Leuven 1992, 181– 215, 190; Van Riet, Georges, “Cardinal Désiré Mercier (1851– 1926) and the Institute of Philosophy of Louvain,” in: David A. Boileau/John A. Dick (ed.), Tradition and Renewal: Philosophical Essays Commemorating the Centennial of Louvain’s Institute of Philosophy, Leuven 1993, 1– 39, 9 – 10.  D. Mercier, “Neo-Scholastic Philosophy (1894),” in: Boileau, Cardinal Mercier: A Memoir, 361– 367, 364.  For De Wulf’s biography, see Van Steenberghen, Fernand, “Maurice De Wulf: historien de la philosophie médiévale (1867– 1947),” in: Revue philosophique de Louvain 46 (1948): 421– 447, and Van Steenberghen, Fernand, “Maurice De Wulf (1867– 1947),” in: Helen Damico (ed.), Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, vol. 3, New York 2000, et al. 43 – 53.  De Wulf, Scholasticism Old and New, 159.

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losophy as “a synthetic study of the world by the sole data of reason”³³ and regarded thirteenth-century scholasticism as the highest developed form of synthetic thought so far produced by humankind. Even stronger than his teacher, De Wulf emphasized the essentially Aristotelian character of thirteenth-century scholasticism, which led him, to the dismay of colleagues abroad, to depict all Neo-Platonism and Averroism in thirteenth-century Europe as essentially foreign to the scholastic tradition (“Latin Averroism differs from scholastic philosophy as the Gothic cathedral differs from the Arabian mosque”).³⁴ De Wulf also closely followed Mercier’s example in adopting the subject position of an heir vis-à-vis a philosophical “inheritance” that needed thoughtful stewardship.³⁵ Like Mercier, he often quoted Blaise Pascal as saying: “It is owing to tradition that the whole procession of men in the course of so many centuries may be considered as a single man, who always subsists, who learns continuously.”³⁶ De Wulf used the same organic imagery as Mercier in advocating both loyalty to and further development of the tradition.³⁷ And as if this were not enough, De Wulf shared Mercier’s fascination for aggiornamento, with reference to the same papal encyclical from 1879. His favorite quotation differed only in wording, not in substance, from Mercier’s: vetera novis augere, or vetera novis augere et perficere maluerunt: “to strengthen and complete the old by aid of the new.”³⁸ This juxtaposing of “the old” and “the new,” nonetheless, can be read as marking an emerging difference between the two Leuven philosophers. While Mercier believed that medieval scholastic philosophy hardly needed to be

 De Wulf, Maurice, “Western Philosophy and Theology in the Thirteenth Century,” in: The Harvard Theological Review 11 (1918): 409 – 432, 425.  De Wulf, Maurice, Philosophy and Civilization in the Middle Ages, Princeton 1922, 285. For the criticism elicited by De Wulf’s exclusively Aristotelian focus, see Noone, Timothy, “Medieval Scholarship and Philosophy in the Last One Hundred Years,” in: Brian J. Shanley (ed.), One Hundred Years of Philosophy, Washington, DC 2001, 111– 132, 117– 118 and Steel, Carlos, “From Siger of Brabant to Erasmus: Philosophy and Civilization in the Late Medieval Low Countries,” in: Kent Emery, Jr./Russell L. Friedman/Andreas Speer (ed.), Philosophy and Theology in the Long Middle Ages: A Tribute to Stephen F. Brown, Leiden et al. 2011, 953 – 979, 959 – 961.  De Wulf, Scholasticism Old and New, 160.  Mercier, “Philosophical Assessment,” 327; De Wulf, Philosophy and Civilization, 140.  E. g., De Wulf, Scholasticism Old and New, 161– 162.  Leo XIII, “The Pope’s Encyclical,” 127. It is worth noting in passing that this would become a key phrase for Bernard Lonergan, too. See, e. g., Lonergan, Bernard J. F., “A New Pastoral Theology” (1973), in: Lonergan, Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1965 – 1980, ed. Robert C. Croken/Robert M. Doran, Toronto et al. 2004, 221– 239, 238; “The Scope of Renewal” (1973), Ibid., 282– 298, 298.

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changed to serve modern needs,³⁹ De Wulf called more explicitly for “adaptation … to our own time.”⁴⁰ For him, Neo-Scholastic philosophy was not only a “revival,” but also an “adaptation” of medieval scholasticism.⁴¹ As he argued in his Introduction à la philosophie néo-scolastique (1904): “The new scholasticism is more extensive than the old, being a development and growth of its doctrine.”⁴² Although Mercier had always insisted on the need for organic development, his emphasis had been on continuity over time, not on discontinuities that inevitably bring about change. By contrast, when De Wulf distinguished between “scholasticism old and new,” he acknowledged more openly that temporal distance from the thirteenth century also implied dissociation from certain medieval philosophical positions, such as Thomas’ understanding of the immortality of the soul: The various polemics and controversies of the medieval scholastics lose most if not all their meaning when taken out of their historical setting: those problems have developed from epoch to epoch; and all their every evolution are a proof that scholasticism has steadily moved with the march of thought, however slow may have been the stages of its progress.⁴³

Two factors help explain De Wulf’s sensitivity to discontinuities between the thirteenth and the twentieth centuries. Firstly, while Mercier had developed his conception of scholasticism before the ink of Aeterni Patris was fully dry, De Wulf wrote his Introduction à la philosophie néo-scolastique at a time witnessing a growing variety of “Neo-Scholastic” or “Neo-Thomist” approaches. Most of these, especially including the Italian ones, were considerably more conservative than the Leuven school in terms of their willingness to develop the scholastic heritage beyond the letter of Thomas’ philosophy.⁴⁴ Leuven’s project of developing a Neo-Scholastic epistemology (“criteriology”), such as carried out after Mercier’s departure by Léon Noël, was therefore viewed with skepticism by those, such as the aforementioned Francesco Olgiati, who were convinced that episte-

 D. Mercier, “The Creation of the Higher School of Philosophy at the University of Louvain” (1889), in: Boileau, Cardinal Mercier: A Memoir, 314– 322, 317. See also Mercier, “Philosophical Assessment,” 340 – 341: “[T]his conception of philosophy crossed the centuries without being shaken in its fundamental theses.”  De Wulf, Scholasticism Old and New, ix.  Ibid., viii.  Ibid., ix.  Ibid., 187.  Coreth, Emerich, “Schulrichtungen neuscholastischer Philosophie,” in: Coreth/Neidl/Pfligersdorffer, Christliche Philosophie, vol. 2, 397– 410.

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mology as such constituted a Cartesian aberration.⁴⁵ In this polarized context, De Wulf felt a greater need than Mercier to dissociate himself from “those exclusive admirers of the past who would fain amass all the best traditions of the Middle Ages and transmit that sacred deposit to posterity, unchanged and unchangeable.”⁴⁶ While “traditionalism” for Mercier had referred exclusively to such French counter-revolutionaries as Louis de Bonald and Jean-Marie de Lamennais,⁴⁷ for De Wulf it also became a pejorative label for “rigid” and “inflexible” opponents in early twentieth-century quarrels over what loyalty to the “Angelic Doctor” implied.⁴⁸ If this is one reason why De Wulf emphasized the “neo” more than Mercier, a second reason is that De Wulf, unlike Mercier, was an historian of philosophy. This is not to say that De Wulf had a professional inclination towards historicization. Like Mercier, he was more interested in patterns than in exceptions. He had therefore little patience with scholars whose primary aim was to show how diverse the world of medieval philosophy had been. In an attempt at escape from the “chaos of systems,” De Wulf preferred to identify scholasticism with “a philosophical synthesis common to a group of the leading doctors of the West,” such as Albert Magnus and Thomas Aquinas.⁴⁹ He subsequently spent many years defending this synthesis, defined in terms of shared metaphysical doctrines, against critics who accused him of “forcing the facts of history.”⁵⁰ However, in the long run, this defense convinced not even himself. In subsequent editions of his Histoire de la philosophie médiévale (1900), De Wulf increasingly qualified his “scholastic synthesis.” In the 1920s, he even went so far as to admit that the “synthesis” had been an imposition on the sources.⁵¹ De Wulf,

 Tredici, G./ Necchi, L./Olgiati, Fr./A. Gemelli, “Una discussione intorno alla criteriologia di Lovanio,” in: Revista di filosofia neo-scolastica 4 (1914): 335 – 341.  De Wulf, Scholasticism Old and New, 158.  E. g., Mercier, “Philosophical Assessment,” 324.  De Wulf, Scholasticism Old and New, 163.  Ibid., 41, 46.  Turner, William, review of Scholasticism Old and New by M. De Wulf, in: The Philosophical Review 17 (1908): 427– 432, 429. It has become customary to contrast De Wulf’s Histoire de la philosophie médiévale (1900) with Etienne Gilson’s History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (1955), with the latter offering a “pluralist” alternative to De Wulf’s “unitary” reading of scholastic philosophy. But as John Inglis convincingly argues, the two books were indebted to a similar historiographical model, derived from Joseph Kleutgen and Albert Stöckl, among others, as well as to a shared grand narrative of rise and fall. See Inglis, John, Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy, Leiden et al. 1998, 9 – 10.  Van Steenberghen, “Maurice De Wulf” (2000), 50 – 51; Inglis, Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry, 170 – 187; Wielockx, Robert, “De Mercier à De Wulf: débuts de l’‘École de Louvain,” in: Ruedi

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in short, was struggling all his life with incongruences between the historical Thomas and nineteenth-century Neo-Scholasticism. On the one hand, then, De Wulf’s understanding of Neo-Scholasticism resembled Mercier’s, especially in what one might call (with a nod to Friedrich Nietzsche) its “monumental” conception of the medieval past.⁵² De Wulf showed himself a loyal disciple of Mercier, too, in insisting that “lovers of tradition” need not be “unrelenting adversaries of everything modern.”⁵³ On the other hand, De Wulf distinguished more sharply than Mercier between the “old” and “new” and, accordingly, accepted more readily that a tradition able to encompass both the “old” and the “new” has moments of discontinuity between past and present. For De Wulf, it was a “blending of the old and new, of tradition and innovation, that is to be characteristic of the new scholasticism – vetera novis augere et perficere.”⁵⁴

IV “The Experience of Being” How successful was the Higher Institute of Philosophy in this attempt to blend the old and the new? The answer depended on to whom the question was addressed. Writing in 1927, Léon Noël was optimistic. Like many other Neo-Scholastics in the interwar period, he enthusiastically observed that metaphysical questions, long suppressed by Kantian criticism, made a return to the philosophical scene, partly due to the impact of World War I. Accordingly, he believed that the prospects of a scholastically inspired metaphysics were bright: “The royal road of scholasticism now lays open for bringing together the modern intellectual spirit and Catholic faith. All the barriers have been pushed away, all the obstacles have been removed.”⁵⁵ Had Neo-Scholastic philosophers in the 1880s felt like

Imbach/Alfonso Maierù (ed.), Gli studi di filosofia medievale fra Otto e Novecento, Rome 1991, 75 – 95, 94.  Indicative of this monumental conception of the medieval past is De Wulf’s favorite comparison of scholastic philosophy to a Gothic cathedral, e. g., in Philosophy and Civilization, 8 – 9, 105, 109 – 111, 241, 285 and Mediaeval Philosophy Illustrated from the System of Thomas Aquinas, Cambridge MA 1922, 3, 6, 126, 148 – 149. For Nietzsche’s notion of monumental history, see Jenkins, Scott, “Nietzsche’s Use of Monumental History,” in: The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 45 (2014): 169 – 181.  De Wulf, Scholasticism Old and New, 207.  Ibid., 217.  Noël, L., “De heropleving van het thomisme,” in: A. W. Van Winckel/F. Van Goethem (ed.), S. Thomas van Aquino: bijdragen over zijn tijd, zijn leer en zijn verheerlijking door de kunst, Hilversum 1927, 114– 128, 128. Similar optimism about a perceived “return to metaphysics” perme-

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lonely pioneers, grossly out of joint with prevailing philosophical thinking, fifty years later they could proudly boast of their “glorious worldview against which the time is powerless.”⁵⁶ The same interwar period, though, witnessed bitter assaults on Neo-Scholasticism as taught in Leuven. The Ghent philosopher Herman De Vleeschauwer, for example, wrote a Schets eener critiek der thomistische wijsbegeerte (1930), in which he condemned Neo-Scholasticism for being “outside of time” and “outside of life.”⁵⁷ Similarly, the Belgian novelist Gerard Walschap, who regarded De Vleeschauwer’s critique as “the most important cultural document in Flanders” to have appeared in years,⁵⁸ published a widely read novel about a bright female student who committed suicide after her dissertation project in Neo-Scholastic philosophy turned out to have estranged her from real life.⁵⁹ Confidence about the Neo-Scholastic tradition among Catholic philosophers thus went hand in hand with skepticism about the suffocating effects of that same tradition among broader groups of Flemish intellectuals.⁶⁰ To some extent, the work of Louis De Raeymaeker, a Leuven-trained philosopher who joined the faculty in 1934 and was soon entrusted with the principal courses in metaphysics, can be read as a response to this ambiguity.⁶¹ De Raeymaeker resembled Mercier and De Wulf in being committed to a philosophia perennis in which metaphysics provides the necessary foundations for ethics and epistemology. Like Noël, he had high expectations of a perceived turn from “criticism” to “realism” and “metaphysics” among philosophers in interwar Europe.⁶² And on top of that, he produced some of the most glowing explanations as to why a Catholic should not be ashamed of being a Neo-Scholastic: “[W]hen we, ated Engert, Joseph, “Metaphysik und Historismus im Christentum,” in: Hochland 21, no. 1 (1923/ 24): 502– 517, 638 – 651 and de Reynold, Gonzague, “Die Rückkehr zum Thomismus in den Ländern französischer Sprache,” in: Hochland 26 no. 2 (1928/29): 34– 47.  Axters, Stephanus, Scholastiek lexicon: Latijn-Nederlandsch, Antwerp 1937, 3.  De Vleeschauwer, H. J., Schets eener critiek der thomistische wijsbegeerte, Ghent 1930, 11.  Gerard Walschap to Herman J. De Vleeschauwer, 15 August 1943, in: Brieven 1921 – 1950, ed. Carla Walschap/Bruno Walschap, Amsterdam 1998, 800 – 801, 800.  Walschap, Gerard, Sibylle, Rotterdam 1938. For a Neo-Scholastic response, see De Petter, D. M., “Wijsgeerige bedenkingen rond ‘het geval Walschap,᾽” in: Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 3 (1941): 277– 289.  Heynickx, Rajesh, Meetzucht en mateloosheid: kunst, religie en identiteit in Vlaanderen tijdens het interbellum, Nijmegen 2008, 160 – 166.  For his biography, see Van Riet, Georges, “In memoriam Monseigneur Louis De Raeymaeker,” in: Revue Philosophique de Louvain 68 (1970): 5 – 10 and Dondeyne, Albert, “Mgr. Louis De Raeymaeker,” in: Aquinas 14 (1971): 247– 256.  De Raeymaeker, Louis, Inleiding tot de wijsbegeerte en het thomisme, Mechelen et al. 1933, 133.

