So What’s New About Scholasticism?

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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.
Table of Contents
Rajesh Heynickx and Stéphane Symons

Into Neo-Thomism: Reading the Fabric of an Intelle

ctual Movement

Part I Shaping A New Society

James Chappel

The Thomist Debate over Inequality and Property Ri

ghts in Depression-Era Europe

Wim Weymans

Religion, human rights and democracy in post-1940

France in theory and practice: from Maritain’s Tho
mism to Vignaux’s secular realism

Rajesh Heynickx

Epistemological Tracks: On Religion, Words, and B

uildings in 1950’s Belgium

John Carter Wood

When Personalism Met Planning: Jacques Maritain

and a British Christian Intellectual Circle, 1937 – 19
49

Part II. Encountering Phenomenology, Existentialism, a

nd Aesthetics
Edward Baring

Neo-Scholasticism, Phenomenology, and the Probl

em of Conversion

Dries Bosschaert

A Great Deal of Controversy? A Case Study of Don

deyne, Grégoire, and Moeller Integrating Phenomen
ology and Existentialism in Louvain Neo-Thomism

Adi Efal-Lautenschläger

Gilson’s Poietics

Part III. Reconciling Science and Religion

Sigrid Leyssen and Annette Mülberger

Psychology from a Neo-Thomist Perspective. The L

ouvain-Madrid Connection.

Jaume Navarro

Science contra Science. The Battle for Legitimate K

nowledge in the Spanish Catholic Journals in the E
arly Twentieth Century

Part IV. Mediating Tradition

Christopher S. Morrissey

The Analogy of Marshall McLuhan

Herman Paul

Vetera Novis Augere: Neo-Scholastic Philosophers

and Their Concepts of Tradition
Karim Schelkens

Thomas Aquinas or John Henry Newman? The Intel

lectual Itinerary of Johannes Willebrands

About the Authors

Index of Persons
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 marco.passarotti@unicatt.
it, or by post: Largo Gemelli 1, 20123 Milan, Italy

Picture of the inside of the Centro Automzione Analisi

Linguistic (CAAL), led by Roberto Busa. The picture
was taken on June 29, 1967.
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, 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 Neo-Thomist or Neo-Scholastic
philosophy,2 as the foundation for a theology envisioning 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. All contributing authors will concentrate
on the conceptual tissue of ‘the Neo-Thomistic 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 extremely irritates me,
I admit that I also get from him some lightning stimulation.”1
1
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-a-Thomist 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.”1
4 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 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 neo-scholasticists 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 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
contemporary 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 Neo-
Thomism 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.
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), Neo-Thomism 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 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 Neo-Thomism
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,” considers 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 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 Neo-Thomist 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 Neo-Scholastic 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 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.
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.19
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.20 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.21 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 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 anti-capitalist 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 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.22
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.23 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.”24 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.25 The British
sociologist R.H. Tawney argued that capitalism and its
property relations were rooted firmly in Protestantism, a
conclusion expanded upon by one of his students, a German
Jesuit named J.B. Kraus.26
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.27 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.28 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 anti-capitalist 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.29
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 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.”30
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.”31
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 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.”32
Horváth’s book created a firestorm of debate across the
continent.33 Anti-capitalist 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.34
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.”35 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 whose
“freedom” and “conditions of existence” were the true telos
of earthly goods.36
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.37 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.38
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”).3
9
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 relations clashed so vehemently with natural
law that “a revolution of the social body” was bound to
happen.40 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.41 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.”42 Thomas,
after all, was not reacting to a socialist threat the 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.”43
 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.”44 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.45
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).46 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.47 Keller had many
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.”48 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”).49 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.”50
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.”51 His friend
Oswald von Nell-Breuning’s Features of Market Morality
(1928) was a staunch defense of capitalism, too. For Nell-
Breuning, 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.52
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.”53
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.”54
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. Thomas,” 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.55 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.”56 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.57
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.
58 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.
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.” 59 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).60
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 to abrogate that property right.61
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.”62 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.63 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 divinely-appointed 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.”64 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.65
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.66 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. 67
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.68
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Wim Weymans
Religion, human rights and
democracy in post-1940
France in theory and practice:
from Maritain’s Thomism to
Vignaux’s secular realism
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.
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.69
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 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.70
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 legitimize 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.71 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.”72 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-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.
73
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.74
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.75 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.76
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.”77 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.78

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.”79 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.”80 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.”81 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.”82 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,”83 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 with an
alternative that is more compatible with modern secular
societies and their emphasis on diversity and freedom.84
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.”85 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.”86
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,”87 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 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.”88 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.”89 It follows that for Scotus “God
treats with complete freedom the beings He has freely
created.”90 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.91
 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.92
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.9
3 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.94
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).95 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 source of doubt.96 Niebuhr
connected skepticism with religion because for him “sin is
the pretension to knowledge.”97 In his view, man is “tempted
to deny the limited character of his knowledge and the
finiteness of his perspectives.”98 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.”99 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.”100
 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.”101 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.”102 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.”103
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 1957.104 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 sometimes
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.1
05
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.”106
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.”107
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”108 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
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,109
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.110
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.111
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-Democracy112 – 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 universal 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.113 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.114
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.115 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.116 If Maritain or 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.”117 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.118 When returning home after the
war, Vignaux continued his unionist activities inside the
Catholic CFTC union.119 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).120
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.”121
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.122 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.”123
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
progressive defense of democracy, freedom and rights.124
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.125 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.126 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.127
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 democracy 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.128 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) 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.12
9
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“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.’”130 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 thought-provoking 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, the question he was wrestling with,
namely ‘Can religious art be modern?’ a clear example of
what Hans Blumenberg called “carry-over questions,”131
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).13
2
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 (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 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.133

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. 134
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.”135
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 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 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.
 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.

