Étienne Gilson and post-conciliar theology

Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain were the leading Catholic public intellectuals of the middle decades of the twentieth century. Major figures in the Thomistic revival within Catholic intellectual life, they were also ambassadors to the non-Catholic world through their articulation of distinctly Catholic defense of democracy in response to the rise of fascist and communist totalitarianism.

Of these two great figures, Maritain is by far the better known in America. Standard histories of American Catholicism link Maritain to the American Jesuit John Courtney Murray as the driving forces behind Dignitatis Humanae, the Vatican II document in which the Church finally made its peace with modern democracy and religious pluralism. Gilson, by contrast, appears largely forgotten. Those who wish to explore the life and work of this significant modern Catholic thinker may, with much profit, turn to Florian Michel’s recently translated study, Étienne Gilson: An Intellectual Biography.

 A timely figure

Gilson remains a timely figure as Catholics continue to struggle with how to engage the modern world while still remaining faithful to a Catholic worldview. The half century or so since the Second Vatican Council has bequeathed ample evidence of the perils of such engagement, particularly through the tendency of Catholics to subordinate theological principles to political priorities. Michel’s biography of Gilson makes clear that this is not simply a post-Vatican II problem. American Catholics in particular will benefit from familiarity with how these issues have played out in countries other than America.

Gilson was born in Paris, France in 1884. He came of age in a time of tremendous religious-political conflict. The stridently secular Third Republic (1870-1940) that governed France during Gilson’s youth saw the Catholic Church as its sworn enemy. Many French Catholics, particularly in the hierarchy, refused to accept the legitimacy of the Republic and insisted that France could only be France with a Catholic monarchy. Pope Leo XIII advised Catholics to seek a compromise with the more moderate elements in republican circles. His efforts failed in the wake of the crisis of the Dreyfus Affair, in which royalist sympathizers accused the staunchly republican, Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus of passing military secrets to Germany. This controversy tore France apart and drew the sharpest possible dividing line between the secular, pro-republican defenders of Dreyfus, and his largely Catholic, royalist, and even antisemitic enemies. The subsequent investigation revealed that Dreyfus had been falsely accused based on forged documents. The Church suffered the penalty of being on the losing side of this fight. Despite the increasing secularism of France, the Catholic Church had remained the established Church of the republic. In 1905, the Third Republic passed a law disestablishing the Church and formalizing the principle of separation of Church and State. This period also saw a harsh suppression of religious orders resulting in the expulsion of some thirty thousand male and female religious.

Despite these sharp divisions, Gilson grew up in a household that was at once faithfully Catholic and firmly republican. His family’s politics reflected in part their socio-economic standing as members of the urban petit bourgeoise and found confirmation in the moderate republicanism that Leo XIII had encouraged in the early 1890s. Under Pius X, this moderation became increasingly difficult to maintain: in 1914, Pius condemned Le Sillon, the leading movement among those seeking to forge a Catholic compromise with republicanism. Though not formal members of Le Sillon, Gilson and his family were shocked by the condemnation; they continued to insist on the compatibility of Catholic faith and republican politics.

Action Française, tensions, and “integral humanism”

A different sort of political challenge emerged after World War I: Action Française. This movement was the brainchild of Charles Maurras, an avowed royalist, anti-modernist and neo-pagan. Maurras looked to the ancient Roman empire as a model of political order and admired the Catholic Church as a living institutional connection to this glorious pagan past. Though despising Christianity in the manner of Nietzsche, he admired the Church as a principle of order and enlisted Catholic royalists in this effort to recreate the Roman empire in modern France. Proto-fascist and profoundly anti-Christian, the movement nonetheless gained support from many Catholic bishops and some leading French Catholic intellectuals, most notably Jacques Maritain. Gilson was, for his part, appalled by Action Française and nearly left the Church in protest against the overwhelming support it received from Catholics. Pius XI spared Gilson this fateful move by condemning the movement in 1926. Maritain, the movement’s most significant intellectual recruit, dutifully put faith before politics and renounced his affiliation with the movement.

Maritain and Gilson would find common cause articulating a path forward for Catholics and modern politics through a broad intellectual vision Maritain labeled “integral humanism.” Though both Gilson and Maritain freely spoke of a “new Christendom,” theirs was not a call for a return to the Middle Ages. Distinguishing between passing political forms and enduring principles, Gilson sought to re-imagine modern democracy as grounded in the primacy of the human person. The term has since become central to post-Vatican II Catholic thought and pro-life politics, though Michel’s account of Gilson’s understanding of the politics of the human person shows the distance between Gilson’s world and ours. In his admittedly unsystematic account of the politics of the human person, Gilson begins with a defense of the family “as a natural fact.” He then proceeds to “the socialization of certain natural resources or of certain means of production and distribution” and support for “trade-unionism,” grouping all three principles under the general term “social democracy,” which he envisioned as an alternative to both communism and capitalism. In this, Gilson was firmly in the mainstream of mid-twentieth century European Catholic social thought, with New Deal liberalism standing in as a rough American equivalent.

Gilson’s Cold War politics proved more controversial. Gilson shared the hope of lay Catholic statesmen such as Conrad Adenauer, Chancellor of West Germany, that Catholic social teaching could provide the guiding framework for the postwar reconstruction of Europe. Well aware of the threat posed by the Soviet Union, both Gilson and Adenauer also feared the loss of political and cultural independence that would come by entering into a military alliance with the United States. The responsibilities of public office and geographic proximity to the Soviet Union led Adenauer to accept NATO as a political necessity, but Gilson, the intellectual, insisted that Europe re-arm and adopt a position of non-alignment. History proved both figures half-right: NATO kept Europe free from Soviet domination, but dependence on the United States saw Gilson’s dream of a Catholic Europe fall before the onslaught of American consumer culture. Gilson’s opposition to NATO no doubt undermined his reputation in the United States. Patriotic Catholics looking for an international Catholic intellectual to sing the praises of the Pax Americana turned to Jacques Maritain, whose Reflections on America (1958) virtually baptized the United States as the real historical embodiment of the new Christendom envisioned in his Integral Humanism.