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Catholics, practice philosophy, we feel that we are taking part in a mighty tradition, carried by a wide stream, which finds its origins in Albert and Thomas. We belong to the dynasty of old scholastics and proudly present our patents of nobility, dating from the heyday of Christianity, the thirteenth century.”⁶³ What this rhetoric can easily obscure, however, is that De Raeymaeker’s relation to medieval scholasticism increasingly differed from those of his predecessors. First of all, De Raeymaeker changed the way in which he introduced his students to the world of medieval metaphysics. While his lectures in the 1930s had focused straightforwardly on scholastic understandings of the “concept of being,”⁶⁴ in the 1940s, De Raeymaeker tried to bring his students “into closer contact with concrete reality, especially with our conscious living and existing.”⁶⁵ He therefore started with “the experience of being,” which presents “the problem of being” as soon as human beings begin to reflect on their experience, and raised the question as to whether there is something like an “order of being.”⁶⁶ This was more than just a didactic tool: it had substantial implications for how the nature of philosophical activity was understood. By starting in an almost Cartesian manner with the self and its experience of itself, De Raeymaeker implied that philosophical reflection has an ineluctably personal element to it. Although De Raeymaeker hastened to add that the experience of being is more than personal, given that it is an experience of a world outside the self, which as such is constrained by its object, philosophy is at base a provisional attempt at making sense of this experience – it has no immediate access to the “essence” of things.⁶⁷ This privileged position of experience in De Raeymaeker’s approach to metaphysics marked a difference from De Wulf, especially for what it meant to follow Thomas in a twentieth-century context. Whereas De Wulf had been fond of highlighting the “impersonal” character of scholastic philosophy, De Raeymaeker regretted that Thomas had not been more communicative about his personal experiences of being: “[I]t is permissible to regret that the Angelic Doctor has not left us a description – let us call it a phenomenological one – of the living basis

 De Raeymaeker, Louis, “De philosophie van den H. Albertus den Groote,” in: Collectanea Mechliniensia 7 (1933): 137– 150, 150.  As evidenced by De Raeymaeker, Louis, Ontologie: algemeene metaphysica, Antwerp et al. 1933.  De Raeymaeker, Louis, De metaphysiek van het zijn, Antwerp 1944, 5.  Ibid., 30, 35, 36.  Ibid., 76 – 77. For further analysis, see Verhack, Ignace, “De ‘Metafysiek van het zijn’ opnieuw bekeken,” in: M. Moors/J. Van der Veken (ed.), Naar leeuweriken grijpen: Leuvense opstellen over metafysica, Leuven 1994, 1– 30.

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of his theories.”⁶⁸ For one cannot understand Thomas without reliving “the fundamental experience commanding the activity of philosophic thought of the Angelic Doctor,” as De Raeymaeker explained in a series of 1950s articles.⁶⁹ Consequently, the project of scholastic philosophy cannot simply be continued by comprehending modern scientific “facts” through Aristotelian lenses, as Mercier had argued: [T]he Thomist who surmises the nature and place of the master’s experience, strives to form a similar experience: an experience also quite personal and therefore joined to the temporal and spatial situation of the man who makes it. … [T]he Thomist is a philosopher who, starting from his own experience, discovers the categories and essential theses of the master’s doctrine and who endeavors thereafter to develop his thought along the lines of this doctrine.⁷⁰

In between De Raeymaeker and Mercier, one might argue, stood Wilhelm Dilthey, the German life philosopher whom De Raeymaeker did not hesitate to acknowledge as a source of inspiration.⁷¹ Implied in this “experiential turn” was, in the second place, a growing interest in the historical Thomas. For if experience of being is the beginning of all metaphysics, then what matters is not only the scholastic tradition, but also the individuals who make up this tradition. As early as 1933, therefore, De Raeymaeker included a chapter on “St. Thomas’ life and personality” in his Inleiding tot de wijsbegeerte en tot het thomisme. ⁷² Tellingly, the title of this textbook spoke about “Thomism.” While Mercier and De Wulf had preferred “Neo-Scholastic” over “Neo-Thomist” so as to highlight the impersonal nature of scholastic philosophy, De Raeymaeker’s interest in personal experience led to a change in vocabulary that also affected his concept of tradition. For De Raeymaeker, the scholastic tradition was not an organism or a cathedral-like edifice, but a community of people who, drawing on their own experiences, tried to deepen and enrich Thomas’ philosophy:

 De Raeymaeker, Louis, “What St. Thomas Means Today,” in: The Review of Politics 20 (1958): 3 – 20, 19.  Ibid., 18. See also De Raeymaeker, Louis, “Thomisme als levende filosofie,” in: Tijdschrift voor Philosophie 18 (1956): 3 – 26, 22– 24 and “The Authority of Saint Thomas Aquinas in the Church in Philosophical Matters,” in: The American College Bulletin 36 (1957): 1– 23, 21.  De Raeymaeker, “What St. Thomas Means,” 19.  De Raeymaeker, Louis, “Wat is het ‘wieledenken’?” in: Ons Geloof 26 (1940): 179 – 182, 179 – 180.  De Raeymaeker, Louis, Inleiding tot de wijsbegeerte en het thomisme, Mechelen et al. 1933.

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Who then shall be able to call himself a Thomist, from the philosophical viewpoint of the term? He who, starting from his own personal experience, forges for himself fundamental categories similar to those that St. Thomas discovered on his own, and who personally executes this work of philosophical research in a perspective proper to a man of today, all the while leaning upon the work of the Angelic Doctor in such a way as to extend it and enrich it with new meanings.⁷³

Finally, although especially the young De Raeymaeker did not hesitate to situate himself in a narrative spanning seven centuries of (Neo‐)Thomist philosophy,⁷⁴ the decades since Aeterni Patris and especially the Belgian “revival” of Thomism under Mercier developed into a more important frame of reference than the Thomist tradition in totu. Especially after World War II, De Raeymaeker and his colleagues increasingly identified with what they called the “Leuven school.” They created a Cardinal Mercier chair, among other things, and judged the time ripe for a retrospective on the history of Neo-Scholasticism.⁷⁵ De Raeymaeker himself contributed to such a retrospective with a book-length study of Mercier and the Higher Institute of Philosophy.⁷⁶ Also, when the Revue néo-scolastique was renamed into Revue philosophique de Louvain, Noël explained that the new title better conveyed that the journal identified with a tradition of reviving Thomism known as the “school of Leuven.”⁷⁷ Why did this local tradition grow in significance, sometimes even at the cost of the global one? One answer is that an appeal to the former allowed De Raeymaeker and his colleagues to dissociate themselves on solid authority from what they perceived as “paleo-Thomism” – a pejorative category flexible enough to include various sorts of critics of the increasingly “open Thomism” advocated at Leuven.⁷⁸ Also, just as Mercier had liked to quote selectively from Aeterni Patris, so De Raeymaeker appealed time and again to a selected number of Mercier quotations in order to justify his own, experience-oriented approach to Neo-Thomism – even to the point of implying that Mercier himself had highlighted the fun-

 De Raeymaeker, “Authority of Saint Thomas,” 21.  De Raeymaeker, Inleiding tot de wijsbegeerte, 207– 224.  Van Breda, H. L., “Voorwoord,” in: Edward Lowyck, Substantiële verandering en hylemorphisme: een critische studie over de neo-scholastiek, Leuven 1948, 5 – 6, 5.  De Raeymaeker, Louis, Le Cardinal Mercier et l’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie de Louvain, Leuven 1952.  Noël, L., “[Editorial],” in: Revue philosophique de Louvain 46 (1944), 5*-6*, 6*.  De Raeymaeker, “Thomisme als levende filosofie,” 3; Van Steenberghen, Fernand, Le retour à Saint Thomas a-t-il encore un sens aujourd’hui? Montréal: 1967, 29 – 36. The term originated with Berthier, J.-J., “Le néo-molinisme et le paléo-thomisme: à propos d’un livre du R. P. Frins,” in: Revue thomiste 1 (1893): 83 – 102, 169 – 199, 471– 508.

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damental role of personal experience in philosophy.⁷⁹ It could seem, then, as if De Raeymaeker proposed yet another “scholastic synthesis,” not among the doctors of the Middle Ages, but among Mercier and his successors at the Higher Institute of Philosophy: a synthesis defined by positive commitment to revision and renewal of the Thomist tradition.

V “Models for Our Imitation” To what extent this helped pave the way for a neo-Thomism that Albert Dondeyne, speaking about his own Leuven colleagues, characterized as “more ‘neo’ than ‘Thomist’” does not need to be settled here.⁸⁰ For the purposes of this chapter, it suffices to observe that the tradition in which postwar Leuven philosophers inscribed themselves increasingly became a tradition of negotiating the problem of “tradition.” This problem entailed the challenge of remaining faithful to Thomas, the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition, and/or the Neo-Scholastic movement while engaging in open conversation with the phenomenological, hermeneutical, and existentialist schools of thought that had come to dominate the philosophical scene in postwar continental Europe. Just as “Leuven school” served as shorthand for an attitude of openness towards a Neo-Thomist aggiornamento, so Thomas himself came to be seen as embodying an exemplary “attitude toward tradition,” as De Wulf’s successor, Fernand Van Steenberghen, put it in 1950.⁸¹ Van Steenberghen made this argument in the context of a lecture, appropriately held on St. Thomas Day, which illustrated first and foremost his indebtedness to Mercier, De Wulf, and De Raeymaeker.⁸² Like his predecessors, Van Steenberghen tried to steer a middle course between progressivist disdain for tradition and conservative repetition of the past. Like them, he preferred intellectual “evolution” over “revolution,” although for him, “evolution” no longer carried organi-

 De Raeymaeker, “Thomisme als levende filosofie,” 8.  Dodeyne, Albert, “Rouwhulde bij de plechtige lijkdienst van Monseigneur Louis De Raeymaeker” (1970), KU Leuven, University Library, Albert Dondeyne papers, inv. no. 61, 3.  Van Steenberghen, Fernand, “Thomism in a Changing World,” in: The New Scholasticism 31 (1952): 37– 48, 38.  For his biography, see McEvoy, James/Follon, Jacques/Rosemann, Philipp W., “Vetera novis augere: à la mémoire du chanoine Fernand Van Steenberghen,” in: Bulletin de philosophie médiévale 35 (1993): 254– 258 and Troisfontaines, Claude, “In memoriam Fernand Van Steenberghen (13 février 1904– 16 avril 1993),” in: Revue philosophique de Louvain 91 (1993): 340 – 345.

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cist connotations.⁸³ Also, despite the fact that Van Steenberghen himself was a historian, he followed a classic Leuven line in defining the Neo-Thomist task in systematic terms, as reflection on the philosophical implications of scientific advances in fields as diverse as physics, biology, psychology, and ethnography: “We have a constructive work to accomplish.”⁸⁴ Like De Wulf and De Raeymaeker, finally, Van Steenberghen positioned himself in a local tradition. He liked to quote the vetera novis augere phrase from Aeterni Patris that De Wulf had frequently cited⁸⁵ and followed De Raeymaeker in identifying as a “Thomist” – presumably in part because, as an assistant to De Wulf, he had personally seen how confusing, from an historian’s point of view, the term “scholastic” could be.⁸⁶ Compared to his predecessors, however, Van Steenberghen significantly broadened the tradition in which he inscribed himself. For him, the tradition on which Neo-Thomism in its Leuven version drew was not the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition as distinguished from Neo-Platonic and Augustinian ones, but the entire cultural legacy of the Occident: “[W]e must build on the solid foundation of tradition, philosophical tradition, theological tradition, humanistic tradition, cultural tradition.”⁸⁷ If Van Steenberghen urged twentieth-century philosophers not to neglect “the treasures of experience and wisdom accumulated by so many generations,” he did not refer to scholasticism in particular, but to a legacy as broad as “the roots of our human and Christian culture.”⁸⁸ If “tradition” came to denote such a polyphonic legacy, then loyalty to the tradition could no longer be a matter of doctrinal continuity. Van Steenberghen therefore redefined respect for tradition in analogical terms. Whenever he reflected on the tasks and challenges of twentieth-century Thomists, he pointed to analogies between the thirteenth and the twentieth century or between Thomas and Catholic philosophers in the 1950s. Just as Thomas had respected the wisdom of the ancients, so twentieth-century thinkers would be wise not to neglect the heritage of ancient and medieval philosophy. Just as Thomas had tried to bring philosophical speculation into accord with the science of his day, so mod Van Steenberghen, “Thomism in a Changing World,” 41.  Ibid., 47.  Van Steenberghen, Le retour à Saint Thomas, 41.  Van Steenberghen, Fernand, “L’interprétation de la pensée médiévale au cours du siècle écoulé,” in: Revue philosophique de Louvain 49 (1951): 108 – 119, 117.  Van Steenberghen, “Thomism in a Changing World,” 40.  Ibid. This analogy became a recurring theme in Van Steenberghen’s later work. See, e. g., “Homélie prononcée par M. le Chanoine F. Van Steenberghen au cours de la messe célébrée en l’honneur de saint Thomas,” in: Hommage à Monsieur le Chanoine Fernand Van Steenberghen, professeur à l’Université catholique de Louvain, à l’occasion de son 70e anniversaire, 10 mars 1974, Leuven 1974, 9 – 11, 10.

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ern Thomists would need to study symbolic logic, sociology, and mathematics. “What St. Thomas did for his century, we, his disciples, must try to do for ours. We must rethink all the problems, in the light of tradition, no doubt, but with our eyes on the new situations and needs of our times.”⁸⁹ Thomas, by implication, became a role model characterized by virtues such as “love of truth” and “esteem for tradition.”⁹⁰ More than any Leuven philosopher before him, Van Steenberghen emphasized Thomas’ personal example, in line with which he consistently referred to him as a “saint.” Typically, when De Raeymaeker held up Thomas’ love of truth, sincerity, loyalty, and humility as virtues worthy of imitation, he added that “to have the right to call oneself a Thomist, it does not suffice to take St. Thomas as a model in the sense described.”⁹¹ More important, for De Raeymaeker, was adherence to Thomas’ philosophy, inspired by a reliving of Thomas’ experience of being. Van Steenberghen, however, reversed the relation between doctrine and example: “The Church did not content herself with giving us St. Thomas’ doctrine; she has given St. Thomas himself as a patron to us …”⁹² With reference to a favorite proof text for doctrinal revisionism – “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (2 Cor. 3:6) – Van Steenberghen therefore proposed to focus, not on the letter of the Summa, but on “the spirit of our master” – a spirit embodied in virtues of “upright intention” and “genuine selflessness in the search for truth.”⁹³ In Van Steenberghen’s reconfiguration, then, the Thomist tradition became a praxeological one, populated with models of how to be an epistemically virtuous philosopher.

VI Conclusion What does this tour through three quarters of a century of reflection on the nature of the Thomist tradition reveal about the adequacy of Gerald McCool’s narrative scheme? A first observation is that McCool’s criticism of Neo-Scholasticism for its lack of historical sensitivity resembles arguments put forward in the interwar period by figures like Walschap and De Vleeschauwer, both of whom perceived Neo-Scholasticism as a “timeless” philosophical system, which as such displayed an “old-fashioned” disinterest in the historical situatedness of philo    

Van Steenberghen, “Thomism in a Changing World,” 45. Ibid., 47. De Raeymaeker, “What St. Thomas Means,” 18. Van Steenberghen, “Thomism in a Changing World,” 38. Ibid., 44, 48.