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 appeal 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.”
136
“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.”137 Even bigger was
the animosity which started to grow 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.138 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.139
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.
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.140 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.141
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,142 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
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.”143
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.144 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.1
45

“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.146 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.147
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 painting and
architecture, fascinated them.148 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.149
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, Neo-Thomistic 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 Neo-
Thomists 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.”150
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’).151
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.”152 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.153 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.154 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 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.”155
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,156 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,”157 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.”158 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 architecture, 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.159
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.160
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 other.161
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.’
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Carter John Wood
When Personalism Met
Planning: Jacques Maritain
and a British Christian
Intellectual Circle, 1937 – 1949
I thank the editors and Mihai-D. Grigore for their
comments on earlier drafts.

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.162 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.163
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
Thomism of Leo XIII.”164 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.165
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 anti-
modernist 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.166
But he came to see Catholicism and modernity as capable of
a profound synthesis.167 Two intellectual “about turns”
followed: his rejection of Action Française (after the papal
condemnation of Maurras in 1926) and support for
Republican Spain after 1936.168 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.169 “Anglo-Catholics” in particular – an influential
variety of Anglican churchmanship in this period170 – saw
Maritain as an important thinker; however, they sometimes
criticised him for a narrow-minded Thomism.171 (Despite
their commitment 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).172 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.173 I refer retrospectively to the circle considered
here as “the Oldham group” after its leading figure, the
missionary and ecumenical activist Joseph H. Oldham.174 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.”175 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 eagerly 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.176 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.”177 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.178 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.
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.179 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.180 He co-
organised the ecumenical “Church, Community and State”
conference in Oxford in 1937, which gave particular
attention to the growing threat of totalitarianism.181
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).182 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).1
83 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).
Oldham was a skilled networker: the “collaborators”
named in early CNL issues included many of the era’s
influential Christians.184 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.185
Among them were clergy and theologians (such as John
Baillie and Alec Vidler),186 ecumenical activists (such as
Eric Fenn, Daniel Jenkins, and Kathleen Bliss),187 writers
and academics (such as T.S. Eliot, John Middleton Murry,
and H.A. Hodges),188 and high-ranking educationalists (such
as Sir Walter Moberly and Sir Fred Clarke).189 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 self-critical 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, and helped inspire his book The Idea of a
Christian Society (1939).190 The Criterion had itself been an
important vector for the introduction of Neo-Thomism into
Britain.191 Maritain’s Religion and Culture (1931) had been
published in a series edited by Dawson, and he met and
corresponded with Moot members.192 Oldham recommended
True Humanism to others, including Archbishops Cosmo
Lang and William Temple.193 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.194 It met for weekends
near London two to four times a year between 1938 and
1944 and once a year between 1945 and 1947, when it was
disbanded after Mannheim’s death.195 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.196 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.”197
In his thirteen-page, single-spaced paper, Ballie
considered True Humanism and others’ remarks on it.198 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.”199 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.200
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.201 He agreed that “what the Reformers cut
asunder” must be reconnected in “a unity of an altogether
looser and more elastic kind than the old.”202
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.”203 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.”204 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.”205 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.206
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.207

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.”208
Religion and politics would be “essentially separate
spheres,” the Church giving only “general ethical principles”
or a “theological firmament” for action (but directly
addressing issues like divorce).209 Change would come not
through a “single political party” but rather “a sort of
Christian diaspora.”210 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.”211 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.”212 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.”213
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).214 By meeting’s end, it had, as Baillie said, “agreed
on a common basis [for its activities] in Maritain.”215
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.”216 Others were “deeply impressed” by, had
“profound admiration” for, or felt “entirely in sympathy”
with True Humanism.217 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.”218 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.219 Löwe saw an “almost miraculous
concord” between True Humanism and “the deepest
emanations of recent Protestant thinking.”220 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.”221
Murry said the book showed “a convergence of neo-Catholic
and neo-Protestant thought, which I find illuminating and
encouraging.”222 (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.”)223 Alexeiev suggested the phrase
“integral humanism” had appeared in fin de siècle French
positivism.224 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.”225
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).226 “Our
continental Protestant brethren,” Baillie wrote, “have
something of cardinal importance to learn from Oldham-
cum-Murry-cum-Maritain.”227 Vidler even thought the book
“seems to gather up and follow on what was said and felt at
the last meeting of the Moot.”228 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.229 Jenkins saw “common ground”
between the “Catholic and Reformed schools of thought” as
expressed by Maritain and Barth on faith’s “social
implications.”230 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.”231 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.”232
Maritain was seen to confirm that “many Christian minds”
were “arriving at the same essential meanings.”233

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.234 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 Mannheim235 – 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.236
The image of a “Summa” as a shorthand for this aim recurred
a few times at subsequent meetings.237 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 from the age of
St. Thomas”; Hodges, in the Moot, agreed that the title
“Summa” was “not appropriate.”238
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.239 He became a key figure in the
Oldham group.240 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.241 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.”242 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.”243 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.”244
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.245 Mannheim saw both Protestant 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.”246 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.”247
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,”248 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).249
Baillie agreed with Maritain that “liberal-bourgeois
humanism is now no more than barren wheat and starchless
bread.”250 In a war-time book, Murry cited Maritain to
argue: “we live in a world in which we cannot change
anything without changing everything.”251 In early 1940, the
CNL recommended True Humanism on a list of “aids to an
understanding of present-day Christian thought.”252 In
another issue, Oldham drew attention to Maritain’s assertion
of a growing potential for a new Christendom in Britain and
France.253 Key CNL essays on a Christian social order
referenced Maritain.254
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.”255
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.256 (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.257) 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.”258 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.259
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
remain mostly secular.260 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.261

