The Philosophy of Neo-Thomism:

Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain

Etienne Gilson (1884-1978)

Etienne Gilson was a philosopher and historian, born in Paris in 1884. He studied at the Sorbonne, and became professor there, teaching from 1921 until 1932. He then taught at the College de France from 1932 until 1951. In 1929, he founded the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at Toronto University in Canada. He divided his academic year between the College de France and Toronto University until 1951, thereafter concentrating on Toronto until 1968.

While Jacques Maritain is the outstanding militant exponent of the philosophy of Aquinas in our time, Gilson is its outstanding historian. But, in analyzing Thomism historically, Gilson does not lack the fighting spirit. He defends his master by attacking what is called modern philosophy, and he does so both by special studies and by outlining large aspects, in order to prove that Thomism has not the ambition of achieving philosophy once and for all but rather of keeping philosophical thought alive, and that Thomism is able to offer a basis for relating reality as we know it to the permanent principles in whose light all the changing problems of science, of ethics or of the arts must be solved.

To Gilson, Thomism is by no means identical with Scholasticism, but rather a revolt against it. Gilson does not believe in systems of philosophy. He believes firmly in the guidance of such principles which, in the course of the history of philosophy, have become evident as an impersonal necessity for philosophical inquiry and orientation. History of philosophy, therefore, is, for him, by far more a part of philosophy itself than history of science is a part of science. It is possible, he says, to become a competent scientist without knowing much about history of science, but no man can carry very far his own philosophical reflections, unless he first studies the history of philosophy.

For Gilson, there have been only three really great metaphysicians, viz., Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas, and none of them had a philosophical system, which would have meant the abolition of philosophy. From the Middle Ages until the present time three great experiments for founding a system have been attempted, and all of them have failed. The medieval, the Cartesian and the modern experiment, represented by Immanuel Kant and Auguste Comte have broken down. The result, as Gilson sees it, is the reduction of philosophy to science. Its consequences would be the abdication of the right to judge and rule nature, the conception of Man as a mere part of nature, and the green light for the most reckless social adventures to play havoc with human lives and institutions. Gilson is convinced that the revival of the philosophy of Aquinas opens the way out of that zone of danger.

Jacques Maritain (1882-1973)

Jacques Maritain was born in Paris in 1882. He studied in Paris and Heidelberg and was a professor at the Institut Catholique in Paris from 1914 until 1940. He taught mainly in North America, at Toronto, Columbia, Chicago, and Princeton universities (1948-60). As French ambassador to the Vatican from 1945 to 1948, he later became a strong opponent of the Vatican Council and the neo-Modernist movement.

Maritain, one of the most influential contemporary Neo-Thomists, was the descendant of a family of freethinkers. His mother's father was Jules Favre, one of the founders of the Third French Republic and an ardent adversary of clericalism. Maritain kept himself outside the Catholic Church until he was converted by the mystic and eccentric poet, Leon Eloy, who lived in a world of supernatural symbols but was not at all interested in philosophy.

After his conversion, which, in some respects, was prepared by his devotion to Henri Bergson, Maritain went to Heidelberg to study biology with Hans Driesch. Until 1926, Maritain was associated with the Action Frangaise, the French royalist shock troop, and, in accordance with its program, he professed strong opposition to republicanism, democracy and liberal ideas. After the Action Frangaise was condemned by Pope Pius XI in 1926, Maritain began to profess confidence in a democracy inspired by Christian faith. At the same time, he turned from speculative metaphysics to history and sociology.

Although Maritain remained a staunch defender of the Catholic Church and Scholasticism, he did not regard the Christian Middle Ages as the obligatory model of human civilization. Rather, he was inclined to acknowledge the rights of a plurality of civilizations, all of which are guided by Divine providence, and proved his ability to expound historical and contemporary, human and social problems in Thomist terms, which, in his opinion, enabled him to discover the relations between historical phenomena and the supratemporal order. Proceeding from these views, Maritain maintained that the value of the human person is rooted in an order which is created by God and strives toward God.

The Catholic Church was acknowledged by Maritain as universal, supranational, supraracial and supratemporal, but he was eager to avoid any romanticizing of what he demanded to be respected. He insisted that the Church is not the home of the elect but the refuge of sinners. On the other hand, he was, on the ground of his conception of the Church, as strongly opposed to Nazism as he was to Bolshevism.

Any contradiction between the Christian faith and modern science is, according to Maritain, due to ontological ambitions on the part of Descartes and Newton, and will vanish after science will have elaborated a thoroughly nonmetaphysical approach. But he did not believe that, even in a distant future, science and faith will cooperate without friction.

Maritain's main works include The Degrees of Knowledge, Art and Scholasticism, Existence and the Existent, Man and the State, Education at the Crossroads, and Moral Philosophy.