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sophical thinking. If this counted already by the 1930s as a serious flaw, a failing appreciation for the “historicity” of human thought came to be regarded as an unpardonable vice especially after the period covered in this chapter, when existentialist-inspired faculty members like Albert Dondeyne placed “historicity” high on the agenda of Leuven’s Higher Institute of Philosophy.⁹⁴ So, if McCool depicts Neo-Scholasticism prior to the 1960s as an exercise in ahistorical system building, this is, in fact, an actor’s view.⁹⁵ This does not imply that McCool’s perspective is devoid of interpretive capacity. As shown above, a figure like De Wulf was grappling all his life with growing tensions between detailed historical research and what he called a “scholastic synthesis.” As such, De Wulf offers a vivid illustration of what McCool perceives as a reluctance among Neo-Scholastic philosophers to privilege historical accuracy over systematic coherence. From this it does not follow, however, that De Wulf defended a timeless “system” or conceived of “history” only in negative terms. To the contrary, even more than Mercier, De Wulf felt the distance that separated him from the age of Thomas – a distance not only in time, but also in mentalities. None of the Leuven philosophers examined in this chapter even remotely tried to conceal this distance.⁹⁶ They all added, how With reference to Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice MerleauPonty, Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, and others, Albert Dondeyne lectured widely on “historicity” and “philosophy of history.” See KU Leuven, University Library, Albert Dondeyne papers, inv. no. 305, “Existentialisme en godsaffirmatie” (15 October 1950); inv. no. 325, “De historiciteit in de moderne existentiële wijsbegeerte” (8 October 1955); inv. no. 326, “De mens en zijn geschiedenis” (undated). In the same early 1950s, the Philosophical Society of Leuven devoted a conference to philosophy of history, while Karel Bellon and Henri-Irénée Marrou, among others, were invited to the Institute to address the relation between philosophy of history and scholastic metaphysics: Wylleman, A., “Studiedagen van het ‘Wijsgerig Gezelschap te Leuven’ (6 and 7 April),” in: Tijdschrift voor Philosophie 13 (1951): 358 – 362; [n/a] “Voordrachten,” in: Mededelingen van het Wijsgerig Gezelschap te Leuven 3 (1952), 4*; [n/a] “De Kardinaal Mercier-leerstoel aan het Instituut,” Ibid., 5* – 6*. Finally, it is worth noting that by the 1960s, philosophy of history was seen as an appropriate teaching subject for a special chair in Thomist philosophy that the Institute helped create in Singapore. See Université Catholique de Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve), Louis De Raeymaeker papers, inv. no. 59, course outline (15 January 1965).  For similar criticism, see Cessario, Romanus, “An Observation on Robert Lauder’s Review of G. A. McCool, S. J.,” in: The Thomist 56 (1992): 701– 710.  As such, the Leuven Neo-Scholastics distinguished themselves from more conservative (“strict observance”) Neo-Thomists, especially in Italy, where figures such as Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange and the aforementioned Francesco Olgiati, partly in response to the perceived dangers of “modernist” thinking, read Thomas through hermeneutical lenses that left considerably less space for considerations of context and change over time. See Cenacchi, “Agostino Gemelli” and Peddicord, Richard, The Sacred Monster of Thomism: An Introduction to the Life and Legacy of Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., South Bend 2005, esp. 119 – 135.

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ever, that past-present relations become empty if discontinuity is all what can said about them. Accordingly, they reflected, each in their own way, on how continuity and discontinuity could be thought together or, more concretely, on what loyalty to a philosophical past could mean if that past turned out to differ significantly from the present. In other words, what Leuven philosophers from Mercier to Van Steenberghen had in common was that they tried to steer a middle course between a denial of historicity (continuity is all there is) and an exaggerated emphasis on it (discontinuity is all there is). The thesis put forward in this chapter is that they did so in terms of “tradition.” While “historicity” and “philosophy of history” entered the classrooms of Leuven’s Higher Institute of Philosophy only in the 1950s, “tradition” was the category through which Leuven philosophers from the 1880s to the 1950s reflected on their past-present relations. Although “tradition,” from the late 1950s onwards, acquired connotations of dogmatism and static-mindedness in societies that liked to conceive of themselves as “post-traditional,”⁹⁷ it would be distorting to project these connotations back on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If this chapter has shown anything, it is that “tradition” in the hands of Mercier, De Wulf, De Raeymaeker, and Van Steenberghen allowed for various sorts of dynamism. While all four men underscored the need for tradition, they defined this concept in different ways, even to such an extent that the doctrinal continuity highlighted by Mercier became near-absent in Van Steenberghen. “Tradition” was therefore not synonymous to a denial of “history” but, to the contrary, an answer to the question what loyalty to Thomas and his interpreters across the centuries could mean in the light of fundamental dissimilarities between the thirteenth and the twentieth centuries.⁹⁸

 A term popularized by Walt Rostow, among others, in The Stages of Economic Growth: A NonCommunist Manifesto, Cambridge 1960 before it became associated with Robert Bellah and, especially, Shmuel Eisenstadt.  This chapter is based on research conducted during a summer stay at the KU Leuven, where I enjoyed the hospitality of the research unit Cultural History since 1750. I thank Jo Tollebeek for his friendship and help, Agnès Desmazières, Rajesh Heynickx, Carlos Steel, and Kaat Wils for stimulating conversations, library staff at the KU Leuven and the Université Catholique de Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve) for kind assistance with archival material, and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for generous funding.

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References [n/a], “Voordrachten,” in Mededekingen van het Wijsgerig Gezelschap te Leuven 3 (1952), 4*. [n/a], “De Kardinaal Mercier-leerstoel aan het Institute,” in: Mededelingen van het Wijsgerig Gezelschap te Leuven 3 (1952). [n/a], Université Catholique de Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve), Louis De Raeymaeker papers, inv. no. 59, course outline (15 January 1965). Axters, Stephanus, Scholastiek lexicon: Latijn-Nederlandsch, Antwerp 1937. Berthier, J.-J., “Le néo-molinisme et le paléo-thomisme: à propos d’un livre du R. P. Frins,” in: Revue thomiste 1 (1893): 83 – 102, 169 – 199, 471 – 508. Besse, C., Deux centres du mouvement thomiste: Rome et Louvain, Paris 1902. Van Breda, H. L., “Voorwoord,” in: Edward Lowyck, Substantiële verandering en hylemorphisme: een critische studie over de neo-scholastiek, Leuven 1948, 5 – 6. Cenacchi, Giuseppe, “Agostino Gemelli (1878 – 1959) und Francesco Olgiati (1886 – 1962),” in: Emerich Coreth/Walter M. Neidl/Georg Pfligersdorffer (ed.), Christliche Philosophie im katholischen Denken des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, vol. 2, Graz et al. 1988, 702 – 711. Cessario, Romanus, “An Observation on Robert Lauder’s Review of G. A. McCool, S. J.,” in: The Thomist 56 (1992): 701 – 710. Ch. Gabriel [pseudonym of Gabriel Charmes], Untitled article on Aeterni Patris, in: Journal des débats politiques et littéraires (19 August 1879). Coffey, P., “Philosophy and the Sciences at Louvain,” in: The Irish Ecclesiastical Record 17 (1905): 385 – 408, 485 – 516. Coreth, Emerich, “Schulrichtungen neuscholastischer Philosophie,” in: Emerich Coreth/Walter M. Neidl/Georg Pfligersdorffer (ed.), Christliche Philosophie im katholischen Denken des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, vol. 2, Graz et al. 1988, 397 – 410. Dodeyne, Albert, “Existentialisme en godsaffirmatie” (15 October 1950), KU Leuven, University Library, Albert Dondeyne papers, inv. no. 305. Dodeyne, Albert, “De historiciteit in de moderne existentiële wijsbegeerte” (8 October 1955), KU Leuven, University Library, Albert Dondeyne papers, inv. no. 325. Dodeyne, Albert, “Rouwhulde bij de plechtige lijkdienst van Monseigneur Louis De Raeymaeker” (1970), KU Leuven, University Library, Albert Dondeyne papers, inv. no. 61. Dondeyne, Albert, “Mgr. Louis De Raeymaeker,” in: Aquinas 14 (1971): 247 – 256. Dodeyne, Albert, “De mens en zijn geschiedenis” (undated), KU Leuven, University Library, Albert Dondeyne papers, inv. no. 326. Engert, Joseph, “Metaphysik und Historismus im Christentum,” in: Hochland 21, no. 1 (1923/24): 502 – 517, 638 – 651. Gilson, Etienne, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, London 1955. Heynickx, Rajesh, Meetzucht en mateloosheid: kunst, religie en identiteit in Vlaanderen tijdens het interbellum, Nijmegen 2008. Inglis, John, Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy, Leiden et al. 1998. Jenkins, Scott, “Nietzsche’s Use of Monumental History,” in: The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 45 (2014): 169 – 181. La Piana, George, “Recent Tendencies in Roman Catholic Theology,” in: The Harvard Theological Review 15 (1922): 233 – 292.

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Ladrière, Jean, “One Hundred Years of Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy,” in: David A. Boileau/John A. Dick (ed.), Tradition and Renewal: Philosophical Essays Commemorating the Centennial of Louvain’s Institute of Philosophy, Leuven 1993, 41 – 78. Leo XIII, “The Pope’s Encyclical,” in: The Catholic World 30 (1879-1880): 111 – 131. Lonergan, Bernard J. F., “A New Pastoral Theology” (1973), in: Lonergan, Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1965 – 1980, Robert C. Croken/Robert M. Doran (ed.), Toronto et al. 2004, 221 – 239. Lonergan, Bernard J. F., “The Scope of Renewal” (1973), in: Lonergan, Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1965 – 1980, Robert C. Croken/Robert M. Doran (ed.), Toronto et al. 2004, 282 – 298. McCool, Gerald A., From Unity to Pluralism: The Internal Evolution of Thomism, New York 1989. McCool, Gerald A., The Neo-Thomists, Milwaukee 2003. McEvoy, James/Follon, Jacques/Rosemann, Philipp W., “Vetera novis augere: à la mémoire du chanoine Fernand Van Steenberghen,” in: Bulletin de philosophie médiévale 35 (1993): 254 – 258. Mercier, Désiré, “Opening Discourse for the Course on St. Thomas’ Philosophy” (1882), in: David A. Boileau (ed.), Cardinal Mercier: A Memoir, Leuven 1996: 296 – 313. Mercier, Désiré, “The Creation of the Higher School of Philosophy at the University of Louvain” (1889), in: David A. Boileau (ed.), Cardinal Mercier: A Memoir, Leuven 1996, 314 – 322. Mercier, Désiré, “Neo-Scholastic Philosophy” (1894), in: David A. Boileau (ed.), Cardinal Mercier: A Memoir, Leuven 1996, 361 – 367. Mercier, Désiré, “The Philosophical Assessment of the Nineteenth Century” (1900), in: David A. Boileau (ed.), Cardinal Mercier: A Memoir, Leuven 1996, 323 – 343. Mercier, Désiré, “Talk Delivered by Msgr. Mercier on the 2nd of December, 1894,” in: David A. Boileau (ed.), Cardinal Mercier’s Philosophical Essays, Essays: A Study in Neo-Thomism, Leuven 2002, 253 – 266. Mercier, Désiré/Van Weddingen, A., “Leo XIII and the Restoration of Philosophical Studies” (1888), in: David A. Boileau (ed.), Cardinal Mercier’s Philosophical Essays: A Study in Neo-Thomism, Leuven 2002, 55 – 120. Noël, L., “De heropleving van het thomisme,” in: A. W. Van Winckel/F. Van Goethem (ed.), S. Thomas van Aquino: bijdragen over zijn tijd, zijn leer en zijn verheerlijking door de kunst, Hilversum 1927, 114 – 128. Noël, L., [Editorial], in: Revue philosophique de Louvain 46 (1944): 5* – 6*. Noone, Timothy, “Medieval Scholarship and Philosophy in the Last One Hundred Years,” in: Brian J. Shanley (ed.), One Hundred Years of Philosophy, Washington, DC 2001, 111 – 132. Paul, Herman, “Who Suffered from the Crisis of Historicism? A Dutch Example,” in: History and Theory 49 (2010): 169 – 193. Paul, Herman, “Relations to the Past: A Research Agenda for Historical Theorists,” in: Rethinking History 19 (2015): 450 – 458. Peddicord, Richard, The Sacred Monster of Thomism: An Introduction to the Life and Legacy of Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., South Bend 2005. De Petter, D. M., “Wijsgeerige bedenkingen rond ‘het geval Walschap,᾽” in: Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 3 (1941): 277 – 289.

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Phillips, Mark Salber, On Historical Distance, New Haven 2013. De Raeymaeker, Louis, “De philosophie van den H. Albertus den Groote,” in: Collectanea Mechliniensia 7 (1933): 137 – 150. De Raeymaeker, Louis, Inleiding tot de wijsbegeerte en het thomisme, Mechelen et al. 1933. De Raeymaeker, Louis, Ontologie: algemeene metaphysica, Antwerp et al. 1933. De Raeymaeker, Louis, “Wat is het ‘wieledenken’?” in: Ons Geloof 26 (1940): 179 – 182. De Raeymaeker, Louis, De metaphysiek van het zijn, Antwerp 1944. De Raeymaeker, Louis, Le Cardinal Mercier et l’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie de Louvain, Leuven 1952. De Raeymaeker, Louis, “Thomisme als levende filosofie,” in: Tijdschrift voor Philosophie 18 (1956): 3 – 26. De Raeymaeker, Louis, “The Authority of Saint Thomas Aquinas in the Church in Philosophical Matters,” in: The American College Bulletin 36 (1957): 1 – 23. De Raeymaeker, Louis, “What St. Thomas Means Today,” in: The Review of Politics 20 (1958): 3 – 20. de Reynold, Gonzague, “Die Rückkehr zum Thomismus in den Ländern französischer Sprache,” in: Hochland 26 no. 2 (1928/29): 34 – 47. Van Riet, Georges, “In memoriam Monseigneur Louis De Raeymaeker,” in: Revue Philosophique de Louvain 68 (1970): 5 – 10. Van Riet, Georges, “Cardinal Désiré Mercier (1851 – 1926) and the Institute of Philosophy of Louvain,” in: David A. Boileau/John A. Dick (ed.), Tradition and Renewal: Philosophical Essays Commemorating the Centennial of Louvain’s Institute of Philosophy, Leuven 1993, 1 – 39. Rostow, Walt, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, Cambridge 1960. Steel, Carlos, “Aquinas and the Renewal of Philosophy: Some Observations on the Thomism of Désiré Mercier,” in: David A. Boileau/John A. Dick (ed.), Tradition and Renewal: Philosophical Essays Commemorating the Centennial of Louvain’s Institute of Philosophy, Leuven 1992, 181 – 215. Steel, Carlos, “From Siger of Brabant to Erasmus: Philosophy and Civilization in the Late Medieval Low Countries,” in: Kent Emery, Jr./Russell L. Friedman/Andreas Speer (ed.), Philosophy and Theology in the Long Middle Ages: A Tribute to Stephen F. Brown, Leiden et al. 2011, 953 – 979. Van Steenberghen, Fernand, “Maurice De Wulf: historien de la philosophie médiévale (1867 – 1947),” in: Revue philosophique de Louvain 46 (1948): 421 – 447. Van Steenberghen, Fernand, “L’interprétation de la pensée médiévale au cours du siècle écoulé,” in: Revue philosophique de Louvain 49 (1951): 108 – 119. Van Steenberghen, Fernand, “Thomism in a Changing World,” in: The New Scholasticism 31 (1952): 37 – 48. Van Steenberghen, Fernand, Le retour à Saint Thomas a-t-il encore un sens aujourd’hui? Montréal 1967. Van Steenberghen, Fernand, “Homélie prononcée par M. le Chanoine F. Van Steenberghen au cours de la messe célébrée en l’honneur de saint Thomas,” in: Hommage à Monsieur le Chanoine Fernand Van Steenberghen, professeur à l’Université catholique de Louvain, à l’occasion de son 70e anniversaire, 10 mars 1974, Leuven 1974, 9 – 11.