Maritain’s emphasis on a “secular Christian” order was

appealing.262
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”263 – 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.”264 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.265

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”266 – 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 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.”267 However, in
the Moot’s discussion, the anonymous German theologian
and Alexeiev argued against religious meddling in politics.26
8 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.”269 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.”270
Vidler, expressing a group consensus, concluded that “when
we are examining the truth of a matter continental criticism
could be left out.”271
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.”)272 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.”273 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.”274
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.275 The Oldham
group shared a similar view of science as only legitimate in
its “material” 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.”276 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.277 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”)278 and, second, the replacement 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.”279 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.280

This passage was also quoted in a Church of England report

on post-war planning.281
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.282 Second, society would be “permeated”
with new values (partly via numerous Christian “cells”),
providing a cultural “leaven”:283 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.284 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) 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.”285 “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.”286 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.”287 This recalled
Maritain’s emphasis on what Baillie called “a sort of
Christian diaspora.”288
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.289 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.290
Mannheim found Maritain’s analysis too “abstract” and
“vague,” ignoring “large scale industrial technique, the
difficulties of the trade cycle, and mass organisation.”291
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.”292 Maritain, he said, was a “test
case” of the dangers of confining oneself to “the realm of
principles” and leaving “technical problems” to experts.293
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.294
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.”295 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.”296 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.297
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.”298
Maritain rose to prominence as a Thomist thinker in this “age
of imperial neo-Scholasticism”299 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 “personalism”
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.300 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.”301 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.302 Fenn even saw the group's vision of a
“Christian society” as a “modernised edition of Natural Law”
as filtered through Maritain.303 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.
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.304 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.305 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.”306 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.307 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 this-
worldly ends of human life.”308 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.”309 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.”310 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.”311 The group’s 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.312 Some whose relationship to
Christianity was decidedly ambivalent reacted similarly. For
example, George Orwell – an agnostic and no fan of
Catholicism313 – 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.”314 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.315 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.316 Matthew
Sterenberg has recently argued that this perceived crisis of
modernity led British intellectual discourse to be profoundly
influenced from the 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.”317 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 one-way. 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.”318 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.”319 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.320 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.”321 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 intellectual, 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.
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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
Heidegger, who first read Husserl at a time when he had
dedicated himself to the “service of researching and teaching
Christian-Scholastic philosophy.”322

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.
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.”323 Of
Husserl's early followers, many converted to Catholicism,
including Max Scheler, Siegfried Hamburger, Aurel Kolnai,
Dietrich von Hildebrand, and Adelgundis Jaegerschmidt.324
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.325 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 more open to
religious belief.326 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.327 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 Ge
melli 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.”328 Above all this meant adopting the questions
and methods of modern philosophy. Neo-scholastics 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 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.”329
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.”330 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.331
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.”332 Reformulated it should read
“adaequatio intellectus et rei jam mente praeconceptae.”333
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.334
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
with being.”335 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.336 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].”337
Like Mercier, Husserl focused his attention on a priori
logical laws and not those with a fundamentum in re.338 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.339 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.”340 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).341 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 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.”342
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.”343 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.344 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.”345
III The Neo-Scholastic Reception of the
Logical Investigations
The parallels between Husserl's project and their own
inclined progressive neo-scholastic 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.”346
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.”347 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 light.348 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.349
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.350
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].”351 A judgment is valid
when the intentional content of consciousness (a Bedeutung)
is fulfilled by the intuition of an object.352 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.”353
Similarly Geyser distinguished the foundational doctrine
from judgments of existence: its Being was “validity” not
“existence [Dasein].”354 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.”355 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.”
356
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, wrote
the first article on Husserl’s thought in a language other than
German: the 1910 “les Frontières de la logique.”357 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].”358 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.”359 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.360 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.361 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.362 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 is permitted to find a good sign
for the future of neo-scholastic philosophy.”363 Gemelli,
however, was at the forefront of this development, citing
Husserl numerous times.364 Gemelli's and Noël's discussion
of Husserl then informed the work of one of Mercier's
students in Spain, Marcelino Arnáiz.365 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.366
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.”367 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].”368 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.369 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 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.”370 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.371 As Husserl
wrote “to remain for ever incomplete after this fashion is an
ineradicable essential of the correlation Thing and Thing-
perception.”372
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.”373 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.”374 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.”375 For these
reasons, in Ideas Husserl seemed to be heading towards a
“transcendental idealism.”376 If 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.377 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.”378 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.379 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.”380 Gilson claimed that while
the idealists thought that philosophical reflection “must go
necessarily from thought to things,” this marked a
“Copernican revolution” of the old medieval tradition.381
The scholastics had instead wanted to “think from the point
of view of the object.”382 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.”383 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?”384
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.385 For Maritain, in contrast, we grasp
extramental Being directly in thought (“ego cogito ens”).386
By rendering the “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.”387 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].”388 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.”389 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.”390 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?”391 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.392
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.393 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.”394
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.”395 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.396 In doing so Husserl illegitimately
foreclosed the question of existence, and this marked his
“return to idealism.”397 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.”398 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;399 Stein through an appeal to faith as our access to
supernatural reason;400 Przywara through a displacement of
the positive sciences and an embrace of his version of the
analogia entis;401 Vanni Rovighi in contrast by asserting the
importance of the positive sciences and the cosmological
proof;402 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.
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Dries Bosschaert
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.”403 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.”404 One year later
Coppens returned to this matter and enlisted those members
of the ‘Ecclesiastical Faculties’405 reprimanded for their
opinions, among whom was also “an anonymous one,
according to Mgr. Van Cauwenbergh…One has named
Dondeyne, but he denies…”.406 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 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.407
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.
I From ‘Aeterni patris’ to ‘Humani
generis’ in Louvain