Varieties of Thomism before and after the Council

Western politics has changed so dramatically over the last seventy years as to render these political debates of perhaps historical interest only. Gilson’s work as an intellectual, particularly his role in promoting a certain kind of Thomism, remains more relevant for Catholics today. Gilson was shocked by the wholesale abandonment of Thomism that followed the Second Vatican Council. He believed that only the Thomistic tradition had the intellectual heft to guide the proper implementation of the Council. Many Catholics dismayed by the legacy of the Council continue to share his sentiments. That does not, however, mean that they share his Thomism. Michel’s book is helpful in revealing the varieties of Thomism at play in the half-century prior to the Council. Gilson distinguished himself by taking a historical approach to the study of St. Thomas. Part of this involved understanding Thomas in terms of his sources and in the larger context of his time. This approach earned Gilson the respect of secular scholars in the emerging field of medieval studies.

The mainstream, secular academia of Gilson’s time was generally suspicious of intellectuals who professed the Catholic faith. Gilson nonetheless earned the respect of secular philosophers at leading institutions such as the Sorbonne and Harvard. The latter offered him a permanent position to teach the history of medieval philosophy. He turned down Harvard’s offer to work with the Basilian Fathers at St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto, where he established the Institute of Medieval Studies. Gilson chose St. Michael’s over Harvard because he wished to teach in an environment where he could more openly integrate his faith with his scholarship. He remained committed to the highest standards of scholarship and to producing work that would be acknowledged by non-Catholic scholars.

Gilson’s commitment to developing a historical understanding of St. Thomas that could speak to the contemporary world put him at odds with others who were content to develop Thomism as a language and a system insulated and isolated from the errors of the modernity. This contrast appeared most clearly in an exchange between Gilson and the “sacred monster” of fortress Thomism, the Dominican Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange. The two attended a set of meetings at Rome in 1950, occasioned by the publication of the encyclical Humani Generis, which warned of “modern opinions and errors threatening to undermine the foundations of Catholic doctrine”. Historical relativism lurked behind much of what the Church identified as modern errors, and Gilson was well aware that most Thomists were inclined to “despise and mistrust” history. Humani Generis appeared as a victory for those, such as Garrigou-Lagrange, who understood Catholic thought, and Thomism in particular, as a closed system; though sometimes understood as a rebuke to the use of history by ressourcement thinkers such as Henri De Lubac, the encyclical could easily be used as a cudgel against a Thomist such as Gilson, who had spent much of his applying the historical-critical method to the writings of St. Thomas.

Gilson, says Michel, had little sympathy for figures like De Lubac, but remained committed to the historical method. In an exchange with Garrigou-Lagrange, he affirmed: “The history of philosophy is not closed. . . . On the contrary, the narrative of so many adventures faced by thought, invites us to new ones, and perhaps the moment has come to attempt the most beautiful.” Garrigou-Lagrange responded: “Therefore, for you . . . metaphysics is an adventure, which is to say, an arbitrary story and made up as one wishes.” To remove any doubt about where he stood, the Dominican affirmed that yes, indeed, metaphysics is a closed system. Reflecting on this controversy, Michel judges that Gilson found himself caught between the warring camps of doctrinaire Thomism and the ressourcement turn away from philosophy toward scripture, liturgy and history.

The confusion following the Council left Gilson in this third camp. Dismayed by the initial interpretation and implementation of the Council, he neither defended the ressourcement foundations of the Council nor retreated to pre-conciliar certainties. He believed that St. Thomas remained a viable guide to the post-conciliar world, yet again insisted that Thomas needed to be liberated from the straightjacket of mainstream Thomism. Michel writes as one sympathetic to Gilson in general and to his interpretation of the Council in particular. He sees Gilson’s brand of Thomism as an inspiration for the two figures identified most with advancing an authentic interpretation of the Council: John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

Michel persuasively argues for the importance of Gilson as a historical figure and the continued relevance of his historical approach in Catholic intellectual life. Still, the link to John Paul and Benedict is somewhat strained and misleading. Both figures no doubt knew and respected Gilson’s work, but neither worked out of the tradition of Gilsonian Thomism, or any Thomism, for that matter. The thought of St. Thomas remains an enduring strain within the larger Catholic intellectual tradition; Gilson rightly denounced its abrupt dismissal from Catholic education following the Council. Still, the Council documents owe most of their inspiration to the ressourcement movement that Gilson always kept at arm’s length. As a theologian Benedict XVI best expressed the intellectual renewal envisioned by the Council in his multi-volume Jesus of Nazareth, a work of biblical exegesis employing the historical-critical method with barely a mention of the philosophical issues that consumed pre-conciliar Thomists (and, sadly, many post-conciliar Thomists).

The doctrinal confusion following the Council has led those concerned with orthodoxy to forget the purpose of the Council: to announce the Gospel to the modern world in a language appropriate to the modern world. Even Gilson conceded the limits of Thomism with respect to evangelization: “Faith has converted more philosophers to Thomism than Thomist philosophy has converted philosophers to the faith”.

Gilson’s own reservations aside, Michel’s book shows how a certain kind of Thomism was able to speak to the world at a particular moment in time. In this way, Gilson’s life and work remain an inspiration, and a challenge, for Catholics today.

Étienne Gilson: An Intellectual Biography
By Florian Michel; Translated by James G. Colbert.
Catholic University of America Press, 2024
Paperback, 430 pages