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Van Steenberghen, Fernand, “Maurice De Wulf (1867 – 1947),” in: Helen Damico (ed.), Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, New York et al. (2000), 43 – 53. Tredici, G./Necchi, L./Olgiati, Fr./Gemelli, A., “Una discussione intorno alla criteriologia di Lovanio,” in: Revista di filosofia neo-scolastica 4 (1914): 335 – 341. Troisfontaines, Claude, “In memoriam Fernand Van Steenberghen (13 février 1904 – 16 avril 1993),” in: Revue philosophique de Louvain 91 (1993): 340 – 345. Turner, William, “Review of Scholasticism Old and New by M. De Wulf,” in: The Philosophical Review 17 (1908): 427 – 432. Verhack, Ignace, “De ‘Metafysiek van het zijn’ opnieuw bekeken,” in: M. Moors/J. Van der Veken (ed.), Naar leeuweriken grijpen: Leuvense opstellen over metafysica, Leuven 1994, 1 – 30. De Vleeschauwer, H. J., Schets eener critiek der thomistische wijsbegeerte, Ghent 1930. Walschap, Gerard, Sibylle, Rotterdam 1938. Walschap, Gerard, Letter to Herman J. De Vleeschauwer (15 August 1943), in: Brieven 1921 – 1950, ed. Carla Walschap/Bruno Walschap, Amsterdam 1998, 800 – 801. White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Baltimore 1973. Wielockx, Robert, “De Mercier à De Wulf: débuts de l’École de Louvain,” in: Ruedi Imbach/Alfonso Maierù (ed.), Gli studi di filosofia medievale fra Otto e Novecento, Rome 1991, 75 – 95. De Wulf, Maurice, Histoire de la philosophie médiévale, Leuven et al. 1900. De Wulf, Maurice, Scholasticism Old and New: An Introduction to Scholastic Philosophy, Medieval and Modern, transl. P. Coffey, Dublin et al. 1907. De Wulf, Maurice, “Western Philosophy and Theology in the Thirteenth Century,” in: The Harvard Theological Review 11 (1918): 409 – 432. De Wulf, Maurice, Mediaeval Philosophy Illustrated from the System of Thomas Aquinas, Cambridge MA. 1922. De Wulf, Maurice, Philosophy and Civilization in the Middle Ages, Princeton 1922. Wylleman, A., “Studiedagen van het ‘Wijsgerig Gezelschap te Leuven’ (6 and 7 April),” in: Tijdschrift voor Philosophie 13 (1951): 358 – 362.

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Thomas Aquinas or John Henry Newman? The Intellectual Itinerary of Johannes Willebrands In the eyes of contemporary Church historians, Johannes Willebrands (1909 – 2006) is a well-known figure. Instead of choosing to investigate already well known elements of his oeuvre, which has consisted largely of promoting ecumenical dialogue, this article aims to analyse his much lesser known early years. Therefore, our topic will be this: born in 1909, educated throughout the 1920s in the Minor Seminary of the Dutch Redemptorist province and subsequently at Warmond, the Major Seminary of the diocese of Haarlem, Willebrands was trained – as were so many priestly candidates of his generation – in the general framework of Neo-Scholasticism. This was even reinforced at the moment when he enrolled in the doctoral study program of Thomist philosophy at the University of St. Thomas in Rome, also known as the Angelicum. At first glance, Willebrands’s philosophical and theological curriculum reveals nothing in particular, however, what remains important is the fact that it was his generation that would increasingly abandon its neo-Thomist roots for other paradigms of thought. The same is true for this trainee in philosophy, who, along the lines of his educational trajectory discovered the writings of John Henry Newman. The effect of this discovery would prove to be pertinent, and would last until his later career as a pioneer of Christian unity¹. Of particular interest at this juncture was the fact that his study of Newman’s epistemology brought about a profound shift, enabling him to adopt a critical stance towards the neo-Thomist study program of his youth. The aim of this study is to carefully retrace the steps of this philosophical itinerary, and to examine how abandoning the neoThomist apparatus arose. While not a pars pro toto, Willebrands’s particular story may help to illustrate the development and struggle of many intellectually

 A brief glance at the inventory of Willebrands’s personal archives immediately illustrates the importance of Newman in his life and work. See Declerck, Leo, Inventaire des archives personnelles du Cardinal J. Willebrands, secrétaire et président du Secrétariat pour l’Unité des Chrétiens, Leuven 2013 (henceforth ‘Archives Willebrands’). We may also refer to the bibliography of Cardinal Willebrands, compiled by ter Steeg, Maria, “Bibliography Johannes Cardinal Willebrands,” in: Adelbert Denaux/Peter De Mey (ed.), The ecumenical Legacy of Johannes Cardinal Willebrands, Leuven 2013, 331– 367. Also, see Merrigan, Terrence, “The Enduring Influence of Newman on Willebrands’ Ecumenical Views,” in: idem., 31– 47. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110588255-014

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skilled young Catholics of his generation, who found themselves caught between the modernist crisis and the renewals of Vatican II. Before retracing Willebrands’s journey, we will begin by sketching out a broad thematic horizon to clarify how the tensions between Newmanian and Thomist thinking developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I A Suspicious Reference Point The so-called ‘modernist crisis’ is unavoidable as a cantus firmus to the tale told in this contribution: it is clear the conflict between the neo-Thomist paradigm and other alternatives that emerged in the Interbellum has its roots with the crisis of modernism that shook the Catholic intellectual elite in the first decades of the twentieth century. Although the link between the Victorian theologian John Henry Newman and the event of the Second Vatican Council may seem remote, this is all but the case. Newman’s oeuvre is consistently said to have had a profound impact on the Second Vatican Council (1962– 1965).² Naturally, this claim ought to be received with some skepticism on the part of the historian. At the very least, one should acknowledge that any influence of Newman on Vatican II would have necessarily been an indirect or mediated influence. Here the generations of Catholics that lived and worked between the nineteenth century and the conciliar era must have played a decisive role. Strikingly, a wide array of Catholic intellectuals molded by the discourse of neo-Thomism had rediscovered and received Newman in their own age and for their own purposes. Here, one may think of important theologians such as Romano Guardini, Yves Congar, and Louis Bouyer.³ Only through this lense can an understanding of Newman’s impact on the council be studied. Yet this contribution will not go that far. We will limit ourselves strictly to the reception of Newman in the first half of the twentieth century, and the way in which this reception clashed with the prevailing models of Catholic thought. It should not surprise us then, that from very early on, Newman was considered a ‘dangerous’ influence on Catholic trainees in theology and philosophy. The origins of this suspicion can be traced back to the second half of the nineteenth century. Already in the 1840s, a first French translation of the

 Lash, Nicholas, “Newman and Vatican II,” in New Blackfriars 92 (2011): 243 – 246.  Cf. Nichols, Aidan, From Newman to Congar. The Idea of Doctrinal Development from the Victorians to the Second Vatican Council, Edinburgh 1990.

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Essay on Development ⁴ was published in Paris, marking a decisive step toward the continental reception of Newman. Throughout the next decades this reception would face serious obstacles within Roman Catholic intellectual milieu’s, because of the dynamic approach of divine revelation and truth developed by Newman,⁵ and certainly because he seemed a stranger to the continental Catholic philosophy so marked by the spread of the neo-Thomism of the Roman School. The latter would become very influential and was promoted by a Catholic hierarchy seeking to install a uniform brand of Catholicism. When in the first decades of the twentieth century the modernist crisis tended to challenge neo-Thomism through an emphasis on the importance of historical and empirical sciences, Newman’s epistemology was quickly associated with so-called ‘modernist’ tendencies. There is no doubt that several so-called modernist theologians in the first decades of the twentieth century saw Newman as a source of inspiration in their striving toward a Catholicism that ought to take historical contingency seriously.⁶ Frequently influenced by Paul-Thureau Dangin’s study of Newman⁷ authors such as Alfred Loisy discovered a type of theological discourse that appeared to escape the deductive and a-historical methodologies so key to neoThomist manuals in the early twentieth century. Gradually, Newman became an alternative to neo-Thomism. Or, seen from a different angle, Newman was also regarded as a threat to neo-Thomist philosophy and theology. His reputation did not improve when prolific authors such as Alfred Loisy (e. g. in his notorious book L’Évangile et l’Église) started making explicit references to Newman’s writings to warrant their rejection of the lack of historical consciousness in Catholic theology.⁸ Loisy was not alone. Other prominent voices such as George Tyrrell,

 Newman, John Henry, Histoire du développement de la doctrine chrétienne ou motifs de retour à l’église catholique, transl. Jules Gondon, Paris 1848. Gondon’s French translation received ample praise from the side of the famous liberal catholic Parisian archbishop Darboy. See Darboy, Georges, “M. Newman,” in: Le Correspondant 29 (10 Jan. 1852): 385 – 407.  Cf. Meszaros, Andrew, “A Theology of History and Doctrinal Development according to J.H. Newman and Y. Congar,” Dissertation, Leuven 2014.  Daly, Gabriel, “Newman, Divine Revelation, and the Catholic Modernists,” in: Terrence Merrigan/Ian Ker (ed.), Newman and the Word, Leuven 2000, 49 – 68.  Thureau-Dangin, Paul, La renaissance catholique en Angleterre au XIXe siècle, Paris 1903. The Oratorian friar Louis Bouyer, who played a considerable role in Willebrands’ turn toward Newmanian thinking, has described Thureau-Dangin’s study as one of “the best pieces of religious history which have appeared in the last fifty years.” See Bouyer, Louis, “Newman’s Influence in France,” in: The Dublin Review 217 (1945): 182– 188.  Cf. Lash, Nicholas, Newman on Development. The Search of Explanation in History, London 1975, 147; Lash, Nicholas, “Newman and A. Firmin,” in: Arthur Hilary Jenkins (ed.), John

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Henri Brémond and Édouard Le Roy,⁹ drew on Newman as a source of inspiration.¹⁰ A recent study on Newman by Andrew Meszaros puts it as follows: On the theological level, the modernists see in Newman a figure seriously attempting to confront the problems posed to Christian faith by historical criticism. Both the Anglican and Catholic apologists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century generally subscribed to a kind of semper eadem conception of revelation. Newman’s Essay on Development was the beginning, in Catholic intellectual circles, of an effort to confront the inadequacy of this conception of revelation and doctrine.¹¹

This inadequacy touched upon the core of neo-Thomism itself. While many defenders of the Thomist tradition fostered an a priori suspicion of Newman’s doctrines, the flipside of the coin was that those Catholic intellectuals on the lookout for renewal often turned into staunch defenders of Newman. Some names have already been mentioned for the French speaking territories, but the same was true for the Low Countries. Eminent Catholic intellectuals of the pre-Vatican II era, such as Willem Hendrik van de Pol, Paul Sobry, Adrian J. Boekraad,¹² Jan Hendrik Walgrave, Johannes Hermanus Gunning and Cornelia de Vogel have all been deeply influenced by their reading of the Victorian age theologian. It is precisely here that the story of Willebrands fits in. In what follows we will first briefly retrace Willebrands’s earliest educational curriculum to pinpoint the origins of his discovery of Newman. Then, we will focus on the way in which Willebrands’s own intellectual itinerary gradually moves away from the Neo-Scholastic framework he fostered in his formative years, under the influence of Newman. Henry Newman and Modernism, Sigmaringendorf 1990, 56 – 73. Burke, Ronald, “Was Loisy Newman’s Disciple?” in: Mary Jo Weaver (ed.), Newman and the Modernists, Lanham MD 1985.  Tyrrell went as far as calling Newman, at least on the level of method, ‘the father of the Modernists’. See Loome, Thomas Michael, Liberal Catholicism, Reform Catholicism, Modernism, Mainz 1979. See Le Roy, Édouard, Dogme et critique, Paris 1907, 285. Also, see Léonce de Grandmaison’s study from this period, entitled “John Henry Newman considérée comme maître,” in: Études 109 (1906): 721– 750. For an historical approach, see Talar, Charles, “Newman in France during the Modernist Period. Pierre Batiffol and Marcel Hébert,” in: Newman Studies Journal 2/1 (2005): 45 – 57.  Poulat, Émile, Histoire, dogme, et critique dans la crise moderniste, Tournai 1962, and more recently Jodock, Darrell e.a. (ed.), Catholicism contending with Modernity. Roman Catholic Modernism and Anti-Modernism in Historical Context, Cambridge 2000.  Meszaros, “A Theology of History and Doctrinal Development,” 5.  An outstanding introduction is found in Boekraad, Adrian J., Kerngedachten van John Henry Newman, Roermond 1966. It is worthwhile to read his review of Newman’s epistemology, and the interpretation of it given by Przywara, Erich, “Aristotelische Erkenntnislehre bei Whately und Newman,” in: Philosophical Studies 11 (1961– 1962): 174– 178.