The promulgation of Aeterni patris408 by pope Leo XIII and

its promotion of Neo-Thomism 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.409 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,410 in a dialogue with
modern philosophies and scientific methods.411 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.412
Notwithstanding the importance of the Institute of Thomist
Philosophy, the Faculty of Theology also took up a position
in the field.413 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.414
 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.’415 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.416 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 superiors 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,417 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.418 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.419 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.420
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.421 As such, the encyclical called to
mind the condemnation of ‘modernism’ in the encyclical
Pascendi dominici gregis,422 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.’423 In 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.”424 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.425 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.”426 First and foremost this paragraph intended
to react to the doubts that 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.”427 Others, such as
Marie-Michel Labourdette,428 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.429
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.430 In
short, the encyclical had raised questions and philosophers
and theologians were asked to reconsider their intellectual
projects and to readjust them if needed.
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,431 Dondeyne had been
concerned with the development of a truthful discourse on
God and metaphysical knowledge from a Neo-Thomist
perspective.432 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.’433
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.”434
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.435 Similar to numerous
other interpretations, Dondeyne first of all presented a
commentary to the encyclical.436 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.”437
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 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.”438
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”439 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 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.440
It was clear that Dondeyne was convinced that only this
re-actualized Thomism would provide the necessary
foundation for a solid metaphysics.441 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,”442 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.443 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 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 Wereld444 [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”445 also sparked a reaction in his own
milieu. The Louvain philosopher Franz Grégoire446
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 analysis of Le Roy’s work.447 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.ˮ448
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 movement. He started his quest by
studying Henri Bergson.449 This philosopher, who also
strongly influenced Jacques Maritain at the beginning of his
career,450 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.451 Grégoire
studied Bergson’s method particularly in his Réflexions sur
l’étude critique des philosophes intuitionistes. Le cas de
l’élan vital chez Bergson.452 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.”453 Second, Grégoire
elaborated further on the principle of sufficient reason which
states that everything has a cause (the formula: “tout
s’explique”454) 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,455 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.456
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.ˮ4
57
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 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.458 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.459 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 ‘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.460 Later on, especially in his famous Littérature du
XXe siècle et christianisme,461 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.46
2 For example, he first addressed Heidegger’s and Sartre’s
humanism in 1946 in the context of a description of militant
atheism and antitheism463 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.”464 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.465 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.466 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 existentialism. 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 1951.467 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”468 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.469
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”470 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.471 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 ensured 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. 472 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.473
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
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 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 Neo-Thomism. 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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di Leone XIII: atti del convegno tenuto a Bologna il 27 – 28 – 
29 dicembre 1960], Rome 1961.
Aubert, Roger, “Le grand tournant de la Faculté de Théologie à
la veille de 1900,” in: Mélanges offerts à M.-D. Chenu: maître
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Adi Efal-Lautenschläger
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:474 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,475 we should situate
Gilson’s perspective alongside that of his fellow neo-
Scholastic and rival, Jacques Maritain.476 Although Maritain
and Gilson pose two 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.477 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.478 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),479 Maritain presents 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.480 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.481
Indeed, for both Maritain and Gilson, there is a markedly
religious function contained in artworks, which is immanent
and indispensable to their existence.482 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.483 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 intellect;484 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,”485 hexis being the Greek
equivalent (and origin) of the Latin habitus.486 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.487 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.
488 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.”489
Creative, or poetic intuition is only expressed by work of art,
the latter remaining a servant to intuitive experience.490 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 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.491 Indeed as mentioned above both
Gilson and Martian were present at Bergson’s lectures in the
College de France.492 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.493 Bergson’s conception of “creative
evolution,”494 and even more so his conception of intuition,4
95 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.496 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.”497 Indeed Gilson’s Poietics is one of
the clearest elaborations of Bergson’s fabricationist view of
life and 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.498 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.499
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.500 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).501 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 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,502 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.”503 The artwork follows the destiny of its
matter; it endures like it, it ages for better or worse, and is
completed in like manner.504 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.505 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.506
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.507
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 Gilson
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.508
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.509 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.
510 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.
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.511 Gilson once said that
it was Lévy-Bruhl who taught him the quality of “Thingness
–(“Chosisme”).”512And 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
world-renowned and revolutionary Index scolastico
cartésien.513 Gilson was also following Lévy-Bruhl’s
lectures on Descartes between 1904 and 1906 which he later
commented upon.514 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.”515 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.516 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.517 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 Leroi-Gourhan, who
exemplified ethnological thought in the terms of the research
of the plastic arts.518 Gilson was developing a concept of
artistic production which 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”),519 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.520 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.521 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.522 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.523 When
matter is invaded by a form, what happens is a reciprocal, yet
tensioned process of adaptation between the two.524 What
matters, according to Gilson is the singularity and
uniqueness of the realization of the form in the work. “There
have never been two works, painted by the same artist, that
tell the same story.”525 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.526 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,527 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.528

Therefore, germinal forms and the productive nature of art

are bound together to shape Gilson’s overall view of his
Poietics.
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.529 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.53
0 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:5
31 “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.”532 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), 533 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 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.534 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,535 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.536 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.”53
7 This does not mean that the entire poietic reality is to be
understood on the basis of pleasure, but nevertheless
pleasure is an inseparable part of that poietic reality.538
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.539 So even if Gilson and Maritain were contesting
regarding what the beautiful essentially means,540 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 enters 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.541
Nevertheless, a Poietic approach to art can advance in the
direction of a concrete, de-mystified, habitual conception of
art-making,542 a poieitic reality extending in the vast space
opened between engineering and liturgy.543
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 neo-Thomism. 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 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.
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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 Mülberger544
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.545
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.546 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.547
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.
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.548 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,549 but only recently has this line of
research been pursued intensively by Robert Kugelmann and
others.550
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”.551 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 Catholic priest in Europe who dedicated
himself to the teaching and experimental research in
scientific psychology.552
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”553 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 1962.554
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.555 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 (1988556), 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-
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.557 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.558 The Spanish psychologist Arnáiz
explicitly equated both expressions as referring to the same
kind of approach,559 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.560 This declaration
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 1882.561 His textbook Psychologie (1892) showed an
elaborative attempt to reconcile his Aristotelian and neo-
Thomist perspective with the newest scientific findings.562
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.563
Mercier not only urged Catholics to study closely the
results of psychological science, he also emphasized the
importance of doing science.564 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
teaching of psycho-physiology courses.565 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.566 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.567 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).568 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.569
Mercier read Jaime Balmes’ Filosofia fundamental before
he started teaching, and he referred to this book as an
important inspiration for his work.570 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,571 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.572
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.57
3 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.574 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 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.575 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.576 In his book on
psychological phenomena, Arnáiz577 attacked Krausism
directly, calling it “philosophical exotism”, “enveloped in
mist and expressed in an unintelligible language.”578 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.579
Therefore, he thought that the same ‘remedy’ which had
been successful in Belgium could also work in Spain.
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.”580 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 (…).”581
V Arnáiz’s Criticism and Program for
Psychology

In his book on “sensitive life”582, 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.583 Probably this philosophical
(theoretical) disorientation and feeling of 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
Psychologie584 reinforced the idea of a certain receptiveness
of their approach among experimental (and positivist)
psychologists,585 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.”586
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,”587 where he denounces the
“invasion” 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, and became “docteur en
philosophie de l'Ecole Saint Thomas” in 1907.588 Upon his
return to Spain, he obtained a professorship in philosophy at
the Academia Universitaria Católica in Madrid,589 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.590 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,591 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.592
Zaragüeta presented himself as the last of Mercier’s
disciples and one of the very first students of Albert
Michotte.593 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).5
94 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 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,595 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.596 Soon he founded his own school – and then
institute – for experimental psychology, independent of the
philosophy institute.597 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.”598 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.599 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.600 With an instrument characterised by
big paper rotating discs he created 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)601 and that
his argument was not epistemological but remained entirely
within the phenomenal and empirical domain.602 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.603 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.604 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
connected, changes in the one could be used experimentally
to study changes in the other.605 In his early work, adopting
the introspective methods of the Würzburg School, Michotte
emphasized the need to complement introspection with
controlled instrumental measurements.606 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.607
This name, which he adopted only in 1961,608 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 – 52.609 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”610 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 from their posts.61
1 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.612
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).613 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.614 At this point the contact with Louvain played
a crucial role once more. Michotte was invited to give the
inaugural speech of the new department and his article on
phenomenal causality opened the first issue of the new
journal.615
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 publication616
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.”617 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 Cardinal
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.”618 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.619 Michotte, from his side,
would continue to mention Yela’s work at the laboratory as
an important contribution to his project.620 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 Neo-Scholastic network.621 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.622 Yela and other members of the new department
often referred to Michotte.623 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 autonomous 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.624 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 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.
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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.”625
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.626 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, “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
nineteenth-century Europe was not whether to embrace or
reject ‘modernity’ but how best to respond to the challenges
it posed.”627
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.628 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
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.629
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 argued 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.”630
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.631
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.632
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.633
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 branches 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.634

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.”635 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.”636 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.”637 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.”638 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 principle,
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”639 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,”640 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.641 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.642
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.643

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.644 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 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.645
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.”646 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.647
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 editorial 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.”648 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.”649
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 science-
promoters, 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.”650
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 History, ordinarily the result of cut-and-
paste or biased selection.”651 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.”652
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…653

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.
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.”654 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.655 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
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.656
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.”657
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 unbridled 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.”658
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.”659 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,”660 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.661 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. 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.662 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.663
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?”664
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.
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.665
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 military-related
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:
[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.666

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 anti-modernist 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 Barcelona-based 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!… 667

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.”668
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.”669 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 philosophy 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.”670 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.”671 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.672
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.”
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.”673 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.
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.
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Arbos, Jaume, Ensayo de Física y Química trascendentalmente
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Arintero, Juan Gonzalez, La Evolución y la Filosofía Cristiana,
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Culture Wars. Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century
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de los jesuitas españoles: La revista Razón y Fe (1901),” in:
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de la Ercilla, Eustaquio Ugarte, “Review of El materialismo
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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).
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McCool, Gerald A., “Is Thomas’s way of philosophizing still viable
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vol 1 (1901): 8 – 9.
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Thermodynamics, national culture, and social progress in
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134
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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.”674
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
advertisements. 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 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.”675
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” understanding 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 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.”676 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.”677 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.678