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II Carefully Selected Sermons Repeated The story of Willebrands discovering the writings of John Henry Newman is frequently connected to the book published by Nico Greitemann, one of Willebrands’s professors at the Major Seminary of Warmond. In his later memoirs, Greitemann proudly claimed to be the first to have triggered Willebrands into reading Newman.¹³ This is not entirely correct. The earliest seeds were sown before his time at Warmond, and can be traced back to the mid-1920s, when Willebrands attended the Minor Seminary of the Redemptorist Congregation, located in the small Limburg village of Vaals. After listening to a popular retreat preached by two Redemptorists, the twelve-year-old Willebrands decided to follow their path, and with permission of his parents he left his West Frisian home town of Bovenkarspel to be educated for six years in Roermond and Vaals. The Redemptorist Minor Seminary in the 1920s stood fully in the tradition of late nineteenth century Catholic education, and inherited the spirit of Ultramontanism. While students were immersed in traditional Neo-Scholastic principles without being explicitly aware of it, the staff members were all too conscious of this option, seeing as they had all been obliged to sign the anti-modernist oath. This was not a remote issue, since the modernist crisis had also struck the Netherlands. This occurred in the form of an integrist campaign led by the editor of De Maasbode, Maria Anthonius Thompson, who had charged several theologians of holding modernist sympathies and of betraying the neo-Thomist philosophy promoted by the hierarchy.¹⁴ So, Willebrands and his peers were raised with the awareness that the two major sources of religious inspiration were Thomas Aquinas and Alphonse of Liguori. Proper to their particular vocation, the Redemptorists placed a strong emphasis on the literary and rhetorical formation of future preachers. Concretely, minor seminarians were trained in preaching by learning to recite classic sermons by heart. Notwithstanding the fact that the younger generation of teachers started mocking the ‘old ways’ – they ironically explained their own congregation’s abbreviation (C.Ss.R.) as ‘carefully selected sermons repeated’ –, students such as Willebrands were still molded in the classic way, and learned a collection of sermons by heart. The same principle was applied in the English course

 Greitemann, Nico, Op zoek naar de tweede onschuld, Baarn 1981, 76  For a broad study of modernism in the Low Countries see: Kenis, Leo/Van der Wal, Ernestine (ed.), Religious Modernism in the Low Countries, Leuven 2013. Also, see Frijhoff, Willem/Spies, Marijke, Dutch Culture in a European Perspective. 1900, the Age of Bourgeois Culture, Basingstoke 2004, 384.

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thought by Father Willem Reiring. It was there that Willebrands first encountered Newman, through the study of his complex and rich sermon entitled The Second Spring. ¹⁵ This first encounter made a lasting impression on Willebrands, who was touched, not by the theological or epistemological bearing of Newman’s words, but rather by the rhetorical quality and style of these words. In 1927 Willebrands completed his curriculum as a Minor Seminarian, and momentarily entered the Redemptorist novitiate. The stay was only brief, however, as he decided to leave the religious congregation after seven months. After a short period of doubt, he then entered the Major Seminary of Warmond to pursue his ecclesial path in the ranks of the secular clergy.¹⁶

III Newman versus Aquinas It was at Warmond that an entirely different engagement with the Newman’s oeuvre would emerge. In a much more explicit manner than in Vaals, neo-Thomist philosophy was taught here in the line of cardinal Mercier’s Manual of Modern Scholastic Philosophy. Seminarians were continually introduced to the teachings of the Angelic Doctor and in the philosophy of Aristotle.¹⁷ In this environment, Willebrands proved to be an excellent student, who soon wrote several essays on the centrality of Aristotelian philosophy for the veracity of Catholic thought. He quickly made the jargon of Neo-Scholasticism his own, and could be caught writing phrases such as these: Aristotle has launched the proposition which is fundamental to his entire philosophical framework, and which has remained the firm basis for the philosophy of Saint Thomas, i. e. the new, profound and uniquely satisfying solution of all philosophical problems: there exists a being in potentiality and a being in actuality, and both contain the full reality of being, be it in analogical sense.¹⁸

 On Reiring and the educational training at the Redemptorist’s Collegium Josephinum, see the materials in the Erfgoedcentrum Nederlands Kloosterleven, Archief redemptoristen, 5083: Codex chronicorum Vaals.  The details behind Willebrands leaving the novitiate are explained in Schelkens, Karim, “De l’inventaire à la vie. Quelques réflexions préparatoires à une biographie du Cardinal Willebrands,” in: Declerck, Inventaire des archives personnelles du Cardinal J. Willebrands, 17– 20.  Willebrands recalls this much later, in 1945, when he writes an obituary for the Warmond philosopher Theodoor Beysen, whom he credits for having developed neo-Thomism in The Netherlands in the line of Mercier. See Willebrands, Johannes, “In herinnering Mgr. Beysens, Warmonds blijvende roem,” in: De Tijd (26 November 1945): 1.  Willebrands, Johannes, De Aristotelis, quam posuit de actu et potential doctrina. Hujus theoriae origo ejusque historica evolutio. Archives Willebrands, Dossier 18.4: De.

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While in itself the citation above contains nothing out of the ordinary, it does illustrate the way in which seminarians like Willebrands were trained in defending the adequacy of the Aristotelian-Thomist paradigm of thought as the only solution for all philosophical problems. On several occasions in his seminary years, Willebrands wrote small contributions in the seminarian’s periodical Cassiciacum, each of them stressing the importance of Aristotle as the main source of inspiration for Catholic philosophy.¹⁹ So, one might ask: how does Newman fit this picture? The answer is indicated by mentioning Cassiciacum, for this student periodical also functioned as the official voice of the so-called Saint-Paul’s Academy,²⁰ a student association which united the most intellectually skilled seminarians for sessions including lectures and debate. In the early 1930s, Willebrands emerged as a central figure in this circle.²¹ He would leave a mark on the group’s gatherings, among others by pointing the attention of his fellow seminarians to the ‘desire for unity in the English State Church.’ He deliberately steered the Academy away from tendencies toward an all too ‘sociological’ approach of Catholic identity, and strove toward a more ‘theologically oriented’ approach. In August 1932, his retreat notes reveal how Willebrands sought to focus on ‘a life of study and of devoting the joy and satisfaction of study to God. I should not only study sociology, but rather Scholasticism, so as not to lose contact with theological insight and with Christian philosophy.’ In these same years, Willebrands developed a fascination for Anglicanism, which he saw as a middle ground between Calvinism and Roman Catholicism. Most relevant for our purposes here is the valedictory speech he delivered at the very end of his curriculum. Only a week after receiving his priestly ordination, on June 3 1934, in front of the members of St. Paul’s Academy he spoke about John Henry Newman. This lecture marked the start of his intellectual path for the coming years, since he was about to start his doctoral studies in philosophy, at the Angelicum in Rome. Willebrands’s goodbye speech at Warmond can safely be regarded as programmatic for the direction he wished to take in his doctoral dissertation. Without any hesitation, the future philosopher opened with sharp criticism of the recent Newman-biography authored by James Lewis May – which had appeared in a Dutch translation for a few years:²² “these

 Willebrands, Johannes, “De godskennis bij Aristoteles,” in: Cassiciacum 5/2 (1930 – 1931): 44– 50; Willebrands, Johannes, “Het godsidee bij Aristoteles,” in Cassiciacum 5/6 (1930 – 1931): 166 – 173.  de Haan, Peter, “Wetenschap en praktische vorming in de Warmondse studentenvereniging Paulus en het studententijdschrift Cassiciacum,” in: Trajecta 9 (2000): 191– 205.  See Noord Hollands Archief (NHA): Archives Major Seminary of Warmond 437.251.  May, John Lewis, John Henry Newman, Voorhout 1931.

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types of biographies,” Willebrands said “have no other aim than to install in their readers an impression of Newman’s influence on persons who are open to beauty, be it in literature, in nature or in man’s existence.” However, the aesthetic quality of Newman’s discourse that had so struck Willebrands earlier on in Vaals no longer seemed relevant. A true comprehension of Newman, he argued, can only be reached by studying the epistemological writings, those which “Newman himself has called: the best things I have written: his Oxford University Sermons and his Grammar of Assent. These works contain his epistemology, and without due study of these writings the figure of Newman tends to appear as a much bigger mystery than it already is.” At this juncture, it is clear that Willebrands was aware of the dubious reception of Newman in the world of continental Catholic philosophy. This did not prevent Willebrands from painfully misreading Newman. Where Willebrands entertained his audience by having Newman say that the “University Sermons [is] the best theological book I have published,” he was wrong. The original source he used contained exactly the opposite idea, since Newman actually judged his Oxford Sermons to be his “least theological book.”²³ More pertinent than this mistake, then, is the fact that Willebrands took on a very particular approach, since he was reading Newman through the interpretive lens of Johannes Vincentius De Groot.²⁴ De Groot, who died in 1922, was a Dominican friar who had served as one of the major promoters of neo-Thomism in the Netherlands around the turn of the century. As of 1894 he had occupied the chair of Thomist philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. In 1910, at the height of the modernist crisis, De Groot had compiled a series of his courses and articles and published them under the title Denkers van onzen tijd. The book contained a lengthy contribution on John Henry Newman’s notion of the certainty of faith. The 1918 reprint of this book now served as the cornerstone for Willebrands’s speech,²⁵ which amounted to an undisguised attempt at incorporating Newman’s epistemology within the categories of Aristotelian-Thomist philosophy. This did not go without some intellectual tensions, and Willebrands proved quite aware of that, when he said that “authors such as Dr. De Groot O.P. tend to want to confess with Oxford: Credo in Neoman-

 See the edition by Mozley, Anne (ed.), Letters and Correspondence of John Henry Newman During his Life in the English Church, vol. 2, London 1891, 407.  On De Groot, see Monteiro, Marit, Gods predikers. Dominicanen in Nederland, Hilversum 2008, 158 – 160.  Willebrands focused on the section, entitled John Henry Newman over de gronden van godsdienstige zekerheid, in Johannes Vincentius De Groot’s, Denkers van onzen tijd, Bursum 1918 (first edition: Amsterdam, 1910), 207– 296.

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num; apparently.” The comment that followed is remarkable: “they find it impossible to ponder the idea that Newman may have completely failed in his epistemological efforts.” This very idea provided the starting point for Willebrands’s further years of study, where the focus would remain on this single question: can one reconcile Newman’s idiomatic approach to (religious) truth with the demands of the neo-Thomist paradigm? In his Warmond speech he simply proposed the problem, without attempting to solve it. In his own words, it sounded like this: We will see how Newman was in fact a convinced individualist. The individual always supersedes the universal; the individual is the only reality. Newman was convinced that it was his personal mission to save England’s Anglican Church. His entire life, he fought against liberalism and agnosticism, in order to safeguard religious dogma. It was this struggle which led him to develop his doctrine of religious certainty and the paths toward certainty. According to Newman any man can reach certainty, and once obtained it is never list. Certainty, however, is not reached through logical reasoning, since Newman denies the power of the concepts of logic and the necessity of the laws of logic. Concrete and individual reality is only known through a personal act of comprehension, which is carried out instinctively. This doctrine is at odds with the doctrine of Saint Thomas Aquinas and amounts to sheer nominalism.²⁶

The word was out: Nominalism. Apart from the fact that Willebrands did not quite do justice to Newman’s actual thoughts, it is undeniable that the young priest all but identified with the Victorian Age cardinal. In fact, Willebrands moved to Rome with a clear intention to set up a neo-Thomist refutation of Newman’s philosophical writings. This is precisely why, when presented with the choice to go study either at the Gregorian University or at the Angelicum, Willebrands opted for the latter.²⁷ Newman, to him, posed both a threat and an intellectual challenge, and he made it all the more clear when presenting the members of Saint Paul’s Academy with three theses as the basis for public debate: first came the obvious statement that “the figure of Newman needs to be judged on the basis of his epistemology.” Next followed the idea that “Newman’s thesis on certainty leads to agnosticism;” and finally Willebrands stated that “Newman’s doctrine on the nature and development of human knowledge is a nominalist doctrine.” One can hardly find a clearer way to reject Newman.

 NHA, Warmond Seminary papers, 437.300: Paulus-Academie.  Willebrands, Johannes, Notes personnelles, Archives Willebrands, Dossier 324.5.

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IV Moving Beyond Neo-Thomist Apologetics While at Warmond, Willebrands had become a fervent reader of the writings of Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange. More than to Mercier’s open Thomism, he clung to the Roman neo-Thomist schools and devoured the Dominican philosopher’s magnum opus on the knowledge of God.²⁸ Once in Rome, the doctoral candidate marveled at the possibility of taking courses with this renowned master. The results were satisfying. In the spring of 1935, Willebrands took the exam with Garrigou-Lagrange on ‘De valore rationis apud Aristotelem’ and obtained the maximum score (20/20). This was all the more important to the philosophy student, since the course provided him with ammunition for the dissertation he started preparing in Rome.²⁹ After having enrolled at the Angelicum on November 26, 1934, Willebrands was lodged at the Dutch Pontifical College in Rome (Via Salvator Rosa), led by rector Msgr. Bernard Eras. One of the first steps he took as a Roman student in philosophy was to seek out a promoter for his dissertation. Upon the suggestion of Eras he contacted the Dutch Dominican Vincent Kuiper, who readily agreed to guide Willebrands. This choice of promoter illustrates the intentions he had: Kuiper was a professor in neo-Thomist philosophy at the Angelicum and in these years was director of the program in philosophy of the Dominicans in Rome. Along with Kuipers’s agreement to guide a dissertation on Newman’s epistemology, however, came a condition: he demanded that Willebrands’s dissertation would demonstrate a clear awareness that he was “studying at a Thomist university, and that therefore his dissertation would have to pay sufficient attention to Saint Thomas, both on the levels of quality and quantity.”³⁰ Willebrands had no objections whatsoever. At this moment in history, Willebrands was not the only Catholic scholar to ask questions regarding the (in)compatibility of Newmanian and Thomist paradigms of thought. His dissertation project was clearly embedded in an atmosphere of the Interbellum, during which Catholic theologians such as Erich Przy-

 Garrigou-Lagrange, Réginald, Dieu. Son existence et sa nature, Paris 1914; Willebrands’ retreat notes from this era also testify to the fact that he had read Garrigou-Lagranges’s book Perfection chrétienne et contemplation selon S. Thomas d’Aquin et S. Jean de la Croix, Saint-Maximin 1923.  Willebrands, Johannes, Libellus studiorum. Archives Willebrands Dossier 1.  Willebrands, Johannes, Interview with cardinal Willebrands by Fr. Gerbert Goossens, Archives Willebrands Dossier 379.1.

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wara undertook similar projects.³¹ Still, the stakes were different: Przywara’s theological focus was pointed toward the problem of the analogy of being, and sought to open the debate with Barthian theology. Opposing the alleged positivism of revelation that occurred in Karl Barth’s Römerbrief (divine revelation as radically contrasted – senkrecht vom oben – to human experience),³² Przywara outlined the Catholic position in line with authorities such as Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas and John Henry Newman. Willebrands was struck by Przywara’s portrayal of Newman as an example of balanced Catholic reasoning. Through the readership of such voices, the Dutch doctoral student gradually distanced himself from De Groot’s approach. He started to wonder whether Newman might not after all be reconcilable with sound Catholic doctrine. In the same years, Willebrands also began to read Henri Brémond and the Lutheran theologian Louis Bouyer – who would later convert to Catholicism –, authors who were clearly sympathetic to Newman as an alternative to the neoThomist paradigm. Willebrands’s Roman years gave him ample time for a more profound rereading of Newman’s oeuvre – which he consulted mostly in the library of Beda College –, and in particular of the Grammar of Assent, which would become the principal source for Willebrands dissertation. This close reading had an unexpected effect on the scholar. Had he initially thought to come up with a neoThomist refutation of Newman’s ideas, instead he developed an increasing fascination for the way in which Newman combined the British empirical tradition with ample attention to patristic and platonic thought.³³ The result was that Willebrands found himself in an intellectual impasse, since on the one hand he acknowledged the failure of attempts (such as those by De Groot and Przywara) at a framing of Newman’s epistemology in the categories of the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition, on the other hand he was forced to recognize the fact that Newman’s Platonism kept him “far removed from Aristotelianism.”³⁴ This minor re-

 Gladen, Karl, Die Erkenntnisphilosophie J.H. Kardinal Newmans im Lichte der thomistische Erkenntnislehre beurteilt, Paderborn 1934. Also see Przywara, Erich, Einführung in Newmans Wesen und Werken, Freiburg im Breisgau 1922; Przywara, Erich, Religionsbegründung: Max Scheler – J.H. Newman, Freiburg im Breisgau 1923.  Barth, Karl, Der Römerbrief, 1919 (Gesamtausgabe), ed. Hermann Schmidt, Zürich 1985.  In Willebrands’s opinion, Platonism – quite other than Aristotelic thinking – constituted the major undercurrent of Newman’s philosophical enterprise.  As will be explained further in this contribution, Willebrands never published his dissertation. It was published with a critical introduction recently, by Schelkens, K./Witte, H.P.J. (ed.), J.G.M. Willebrands, De denkleer van kardinaal Newman, Bergambacht 2013. For the reference made here, see page 33.