Analogy is simply “how we use words to express what we

know”679 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 …680

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,681 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 called in Latin analogia).682 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.”683 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.”684
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.”685
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, “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.686

Hence it would be wrong to read Aristotle as saying analogy

is a species of metaphor,687 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,”688 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.689

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.690

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 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.691 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.”692
Further, there are not “two models” of analogy, as some
scholars would have it,693 because proportionality is simply a
mathematical analogy for representing relations logically,
but there is no essential difference between it and the so-
called 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.694

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.”695But 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
between the two types of causality, namely, that both produce an
observed effect, even though in utterly different ways.696

Thus, it is wrong to say that, implicit in the so-called analogy

of proportionality x:a::b:c697 is the assertion that the relation
between God (x) and his creatures (a, b, c) must be already
known.698 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”699
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.700

… 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]).701

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.”702 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.703
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.704 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.705
Natural theology would go astray, then, whenever it
rejects the Thomistic epistemology of “being as first known”
(ens ut primum cognitum), because it is 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.706

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.707

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.708

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.709 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.710

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 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.”711

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 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.712
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.713 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.”714 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.715
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.”716
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.”717
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.718 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.”719
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.720
Even so, the historic achievement of Aquinas transcends
the patristic program, because, as McLuhan puts it, “St.
Thomas alone reconciled grammar and dialectics.”721
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).722
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.”723
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.”724
Exasperated with their inability to appreciate his own efforts
at unveiling this hidden ground, McLuhan wrote to John
Atkin that 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.”7
25 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.”726
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.”727 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 business.”728 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.”729
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.
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 man-made 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.’730

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.”731 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 to understanding the spiral of
meaning can hope to unravel its analogical patterns.732
While Plato may have attacked the mimetic method of “a
collective psyche and mind,”733 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.”734
Evidently McLuhan thought that Neo-Thomism lacked the
resources for modes of pattern recognition sufficient to
escape the maelstrom.
 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.
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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.735 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.736
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 it737 – 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 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.”738 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.”739 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.”740 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.”741
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.”742 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 centuries-old heritage into “an
attractive modern article.”743 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 exercised considerable
influence,744 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.74
5 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 “past-present
relations.”746 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, 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.”747 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.”748 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 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.749
 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.”750
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.”751 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 one-sidednesses 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 totality of the demands of our nature … [by taking]
me as I am, in the integrity of my sensible and intelligent nature.752

Accordingly, for Mercier, the revitalization of scholastic

philosophy recommended by Aeterni Patris had a
significance not limited to Catholic students. Neo-
Scholasticism 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.”753
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.”754 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.”755 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.756 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 of
Aristotle, “the greatest genius that humanity has ever
known.”757 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.”758 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.”759 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.”760 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.761 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?”762
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.763 “Neo-
Thomism” would draw too much attention to an individual
philosopher, 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 Albert-the-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.764
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.765 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.”766 Also, like
Mercier, De Wulf conceived of philosophy as “a synthetic
study of the world by the sole data of reason”767 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”).768
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.769 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.”770 De Wulf used the same organic imagery as
Mercier in advocating both loyalty to and further
development of the tradition.771 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.”772
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 changed
to serve modern needs,773 De Wulf called more explicitly for
“adaptation … to our own time.”774 For him, Neo-Scholastic
philosophy was not only a “revival,” but also an “adaptation”
of medieval scholasticism.775 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.”776 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.777

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.778 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 epistemology as such constituted a
Cartesian aberration.779 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.”780
While “traditionalism” for Mercier had referred exclusively
to such French counter-revolutionaries as Louis de Bonald
and Jean-Marie de Lamennais,781 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.782
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.783 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.”784 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.785 De
Wulf, 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.786 De Wulf
showed himself a loyal disciple of Mercier, too, in insisting
that “lovers of tradition” need not be “unrelenting
adversaries of everything modern.”787 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.”788
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.”789 Had Neo-
Scholastic philosophers in the 1880s felt like 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.”790
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.”791 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,792
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.793 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.794
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.795
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.796
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, 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.”797
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,”798 in the
1940s, De Raeymaeker tried to bring his students “into closer
contact with concrete reality, especially with our conscious
living and existing.”799 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.”800 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.801
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 of his theories.”80
2 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.803
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.804

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.805
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.806 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:
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.807

Finally, although especially the young De Raeymaeker did

not hesitate to situate himself in a narrative spanning seven
centuries of (Neo‐)Thomist philosophy,808 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.809 De
Raeymaeker himself contributed to such a retrospective with
a book-length study of Mercier and the Higher Institute of
Philosophy.810 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.”811
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.812
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 fundamental role of personal experience in
philosophy.813 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.814 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 1950.815
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.816 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 organicist connotations.817 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.”818 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 cited819 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.820
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.”821 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.”822
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
modern 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.”823
Thomas, by implication, became a role model
characterized by virtues such as “love of truth” and “esteem
for tradition.”824 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.”825 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 …”826 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.”827 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 philosophical 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.828 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.
829
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.830 They all added, however, 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,”831 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.832
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Karim Schelkens
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 unity833. 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
neo-Thomist apparatus arose. While not a pars pro toto,
Willebrands’s particular story may help to illustrate the
development and struggle of many intellectually 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).834 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.835 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 Essay on Development836 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,837 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.838 Frequently influenced by Paul-Thureau
Dangin’s study of Newman839 authors such as Alfred Loisy
discovered a type of theological discourse that appeared to
escape the deductive and a-historical methodologies so key
to neo-Thomist 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.840 Loisy was not alone.
Other prominent voices such as George Tyrrell, Henri Brémo
nd and Édouard Le Roy,841 drew on Newman as a source of
inspiration.842 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.843