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mark was found in the opening pages of Willebrands’s dissertation, and stands to illustrate how Willebrands had started doubting the possibility of his own philosophical project. Before he started writing, he had read Louis Bouyer’s landmark study on ‘Newman and the Platonism of the English Soul,’³⁵ and Willebrands became convinced that the formal and logical reasoning, which are characteristic of neo-Thomist thought, suffered from its limited capacity to comprehend lived faith. To put things differently: Willebrands adhered to the value of Aristotelian Thomism as a method, but no longer found that the neo-Thomism in which he was raised could do justice to the complex manner in which concrete individuals arrive at religious experiences. Along with this new attention for the category of experience, the typical Newmanian distinction between notional and real comprehension entered the fore. Willebrands was forced to reposition himself and to clarify his own position in the midst of a plurality of Newman-interpretations. In his dissertation, he would first critically distance himself from Henri Brémond’s approach, to the extent that he disagreed with Brémont linking Newman to the ‘immanentism’ proper to the writings of the French modernists.³⁶ Having rejected the modernist appropriation of Newman, he also went on to criticize Erich Przywara, attacking the German Jesuit for doing the opposite and recuperating Newman for the neo-Thomist agenda. In Willebrands perspective, Przywara had “dismantled the distinction between the notional and the real in Newman’s thinking, so as to reach a scholastic interpretation of his writings.”³⁷ Both options, the modernist and the scholastic framing of Newman, were judged to be inadequate. The latter critique marked the philosophical and religious conversion Willebrands went through when studying at the Angelicum. Had he planned to use neo-Thomist categories as a means to refute the weaknesses of Newman’s doctrines, he found himself in the opposite corner. Henceforth, the Grammar of Assent led him to criticize the limits and obstacles he found in a neo-Thomism that had eroded

 Bouyer, Louis, “Newman et le platonisme de l’âme anglaise,” in: Revue de Philosophie 6 (1936): 285 – 305. A recent study of Platonism in Newman, was written by McIntosh, Mark Allen, “Newman and Christian Platonism in Britain,” in: Journal of Religion 91 (2011): 344– 364.  Willebrands had consulted Brémond’s study on Newman, which was written in 1906 – the high peak of the modernist crisis – but had known a revised edition in 1932: Brémond, Henri, Newman. Essai de biographie psychologique, Paris 1932. An interesting evaluation of this study was given by Talar, Charles, “Assenting to Newman. Henri Brémond’s psychologie de la foi,” in: The Downside Review 121/425 (2003): 251– 270. In order to strengthen the link with the modernist era, it may be interesting to point to another study of Brémond of the same year: Brémond, Henri, “Apologie pour les newmanistes français,” in: Revue pratique d’apologétique 3 (1907): 655 – 666.  Schelkens/Witte, J.G.M. Willebrands, 116.

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onto a system of a-historical and abstract reasoning. Although unaware of this, in the same period French Dominicans such as Yves Congar and Marie-Dominique came to similar conclusions, which would mean the start of the so-called ‘nouvelle théologie’ movement. This movement, after all, started in 1938, with Congar criticizing neo-Thomism in the style of Garrigou-Lagrange of having become a ‘wax mask,’ that failed to comprehend the contingency of lived religious experience.³⁸

V A Troublesome Dissertation Willebrands’ philosophical turn was not without consequences, both on the practical and the philosophical level. We will start with the latter. Contrary to the spirit with which he had left the Warmond Major Seminary, he ended up, in the summer of 1937, drafting a dissertation that was as unique in the context of the Angelicum of the 1930s as it was problematic. In the very opening clauses of his study on ‘The epistemology of cardinal Newman’ he argued that neo-Thomism and Newmanian discourse remain utterly incompatible.³⁹ Formally speaking, this was the very idea he had launched in his valedictory speech for the Saint-Paul Academy in 1934. But he himself had chosen sides in favor of Newman’s epistemology, and to the detriment of the Aristotelian-Thomist system. The failure lay not with Newman, rather with Neo-Scholasticism. Against this horizon, the young philosopher carefully meandered between what he thought to be the Scylla and Charybdis of his journey. On the one hand, he tried to steer away from a Newman-reading that would get lost in modern existentialist interpretations, without doing injustice to the concrete experience of everyday religious life – precisely one of the major features of nouvelle theologie in the line of Chenu and Congar.⁴⁰ On the flipside, Willebrands tried hard not to sink into

 Mettepenningen, Jürgen, New Theology. Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican II, New York 2011, 32.  The sharp opposition which Willebrands poses between the thought of Aquinas and Newman does require a caveat, for recent scholarly literature tends to offer a more nuanced picture. On the one hand the notion of the development of doctrine is no longer seen as alien to Thomism (which it clearly was for Willebrands), and on the other hand it has been argued that Newman too underwent a good deal of Aristotelian influences. Cf. Kaczor, Christopher, “Thomas Aquinas on the Development of Doctrine,” in: Theological Studies 62 (2001): 283 – 302.  On the nouvelle théologie movement and its connectedness with modernism, see the landmark study by Fouilloux, Étienne, Une église en quête de liberté. La pensée catholique française entre modernisme et Vatican II, 1914 – 1962, Paris 1998. Also, on the influence of the Parisian

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‘mathematical’ and ‘overly intellectualist’ approaches. Amidst these excesses, he developed his ideas and flirted with the very edges of what was acceptable at the Angelicum. When rereading Willebrands’ dissertation one is struck by the passages where he dealt with syllogistic reasoning in the line of Aristotle. He entirely orders this type of philosophical argument under the Newmanian categories of ‘notional’ apprehension and notional assent. This was a subtle way of safeguarding what is still worthwhile in neo-Thomism. It nevertheless implied judging that neo-Thomism only remained valid as a formal method on the notional level: with its strict logic of deduction, based on general and universal principles, and its method of condescension toward the concrete, Willebrands judged that neoThomism ultimately remained a prisoner of abstraction. It had become insufficient. So, he concluded that “syllogistic reasoning must falter, for it misleadingly presupposes that everything that can be thought, can also be adequately formulated in propositions.”⁴¹ Such criticism touched the very heart of the neo-Thomist paradigm, since it attacked the principle of truth as adaequatio intellectus et rei, central to the philosophical realism of professors such as Garrigou-Lagrange and Kuiper. True knowledge, Willebrands went on to argue, was not necessarily dependent upon the adequacy of a proposition and the reality it expresses. With such statements, the young philosopher comes strikingly close to philosophical idealism. He was seemingly aware of this, since in his dissertation he delicately remarked that underneath Newman’s Christian Platonism, traces of idealism may be detected. Ranging the syllogistic method under the category of the notional, for Willebrands implied acknowledging the superiority of Newmanian epistemology, which not only included notional apprehension and assent, but also reserved space for real apprehension and assent. The latter categories were, in Willebrands’ eyes, much more adequate to understand the Catholic faith in its existential, lived dimensions. The verdict sounded: “Newman’s entire idea of human knowledge stands in contrast to the Aristotelian-Thomist point of view.”⁴² And now for the practical consequences of Willebrands’s turn: the year of 1937 brought the moment in which the Dutch priest was expected to defend his dissertation closer. In the meantime, the philosophical option taken by his

Dominicans of Le Saulchoir and their efforts for the renewal of Thomism before and during Vatican II, see Michael Quisinsky, XXXXX  Schelkens/Witte, J.G.M. Willebrands, 90 – 91.  Ibid, 101– 102. It is worthwhile to observe here that Willebrands does not entirely do justice to Newman, who, in his Grammar of Assent, London, 1870, 349vv clearly indicated that the illative sense was modeled after the Aristotelian notion of phronesis.

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pupil had caused a breach in the relationship between promotor and doctoral candidate. Willebrands himself had sensed clearly that Kuiper’s thought world hardly still matched his own, and so he had proposed to switch promoters. After some considerations, he explained to Alexander Siemer, a less rigid defender of neo-Thomism at the Angelicum, his problem, and Siemer agreed to take over. This shift occurred in 1936 and soon thereafter Willebrands’ bishop, the new bishop of the diocese of Haarlem, Mgr. Huibers, urged the candidate to close his study curriculum and return home to fulfil more pastoral duties. Willebrands completed his dissertation in the spring of 1937, yet was utterly surprised at the moment of his defense, that he would be examined not only by Siemer, but also by Vincent Kuiper. The exact events of the oral defense, held on July 6, 1937, are unknown, but in later recollections, Willebrands told the tale as follows: Siemer was satisfied with the work I had prepared, and so I arrived at the moment of promotion. At that instant, three professors were present to discuss my thesis. During the session I underwent harsh criticisms from the side of Kuiper, to the extent that Msgr. Eras – present at the defense and hoping for a convivial session – became very upset. He was annoyed at the fact that the discussion did not end and the session took much longer than foreseen.

In the end, Willebrands passed with the degree cum laude, which was often reserved for the less brilliant students at the time. And more than this: the custom was that dissertations at the Angelicum were published after the defense. But as a result of his lack of loyalty to the neo-Thomist tradition held high at the University, Willebrands was denied this privilege and a note was added to his degree that it can only be published after being reworked and having received a new and positive judgment from the board of examiners. Willebrands never took this step, he returned home to become chaplain of the beguinage of Amsterdam.

VI Epilogue If anything, the above survey of Willebrands’ intellectual journey clarifies that the neo-Thomist framework that had shaped his early education was in a state of decline. Since the modernist crisis, ongoing attempts were made in view of a renewal of the official Catholic intellectual framework. This could take on various directions: from utter rejection of the Thomist framework up to internal renewal from within. Willebrands figured among the many scholarly educated priests of his generation who struggled with this erosion, and sought to find alternatives to a thought system that had often become reduced to an overly math-

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ematical and technical approach of reflection upon Catholic truth. In the Interbellum, the need was felt to develop a thought system that was able to connect with the lived experiences of the faithful. For Catholic intellectuals such as Willebrands, Newman’s approach included a more intuitive, and more inductive interpretation of the Catholic tradition, which was readily embraced by those who experienced neo-Thomism as stifling. This proved to be of lasting importance. And much more than Thomas Aquinas of Aristotle, Newman would remain a compagnon de route for a generation that would shape the conciliar renewal of the 1960s. In the case of Willebrands, the Newmanian heritage would shape his own position further once he was appointed, as of 1940, as a professor of philosophy at the Major Seminary of Warmond. In 1941 he published parts of his dissertation under the form of two articles devoted to Newman’s epistemology.⁴³ This marked the fact that seminary education in the Netherlands, already in the 1940s, started moving away from the classic neo-Thomist bulwark it had once been. By means of closing this contribution, we may cite a part of the oratio inauguralis of Willebrands, delivered on 21 November 1940, already during the first months of World War II, contained passages that illustrate this evolution more than anything else: From the perspective of scholasticism, the task of science is to move away. To move from plurality toward unity, from coincidence toward necessity, from particularity to universality. This stands in contrast to an historical approach. History seeks nuance, seeks distinctiveness, seeks particularity and concreteness. In other words, she takes an interest in facts and how then can be comprehended. This tendency is opposed to the scholastic idea of scientific thinking in general. Scholasticism’s flaw was its lack of an interest in Geschichte, its lack of a sensus historicus, of a sense for the importance of concrete developments.⁴⁴

References [n/a], Noord Hollands Archief: Archives Major Seminary of Warmond 437.251. Quoted as NHA. [n/a], Noord Hollands Archief, Warmond Seminary papers, 437.300: Paulus-Academie. Quoted as NHA. [n/a], Erfgoedcentrum Nederlands Kloosterleven, Archief redemptoristen, 5083: Codex chronicorum Vaals Barth, Karl, Der Römerbrief, 1919 (Gesamtausgabe), ed. Hermann Schmidt, Zürich 1985.

 Willebrands, Johannes, “Het christelijk platonisme van kardinaal Newman,” in: Studia Catholica 17 (1941): 373 – 388; Willebrands, Johannes, “Kardinaal Newman. De persoonlijke aard van het denken,” in: Studia Catholica 17 (1941): 425 – 444.  Willebrands, Johannes, Oratio inauguralis. In festo Praesentationis B. V.Mariae, Archives Willebrands Dossier 2.

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Boekraad, Adrian J., Kerngedachten van John Henry Newman, Roermond 1966. Bouyer, Louis, “Newman et le platonisme de l’âme anglaise,” in: Revue de Philosophie 6 (1936): 285 – 305. Bouyer, Louis, “Newman’s Influence in France,” in: The Dublin Review 217 (1945): 182 – 188. Brémond, Henri, “Apologie pour les newmanistes français,” in: Revue pratique d’apologétique 3 (1907): 655 – 666. Brémond, Henri, Newman. Essai de biographie psychologique, Paris 1932. Burke, Ronald, “Was Loisy Newman’s Disciple?” in: Mary Jo Weaver (ed.), Newman and the Modernists, Lanham MD 1985. Daly, Gabriel, “Newman, Divine Revelation, and the Catholic Modernists,” in: Terrence Merrigan/Ian Ker (ed.), Newman and the Word, Leuven 2000, 49 – 68. Darboy, Georges, “M. Newman,” in: Le Correspondant 29 (10 Jan. 1852): 385 – 407. Declerck, Leo, Inventaire des archives personnelles du Cardinal J. Willebrands, secrétaire et président du Secrétariat pour l’Unité des Chrétiens, Leuven 2013. Quoted as Archives Willebrands. Fouilloux, Étienne, Une église en quête de liberté. La pensée catholique française entre modernisme et Vatican II, 1914 – 1962, Paris 1998. Frijhoff, Willem/Spies, Marijke, Dutch Culture in a European Perspective. 1900, the Age of Bourgeois Culture, Basingstoke 2004. Garrigou-Lagrange, Réginald, Dieu. Son existence et sa nature, Paris 1914. Garrigou-Lagrange, Réginald, Perfection chrétienne et contemplation selon S. Thomas d’Aquin et S. Jean de la Croix, Saint-Maximin 1923. Gladen, Karl, Die Erkenntnisphilosophie J.H. Kardinal Newmans im Lichte der thomistische Erkenntnislehre beurteilt, Paderborn 1934. de Grandmaison, Léonce, “John Henry Newman considérée comme maître,” in: Études 109 (1906): 721 – 750. Greitemann, Nico, Op zoek naar de tweede onschuld, Baarn 1981. De Groot, Johannes Vincentius, Denkers van onzen tijd, Bursum 1918 (first edition: Amsterdam, 1910). de Haan, Peter, “Wetenschap en praktische vorming in de Warmondse studentenvereniging Paulus en het studententijdschrift Cassiciacum,” in: Trajecta 9 (2000): 191 – 205. Jodock, Darrell e.a. (ed.), Catholicism contending with Modernity. Roman Catholic Modernism and Anti-Modernism in Historical Context, Cambridge 2000. Kaczor, Christopher, “Thomas Aquinas on the Development of Doctrine,” in: Theological Studies 62 (2001): 283 – 302. Kenis, Leo/Van der Wal, Ernestine (ed.), Religious Modernism in the Low Countries, Leuven 2013. Lash, Nicholas, Newman on Development. The Search of Explanation in History, London 1975. Lash, Nicholas, “Newman and A. Firmin,” in: Arthur Hilary Jenkins (ed.), John Henry Newman and Modernism, Sigmaringendorf 1990, 56 – 73. Lash, Nicholas, “Newman and Vatican II,” in New Blackfriars 92 (2011): 243 – 246. Le Roy, Édouard, Dogme et critique, Paris 1907. Loome, Thomas Michael, Liberal Catholicism, Reform Catholicism, Modernism, Mainz 1979. May, John Lewis, John Henry Newman. Voorhout 1931. McIntosh, Mark Allen, “Newman and Christian Platonism in Britain,” in: Journal of Religion 91 (2011): 344 – 364.