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,844 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.
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.845 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.846 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 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.847 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.848
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.849 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.850

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.851 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,852 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.853 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:854 “these 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.”855 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.856
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,857 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
Neomannum; 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.858

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.859 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.
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.860
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.861
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.”862 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 Przywara undertook similar
projects.863 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),864 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 neo-Thomist 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 neo-Thomist 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.865 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.”866 This minor remark 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,’867 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.868 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.”869 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 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.870
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.871 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.872 On the flipside, Willebrands tried hard not to sink
into ‘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 neo-Thomism
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.”873 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.”874
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 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 mathematical 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.875 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.876
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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 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.

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 1
Albert the Great 1
Alexeiev, Nicolas 1, 2 f., 3, 4, 5, 6
Alphonse of Liguori 1
Aquinas, Thomas 1 – 2, 3 f., 4 – 5, 6 – 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 1
3 – 14, 15 – 16, 17 f., 18, 19 f., 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 2
7, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32 – 33, 34, 35 – 36, 37 f., 38 – 39, 40,
41, 42 – 43, 44, 45 – 46, 47 – 48, 49 f., 50
Arbós, Jaime 1, 2, 3, 4
Aristotle 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 – 11, 12 f., 13 – 14, 15, 1
6 – 17, 18 f., 19 – 20, 21, 22
Arnáiz, Marcelino 1, 2 – 3, 4, 18, 20 f.
Atkin, John 1
Auden, W.H. 1
Augustine of Hippo 1
Bacon, Francis 1
Baillie, John 1, 2, 3 – 4, 5 f., 6 – 7, 8, 9
Balmes, Jaime 1
Baring, Edward 1,2
Barker, Ernest 1 f.
Barth, Karl 1, 2, 3, 4
Bellon, Karel 1 f.
Berdyaev, Nikolai 1, 2
Berger, Suzanne 1
Bergson, Henri 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 f., 6, 7, 8, 9 f., 10
Bernanos, Georges 1
Bernard of Chartres 1
Bernini 1
Besse, Clément 1
Biederlack, Joseph 1
Billot, Louis 1
Binet, Alfred 1
Bittremieux, Joseph 1
Bliss, Kathleen 1 – 2, 3
Blondel, Maurice 1, 2 – 3
Blumenberg, Hans 1
Boekraad, Adrian J. 1
Boelaar, Henri 1
Boethius 1
Bosschaert, Dries 1, 2
Bouillard, Henri 1, 2 f., 3, 4
Bouyer, Louis 1, 2 f., 3 – 4
Brauer, Theodor 1
Brémond, Henri 1, 2 – 3
Brentano, Franz 1
Bretherton, Luke 1
Briefs, Götz 1
Brunner, Emil 1
Buber, Martin 1
Burgert, Helmut 1
Busa, Roberto 1
Cajetan, Thomas 1, 2, 3, 4
Calvin, John 1
Camus, Albert 1, 2
Carracido, José Rodríguez 1
Cauchie, Alfred 1
Cebrián, José Germain 1