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Merrigan, Terrence, “The Enduring Influence of Newman on Willebrands’ Ecumenical Views,” in: Adelbert Denaux/Peter De Mey (ed.), The ecumenical Legacy of Johannes Cardinal Willebrands, Leuven 2013, 31 – 47. Meszaros, Andrew, A Theology of History and Doctrinal Development according to J.H. Newman and Y. Congar, Dissertation, Leuven (2014). Mettepenningen, Jürgen, New Theology. Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican II, New York 2011. Monteiro, Marit, Gods predikers. Dominicanen in Nederland, Hilversum 2008. Mozley, Anne (ed.), Letters and Correspondence of John Henry Newman During his Life in the English Church, vol. 2, London 1891. Newman, John Henry, Histoire du développement de la doctrine chrétienne ou motifs de retour à l’église catholique. Transl. Jules Gondon, Paris 1848. Newman, John Henry, Grammar of Assent, London 1870. Nichols, Aidan, From Newman to Congar. The Idea of Doctrinal Development from the Victorians to the Second Vatican Council, Edinburgh 1990. Poulat, Émile, Histoire, dogme, et critique dans la crise moderniste, Tournai 1962. Przywara, Erich, Einführung in Newmans Wesen und Werken, Freiburg im Breisgau 1922. Przywara, Erich, Religionsbegründung: Max Scheler – J.H. Newman, Freiburg im Breisgau 1923. Przywara, Erich, “Aristotelische Erkenntnislehre bei Whately und Newman,” in: Philosophical Studies 11 (1961 – 1962): 174 – 178. Schelkens, Karim, “De l’inventaire à la vie. Quelques réflexions préparatoires à une biographie du Cardinal Willebrands,” in: Leo Declerck, Inventaire des archives personnelles du Cardinal J. Willebrands, Leuven 2013, 17 – 20. Schelkens, K./Witte, H.P.J. (ed.), J.G.M. Willebrands, De denkleer van kardinaal Newman, Bergambacht 2013. ter Steeg, Maria, “Bibliography Johannes Cardinal Willebrands,” in: Adelbert Denaux/Peter De Mey (ed.), The ecumenical Legacy of Johannes Cardinal Willebrands, Leuven 2013, 331 – 367. Talar, Charles, “Assenting to Newman. Henri Brémond’s psychologie de la foi,” in: The Downside Review 121/425 (2003): 251 – 270. Talar, Charles, “Newman in France during the Modernist Period. Pierre Batiffol and Marcel Hébert,” in: Newman Studies Journal 2/1 (2005): 45 – 57. Thureau-Dangin, Paul, La renaissance catholique en Angleterre au XIXe siècle, Paris 1903. Willebrands, Johannes, “De godskennis bij Aristoteles,” in: Cassiciacum 5/2 (1930 – 1931): 44 – 50. Willebrands, Johannes, “Het godsidee bij Aristoteles,” in Cassiciacum 5/6 (1930 – 1931): 166 – 173. Willebrands, Johannes, “Het christelijk platonisme van kardinaal Newman,” in: Studia Catholica 17 (1941): 373 – 388. Willebrands, Johannes, “Kardinaal Newman. De persoonlijke aard van het denken,” in: Studia Catholica 17 (1941): 425 – 444. Willebrands, Johannes, “In herinnering Mgr. Beysens, Warmonds blijvende roem,” in: De Tijd (26 November 1945). Willebrands, Johannes, De Aristotelis, quam posuit de actu et potential doctrina. Hujus theoriae origo ejusque historica evolutio [n. d.], Archives Willebrands, Dossier 18.4: De

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Willebrands, Johannes, Notes personnelles [n. d.], Archives Willebrands, Dossier 324.5. Willebrands, Johannes, Libellus studiorum [n. d.], Archives Willebrands Dossier 1 Willebrands, Johannes, Interview with cardinal Willebrands by Fr. Gerbert Goossens [n. d.], Archives Willebrands Dossier 379.1. Willebrands, Johannes, Oratio inauguralis. In festo Praesentationis B. V.Mariae [n. d.], Archives Willebrands Dossier 2.

About the Authors Rajesh Heynickx is an Associate Professor and teaches architectural theory at the Faculty of Architecture at the KU Leuven. He studied history and architectural sciences at the University of Leuven, the University of Illinois (Urbana Campaign, US) and the Institute for European History at Mainz. His doctoral dissertation dealt with The interaction of art, religion and identity in Interwar Flanders (Vantilt, 2008). With Leuven University Press he edited the following studies: in 2012 (together with Tom Avermaete) Making a New World. Architecture and Communities in Interwar Europe and (together with Thomas Coomans e.a.) Loci Sacri. Understanding Sacred Places; in 2010 (together with Jan De Maeyer) The Maritain Factor. Taking religion into Interwar Modernism. He has published articles in Modern Intellectual History, Modernist Cultures, Environment and History. He co-edited special issues of Interiors: Design/Architecture/Culture, the Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire and The European Legacy. Stéphane Symons is an Associate Professor in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Culture at the Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven. His research focuses on twentieth century, continental philosophy, with specific emphasis on Critical Theory and Frankfurt School. He has published two books (Walter Benjamin. Presence of Mind, Failure to Comprehend (Brill, 2013) and More than Life: Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin on Art (Northwestern University Press, 2017)) and co-edited multiple collections of essays (amongst which Walter Benjamin and Theology (with Colby Dickinson, Fordham University Press, 2015)). James Chappel is the Hunt Family Assistant Professor of History at Duke University. His work on Catholic intellectual history has been published in multiple journals, including Modern Intellectual History. His book on the topic is called Catholic Modern (Harvard University Press, 2018). Wim Weymans studied political thought and intellectual history (MPhil) at Cambridge University and modern history (MA) and philosophy (PhD) at KU Leuven. From 2008 till 2009 he was an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University, teaching courses on human rights history and theory. Between 2013 and 2016 he also taught philosophy of law at the University of Antwerp (UA). He was a visiting scholar at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES), chercheur invité at Sciences Po (Paris), a postdoctoral fellow at The Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO), a Fulbright scholar at UC Berkeley and a visiting scholar at NYU’s Remarque Institute. He is chiefly interested in French social, historical and political thought post-1940, focusing mainly on Lefort, Certeau, Gauchet and Rosanvallon. He has published in journals such as History & Theory, Modern Intellectual History, Thesis Eleven and The European Journal of Political Theory on various topics including theories of democracy, human rights, political representation, internationalism and European higher education policy. John Carter Wood attended Northern Illinois University as well as the University of Maryland, College Park, where he received his Ph.D. in British history in 2001. He is the author of Violence and Crime in Nineteenth-Century England: The Shadow of Our Refinement (London: Routledge, 2004) and The Most Remarkable Woman in England: Poison, Celebrity and the https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110588255-015

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About the Authors

Trials of Beatrice Pace (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2012). He has also edited an essay collection, Christianity and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Europe: Conflict, Community, and the Social Order (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016). He currently teaches history at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz (Germany) and is completing a monograph on British Christian intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s. Edward Baring is Associate Professor of Modern European History at Drew University, in Madison NJ. He is the author of The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945 – 1968 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which won the Morris D. Forkosch Prize (2011), awarded by the Journal of the History of Ideas for the best book in intellectual history, and he has written a number of articles on modern European intellectual history for Critical Inquiry, Modern Intellectual History, Journal of the History of Ideas, and New German Critique, amongst others. He is currently working on a Europe-wide history of phenomenology, for which he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015. Dries Bosschaert (Wilrijk, 1989) is a PhD fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) in the History of Church and Theology Research Unit at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies. He studied Theology and Religious Studies at the KU Leuven and obtained a Master’s (2011), Advanced Master’s (2012) and STL (2015) degree. He is currently working on a doctoral dissertation on the ‘Christian anthropology’ in the work of the Louvain theologians Gustave Thils, Charles Moeller, Albert Dondeyne and Gerard Philips in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Their roles at Vatican II will also be discussed, based on their contributions to the ‘Malines’ Text’, a first draft of Gaudium et spes. Central to this research are: movements of renewal in twentieth century theology, Christian humanism, the Second Vatican Council and the relation between theology, the temporal, history, culture and society. Adi Efal-Lautenschläger is currently a research associate at the a.r.t.e.s Post-Graduate School for the Humanities at the University of Cologne and a postgraduate research student at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Lille 3 Charles de Gaulle. Her first book, Figural Philology: Panofsky and the Science of Things appeared in 2016, at the Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy series, and her second book, Habitus as Method: Revisiting a Scholastic Theory of Art is forthcoming at Peeters, in the series Studies in Iconology. She works and publishes in the domains of the theory of art and the history of thoughts, ideas, and concepts. In her work, Sigrid Leyssen combines approaches from the history of science, technology and media, with a focus on the history of experimental psychology. Her current project investigates a history of stimuli images in the psychology of perception. The project centres on the experimental psychologist Albert Michotte (1881 – 1965), addressing topics in the history of psychological instruments and methods, experimental phenomenology, Neo-Scholastic philosophy and the sciences, and film studies. Sigrid Leyssen studied philosophy and film studies in Leuven, Belgium and Cambridge, UK. She currently works at the Centre Alexandre Koyré – Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques/EHESS and I:IMSK, Universität Regensburg. One of her recent publications includes an edited volume entitled Bilder animierter Bewegung / Images of Animate Movement (2013) published by Wilhelm Fink Verlag.

About the Authors

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Annette Mülberger is a senior lecturer at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and director of its Centre for History of Science (CEHIC). She coordinates a research group and regularly teaches undergraduate history of psychology (Faculty of Psychology) and several master’s degree courses in the history of science. She is currently President of the European Society for the History of the Human Sciences. In 2016, she published a book on her research in the history of spiritualism and the study of paranormal phenomena. Jaume Navarro is Ikerbasque Research Professor at the University of the Basque Country. Trained in Physics and in Philosophy, his research interests have always been in the history of science, mainly the history of physics, as well as in the history of the relations between science and religion. He is author, among others, of A History of the Electron. J.J. and G.P. Thomson (Cambridge, 2012) and editor of Science and Faith within Reason (Ashgate, 2011). Christopher S. Morrissey teaches Greek and Latin on the Faculty of Philosophy at the Seminary of Christ the King located at the Benedictine monastery of Westminster Abbey in Mission, British Columbia. He also lectures in logic and philosophy at Trinity Western University. He studied Ancient Greek and Latin at the University of British Columbia and has taught classical mythology, history, and ancient languages at Simon Fraser University, where he wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on René Girard. He is managing editor of The American Journal of Semiotics. His book of Hesiod’s poetry, Theogony / Works and Days, is published by Talonbooks. Herman Paul is Associate Professor of Historical Theory at Leiden University, where he currently directs a project on virtues and vices in the nineteenth-century humanities. He also holds a special chair in secularization studies at the University of Groningen. He is the author, most recently, of Key Issues in Historical Theory (2015) and articles in Modern Intellectual History, History of Humanities, and History and Theory. Karim Schelkens is Associate Professor in Contemporary Church History at Tilburg University, The Netherlands. Recent publications include a biography of Cardinal Godfried Danneels (2015), an editored volume on ‘Conversion and Church. The Challenge of Ecclesial Renewal (co-editored with S. Van Erp, 2016), and Aggiornamento? Catholicism from Gregory XVI to Benedict XVI (2013).

Index of Persons Adam, Karl 87 Albert the Great 262 Alexeiev, Nicolas 84, 86 f., 87, 92, 94, 95 Alphonse of Liguori 285 Aquinas, Thomas 3 – 8, 11 f., 13 – 15, 22 – 32, 34, 36, 40, 43, 45, 67 – 69, 77 – 79, 79 f., 89, 89 f., 113, 116, 126, 134, 145, 149, 169, 173, 181, 190, 195, 199, 208 – 210, 216, 231 – 238, 239 f., 240 – 249, 252, 258, 260 – 261, 265, 285 – 286, 289 – 291, 293 f., 296 Arbós, Jaime 208, 211, 215, 224 Aristotle 13, 43, 45, 94, 160, 162, 164, 173, 195, 236 – 238, 238 f., 243 – 246, 250, 260 – 261, 261 f., 286 – 287, 294, 296 Arnáiz, Marcelino 4, 7 – 11, 13, 18, 20 f. Atkin, John 247 Auden, W.H. 101 Augustine of Hippo 85 Bacon, Francis 215 Baillie, John 80, 82, 84 – 88, 88 f., 91 – 94, 97, 100 Balmes, Jaime 187 Baring, Edward 8,11 Barker, Ernest 82 f. Barth, Karl 85, 88, 93, 291 Bellon, Karel 274 f. Berdyaev, Nikolai 82, 87 Berger, Suzanne 49 Bergson, Henri 12, 50, 137, 144, 144 f., 151, 160, 163, 163 f., 168 Bernanos, Georges 78 Bernard of Chartres 257 Bernini 59 Besse, Clément 256 Biederlack, Joseph 31 Billot, Louis 134 Binet, Alfred 189 Bittremieux, Joseph 134 Bliss, Kathleen 81 – 82, 98 Blondel, Maurice 6, 136 – 137 Blumenberg, Hans 60 Boekraad, Adrian J. 284 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110588255-016

Boelaar, Henri 125 Boethius 243 Bosschaert, Dries 11, 68 Bouillard, Henri 136, 136 f., 141, 255 Bouyer, Louis 282, 283 f., 291 – 292 Brauer, Theodor 31 Brémond, Henri 284, 291 – 292 Brentano, Franz 117 Bretherton, Luke 35 Briefs, Götz 31 Brunner, Emil 87 Buber, Martin 82 Burgert, Helmut 126 Busa, Roberto 3 Cajetan, Thomas 22, 24, 239, 242 Calvin, John 84 Camus, Albert 65, 137 Carracido, José Rodríguez 205 Cauchie, Alfred 134 Cebrián, José Germain 193 Cerfaux, Lucien 146 Cervantes, Miguel de 147 Chappel, James 9, 39 f. Charcot, Jean-Martin 185 Charlier, Louis 135 Charmes, Gabriel 258 – 259 Chenu, Marie-Dominique 134, 293 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith 23, 233, 248 Cicero 246 – 247 Cirera, Ricard 214 Clark, Christopher 206 Clarke, Fred 82, 82 f. Claudel, Paul 78 Coffey, Peter 256 Coleman, Charly 23 Congar, Yves 282, 293 Coppens, Joseph 131, 131 f., 143, 145, 152 Cornoldi, Giovanni Maria 184 Cripps, Stafford 82 f. Dangin, Paul-Thureau 282 – 283 Dawson, Christopher 82 – 84, 91 f., 92, 99 f., 233

306

Index of Persons

de Beauvoir, Simone 137, 147 de Bonald, Louis 265 De Bruyne, Edgard 69 de Burgh, William 87 Debuyst, Fréderic 66 de Corte, Marcel 126 Deely, John 237 – 238, 242 – 243 De Gaulle, Charles 40 De Groot, Johannes Vincentius 288, 291 de Keyzer, Eugenie 69 de Laburu, Jose Antonio 216 Delacroix, Eugene 166 de Lamennais, Jean-Marie 265 del Barrio, Jaime María 214 Delors, Jacques 54 de Lubac, Henri 136 f., 255 Demant, V.A. 82 f., 88 Denis, Maurice 166, 166 f. De Raeymaeker, Louis 257, 267 – 273, 275 de Rafael, Enrique 222 Descartes, René 125, 167, 215, 262 De Vleeschauwer, Herman 267, 273 de Vogel, Cornelia 284 De Wulf, Maurice 70, 256 – 257, 262 – 269, 271 – 272, 274 – 275 Diggins, John Patrick 47 f. Dilthey, Wilhelm 269 Dionysius 235 Dondeyne, Albert 11, 67 – 68, 70 – 71, 73, 131 – 132, 132 f., 138 – 142, 144 – 146, 149 – 152, 271, 274, 274 f. Draguet, René 131 f., 135 Du Bois-Reymond, Emil 186 f. Duhem, Pierre 215 Dupont, Christian 137, 144 Eames 62, 66 Ebbinghaus, Hermann 190 f. Eberle 24, 26, 28 Efal-Lautenschläger, Adi 12 Einstein, Albert 12 Eliot, T.S. 82, 82 f., 83 f., 89 – 90, 91 f., 102 Eras, Bernard 290, 295 Etrog, Sorel 250 Eucken, Rudolf 6

Farmer, H.H. 82 f. Fenn, Eric 82, 82 f., 99 Feuerbach, Ludwig 143 Feuling, Daniel 11, 125 – 126 Focillon, Henri 168 Frohschammer, Jacob 183 Garrigou-Lagrange, Réginald 136, 136 f., 290, 290 f., 293 – 294 Gemelli, Agostino 115, 120 – 121, 192 f., 197 Germain, José 13, 193, 196 f., 197 – 198, 200 – 201 Getino, Luis Alonso 186 Geyser, Joseph 11, 118 – 120, 120 f., 124, 126 Gilman, Nils 8 Gilson, Etienne 9, 11 – 12, 14, 41 – 42, 78, 123 – 124, 124 f., 159 – 174, 234, 245 – 246, 255, 265 f. Giner de los Ríos, Francisco 188 Giotto di Bondone 59 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 147 González Arintero, Juan 210 – 211 González, Zeferino 207– 208, 210 – 211, 214, 223 Grabmann, Martin 115, 121 Grasselli, Giulio 114, 123 Grassi, Ernesto 114, 123 Gratacós, Federic Dalmau 183 f. Grégoire, Franz 1 f., 9 f., 12 – 16, 20 – 22 Greitemann, Nico 285 Grimley, Matthew 100 Grisebach, Eberhard 88 Guardini, Romano 66, 282 Gundlach, Gustav 30 – 31 Gunning, Johannes Hermanus 284 Gutberlet, Constantin 115, 118 Haeckel, Ernst 215 Haessle, Johannes 30, 32 Hamburger, Siegfried 114 Hauriou 50 Hayen, André 137 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 143, 213 Heidegger, Martin 113 – 114, 147, 164 f., 274 f. Hetherington, Hector 82 f., Heymans, Jan Frans 186 f. Heynickx, Rajesh 10, 113 f., 275 f.

Index of Persons

Hilbert, David 222 Hitchcock, James 4 – 5 Hodges, H.A. 82, 82 f., 84, 87 – 89, 89 f., 90, 94, 102 Homer 147 Horváth, Sándor 9, 24 – 29, 31 – 34 Hume, David 21 Husserl, Edmund 11, 70, 113 – 114, 116 – 127 Inglis, John 265 f. Iredale, Eleanora 82 f. Izquierdo, Alberto Gómez

187

Jaegerschmidt, Adelgundis 114 James, William 190 f. Jaspers, Karl 140, 274 f. Jenkins, Daniel 82, 88, 91 f. John of Salisbury 14, 246 – 247 Jolivet, Régis 125 Julliard, Jacques 54 Kant, Immanuel 262 Keller, Franz 29 – 30 Kelsen, Hans 24 Kiefl, Franz Xaver 30 Kleutgen, Joseph 265 f. Kogon, Eugen 24 Koyré, Alexandre 40 Krause, Karl Christian Friedrich 188 Kremer, René 11, 120, 123, 125 – 127 Kugelmann, Robert 182 Kuiper, Vincent 290, 294 – 295 Külpe, Oswald 193 Kurlberg, Jonas 95 f., 100 Kuyper, Abraham 256 Laberthonière, Lucien 6 Labourdette, Marie-Michel 136 f., 137 Ladd, George Trumbull 190 f. Ladeuze, Paulin 134 Laminne, Jacques 134 Landmesser, Franz Xaver 24, 26 Lang, Cosmo 83, 83 f. Laros, Matthias 26 – 27 Laski, Harold 90 f. Lefèvre 65 Lefort, Claude 46 f., 47 f., 56 f.

307

Léger, Fernand 59 Leo van Breda, Herman 113 Le Roy, Édouard 142 – 143, 284 Levinas, Emmanuel 274 f. Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 167, 167 f. Lewis, James 287 Leyssen, Sigrid 12 – 13 Liberatore, Matteo 184 Lindsay, A.D. 82 f., 90 f. Locke, John 21 Loew, Wilhelm 8, 11, 16, 21 Loisy, Alfred 3 f. Löwe, Adolf 82, 84, 87, 95, 97, 100 Luther, Martin 84 – 85, 93 Macmurray, John 84, 85 f., 94 Magnus, Albert 260, 265 Maisonneuve, Augustin 184 Mannheim, Karl 80, 82 – 84, 86, 89 – 91, 95, 95 f., 97 – 98, 100, 102 Marcel, Gabriel 140, 147, 274 f. Maréchal, Joseph 21, 143 Marín-Sola, Francisco 186 Marion, Jean-Luc 164 Maritain, Jacques 8 – 12, 21, 27 – 28, 35, 39, 40 – 48, 50 – 55, 69, 77 – 80, 82 – 89, 91 – 102, 124 – 125, 144, 159 – 168, 171 – 174, 233 Maritain, Raïssa 23, 39 Martius, Hedwig Conrad 114 Marx, Karl 21, 48, 85 f., 92, 143 Masnovo, Amato 120 Matisse, Henri 59, 166 Mauriac, François 78 Maurras, Charles 78, 83 f. Mazzella, Camillo 134 McCool, Gerald A. 34, 211, 255, 257, 273, 274 McGinn, Bernard 7 McLuhan, Eric 233 McLuhan, Marshall 13 – 14, 231 – 236, 240, 244 – 252 Mercier, Désiré 11, 13 – 14, 115 – 117, 119 – 121, 123 – 124, 131, 133 – 134, 182 – 189, 191 – 195, 197 – 201, 256 – 267, 269 – 271, 274 – 275, 286, 290 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 50, 169, 274 f.

308

Index of Persons

Merrill, Thomas 21 Mertens, Heinrich 26 Messner, Johannes 9, 31 – 32, 35 Meszaros, Andrew 284 Michotte, Albert 13, 182 – 184, 186, 192 – 201 Miller, Alexander 82 f. Mill, John Stuart 188 Mira, Emilio 196 f. Misiak, Henry 182 – 183 Mitterrand, Françoise 54 Moberly, Walter 82, 82 f., 96 f. Moeller, Charles 11 – 12, 132, 145 – 146 Mole, John 231, 233, 245 Montaigne, Michel de 147 Moore, Thomas Verner 198 Morpurgo-Tagliabue, Guido 6 Morrissey, Christopher 13 Mounier, Emmanuel 7, 27 Moyn, Samuel 43, 54, 47 f. Mülberger, Annette 12 – 13 Muller, Camille 131 f., 141 Murry, John Middleton 82, 82 f., 84, 87 – 88, 90 – 93, 95 Napoleon Bonaparte 117 – 118 Nashe, Thomas 233 – 234 Navarro, Jaume 13 Newman, John Henry 14, 281 – 291, 291 f. Newton, Eric 59 – 60 Niebuhr, Reinhold 10, 40, 47 – 50, 50 f., 55, 82, 82 f., 87 – 88, 97, 100 Nieto, Agustí 205 Nietzsche, Friedrich 48, 266, 266 f. Noël, Léon 11, 70, 119 – 121, 123 – 124, 127, 264, 266 – 267, 270 Nuttin, Joseph 183 f. Oakeshott, Walter 82 f. Oldham, Joseph H. 79, 81 – 83, 88, 91, 93 – 96, 98, 100, 102 Olgiati, Francesco 256, 264, 274 f. Orel, Anton 24 Orti i Lara, Juan Manuel 186 Orwell, George 101, 101 f. Otto, Rudolf 114

Palacios, Miguel Asín 187 Palmés, Fernando 221, 224 Pascal, Blaise 263 Paton, William 82 f. Paul, Herman 14 Pesch, Heinrich 30 Philips, Gerard 146 Pieper, Josef 26 Piketty, Thomas 21 Plato 45, 250 – 251 Poe, Edgar Allen 251 Poincaré, Henri 218, 222 Polanyi, Michael 82, 90, 92 Pope Francis 22, 35 Pope John Paul II 22, 113 Pope Leo XIII 4, 14, 77, 133, 141, 185, 188 f., 207, 209, 255 Pope Pius IX 213, 216 Pope Pius X 135, 220 Pope Pius XI 32 – 35 Pope Pius XII 67 f., 135, 137, 139 Poulat, Emile 223 Proctor, Robert 72 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 21 Przywara, Erich 11, 124, 126 – 127, 234, 291 – 292 Puig, Ignasi 217, 224 Ramírez, Santiago 186 Rancière, Jacques 71 Ravaisson-Mollien, Felix 163 Raven, Charles 82 f. Régamey, Raymond 61 Reinhardt, Kurt 126 Reiring, Willem 286, 286 f. Ribot, Théodule 188 Rocard, Michel 54 Rolnick, Philip 239 Roosevelt, Franklin 34 Rorty, Richard 72 Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen 94 Rosmini-Serbati, Antonio 184 Rouault, Georges Henri 59 Ryan, John 34 – 35

Index of Persons

Sanz del Río, Julián 188 Sartre, Jean-Paul 137, 140, 147, 149 – 150, 274 f. Sayers, Dorothy L. 82 f. Scheler, Max 114, 114 f. Schelkens, Karim 14 Schilling, Otto 30 Schmid, Alois 183 Schmidinger, Heinrich 183 Schulte, Karl Joseph 29, 31, 33 Scotus, Duns 40, 45 – 47, 55 Seipel, Ignaz 24 Shaw, Gilbert 82 f. Siemer, Alexander 295 Smith, Henry 21 Sobry, Paul 143, 284 Socrates 233 Spann, Othmar 24 Spencer, Herbert 188 Spiegelberg, Herbert 68, 115 f. Staudt, Virginia 182 – 183 Stehman, Samuel 60 – 68, 70 – 73 Stein, Edith 113 – 114, 121, 127 Sterenberg, Matthew 101 Stöckl, Albert 265 f. Suaréz, Francisco 28, 221 – 222 Switalski, Wladislaus 121 Tawney, Richard Henry 23, 82 f., 88 Temple, William 82 f., 83, 88, 96 Thiéry, Canonigan Armand 182, 185 – 186, 193, 195, 200 Thils, Gustave 131 f., 146 Thompson, Maria Anthonius 285 Thurstone, Louis Leon 198 Thyssen, Fritz 29 Tillich, Paul 87 Titchener, Edward Bradford 189, 190 f. Tomkins, Oliver 82 f. Toynbee, Arnold 82 f. Twardowski, Kazimierz 117 Tyrrell, George 283, 284 f. Ugarte de la Ercilla, Eustaquio Urráburu, Juan José 215

218

309

van Breda, Herman Leo 113, 127 Van Cauwenbergh 131 van de Pol, Willem Hendrik 284 Van Haecht, Louis 68 Van Hoonacker, Albin 134 Vanni Rovighi, Sofia 11, 125 – 126 van Roey, Jozef-Ernest 143 Van Steenberghen, Fernand 14, 42, 131 f., 257 – 258, 271 – 273, 275 Vermeersch, Arthur 31, 34 Vidler, Alec 82, 84, 87 – 88, 90, 94, 99 Viejo, Manual Barbado 186, 197 Vignaux, Georgette 39 – 41, 47 – 51, 53 – 55 Vignaux, Paul 9 – 10, 39 – 54, 54 f., 56 f. Vincent of Beauvais 247 Virgil 147 Vitoria, Eduardo 216 – 217, 220, 224 Vives, Luis 197, 199 von Hildebrand, Dietrich 114 von Hügel, Friedrich 87 von Nell-Breuning, Oswald 9, 31 – 35, 35 f. von Vogelsang, Karl 24 Walgrave, Jan Hendrik 284 Walschap, Gerard 267, 273 Watson, Thomas J. 3 Weil, Simone 165 Wendland, Heinz-Dietrich 84, 84 f. Weymans, Wim 9 Whale, J.S. 82 f. Wilhelmsen, Fredrick 248 Willebrands, Johannes 14, 281 – 296 William of Ockham 244 – 245 Winter, Ernst Karl 24, 24 f. Wood, John Carter 10 Wundt, Wilhelm 181, 185, 190, 190 f., 193 Yela, Mariano

183, 193, 198, 199 – 201

Zaragüeta, Juan 13, 184, 191 – 193, 197 – 200 Zeferino González y Díaz Tuñón 207 – 208, 210 – 211, 214, 223 Ziehen, Theodor 190 f. Zimmern, Alfred 82 f. Zubiri, Xavier 114, 123, 183 f., 199