Cerfaux, Lucien 1
Cervantes, Miguel de 1
Chappel, James 1, 2 f.
Charcot, Jean-Martin 1
Charlier, Louis 1
Charmes, Gabriel 1 – 2
Chenu, Marie-Dominique 1, 2
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith 1, 2, 3
Cicero 1 – 2
Cirera, Ricard 1
Clark, Christopher 1
Clarke, Fred 1, 2 f.
Claudel, Paul 1
Coffey, Peter 1
Coleman, Charly 1
Congar, Yves 1, 2
Coppens, Joseph 1, 2 f., 3, 4, 5
Cornoldi, Giovanni Maria 1
Cripps, Stafford 1 f.
Dangin, Paul-Thureau 1 – 2
Dawson, Christopher 1 – 2, 3 f., 4, 5 f., 6
de Beauvoir, Simone 1, 2
de Bonald, Louis 1
De Bruyne, Edgard 1
de Burgh, William 1
Debuyst, Fréderic 1
de Corte, Marcel 1
Deely, John 1 – 2, 3 – 4
De Gaulle, Charles 1
De Groot, Johannes Vincentius 1, 2
de Keyzer, Eugenie 1
de Laburu, Jose Antonio 1
Delacroix, Eugene 1
de Lamennais, Jean-Marie 1
del Barrio, Jaime María 1
Delors, Jacques 1
de Lubac, Henri 1 f., 2
Demant, V.A. 1 f., 2
Denis, Maurice 1, 2 f.
De Raeymaeker, Louis 1, 2 – 3, 4
de Rafael, Enrique 1
Descartes, René 1, 2, 3, 4
De Vleeschauwer, Herman 1, 2
de Vogel, Cornelia 1
De Wulf, Maurice 1, 2 – 3, 4 – 5, 6 – 7, 8 – 9
Diggins, John Patrick 1 f.
Dilthey, Wilhelm 1
Dionysius 1
Dondeyne, Albert 1, 2 – 3, 4 – 5, 6, 7 – 8, 9 f., 10 – 11, 12 –
13, 14 – 15, 16, 17, 18 f.
Draguet, René 1 f., 2
Du Bois-Reymond, Emil 1 f.
Duhem, Pierre 1
Dupont, Christian 1, 2
Eames 1, 2
Ebbinghaus, Hermann 1 f.
Eberle 1, 2, 3
Efal-Lautenschläger, Adi 1
Einstein, Albert 1
Eliot, T.S. 1, 2 f., 3 f., 4 – 5, 6 f., 7
Eras, Bernard 1, 2
Etrog, Sorel 1
Eucken, Rudolf 1
Farmer, H.H. 1 f.
Fenn, Eric 1, 2 f., 3
Feuerbach, Ludwig 1
Feuling, Daniel 1, 2 – 3
Focillon, Henri 1
Frohschammer, Jacob 1
Garrigou-Lagrange, Réginald 1, 2 f., 3, 4 f., 5 – 6
Gemelli, Agostino 1, 2 – 3, 4 f., 5
Germain, José 1, 2, 3 f., 4 – 5, 6 – 7
Getino, Luis Alonso 1
Geyser, Joseph 1, 2 – 3, 4 f., 5, 6
Gilman, Nils 1
Gilson, Etienne 1, 2 – 3, 4, 5 – 6, 7, 8 – 9, 10 f., 11 – 12, 13,
14 – 15, 16, 17 f.
Giner de los Ríos, Francisco 1
Giotto di Bondone 1
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 1
González Arintero, Juan 1 – 2
González, Zeferino 1 – 2, 3 – 4, 5, 6
Grabmann, Martin 1, 2
Grasselli, Giulio 1, 2
Grassi, Ernesto 1, 2
Gratacós, Federic Dalmau 1 f.
Grégoire, Franz 1 f., 2 f., 3 – 4, 20 – 5
Greitemann, Nico 1
Grimley, Matthew 1
Grisebach, Eberhard 1
Guardini, Romano 1, 2
Gundlach, Gustav 1 – 2
Gunning, Johannes Hermanus 1
Gutberlet, Constantin 1, 2
Haeckel, Ernst 1
Haessle, Johannes 1, 2
Hamburger, Siegfried 1
Hauriou 1
Hayen, André 1
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1, 2
Heidegger, Martin 1 – 2, 3, 4 f., 5 f.
Hetherington, Hector 1 f.,
Heymans, Jan Frans 1 f.
Heynickx, Rajesh 1, 2 f., 3 f.
Hilbert, David 1
Hitchcock, James 1 – 2
Hodges, H.A. 1, 2 f., 3, 4 – 5, 6 f., 7, 8, 9
Homer 1
Horváth, Sándor 1, 2 – 3, 4 – 5
Hume, David 1
Husserl, Edmund 1, 2, 3 – 4, 5 – 6
Inglis, John 1 f.
Iredale, Eleanora 1 f.
Izquierdo, Alberto Gómez 1
Jaegerschmidt, Adelgundis 1
James, William 1 f.
Jaspers, Karl 1, 2 f.
Jenkins, Daniel 1, 2, 3 f.
John of Salisbury 1, 2 – 3
Jolivet, Régis 1
Julliard, Jacques 1
Kant, Immanuel 1
Keller, Franz 1 – 2
Kelsen, Hans 1
Kiefl, Franz Xaver 1
Kleutgen, Joseph 1 f.
Kogon, Eugen 1
Koyré, Alexandre 1
Krause, Karl Christian Friedrich 1
Kremer, René 1, 2, 3, 4 – 5
Kugelmann, Robert 1
Kuiper, Vincent 1, 2 – 3
Külpe, Oswald 1
Kurlberg, Jonas 1 f., 2
Kuyper, Abraham 1
Laberthonière, Lucien 1
Labourdette, Marie-Michel 1 f., 2
Ladd, George Trumbull 1 f.
Ladeuze, Paulin 1
Laminne, Jacques 1
Landmesser, Franz Xaver 1, 2
Lang, Cosmo 1, 2 f.
Laros, Matthias 1 – 2
Laski, Harold 1 f.
Lefèvre 1
Lefort, Claude 1 f., 2 f., 3 f.
Léger, Fernand 1
Leo van Breda, Herman 1
Le Roy, Édouard 1 – 2, 3
Levinas, Emmanuel 1 f.
Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 1, 2 f.
Lewis, James 1
Leyssen, Sigrid 1 – 2
Liberatore, Matteo 1
Lindsay, A.D. 1 f., 2 f.
Locke, John 1
Loew, Wilhelm 1, 2, 3, 4
Loisy, Alfred 1 f.
Löwe, Adolf 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Luther, Martin 1 – 2, 3
Macmurray, John 1, 2 f., 3
Magnus, Albert 1, 2
Maisonneuve, Augustin 1
Mannheim, Karl 1, 2 – 3, 4, 5 – 6, 7, 8 f., 9 – 10, 11, 12
Marcel, Gabriel 1, 2, 3 f.
Maréchal, Joseph 1, 2
Marín-Sola, Francisco 1
Marion, Jean-Luc 1
Maritain, Jacques 1 – 2, 3, 4 – 5, 6, 7, 8 – 9, 10 – 11, 12, 13
– 14, 15 – 16, 17 – 18, 19 – 20, 21, 22 – 23, 24 – 25, 26
Maritain, Raïssa 1, 2
Martius, Hedwig Conrad 1
Marx, Karl 1, 2, 3 f., 4, 5
Masnovo, Amato 1
Matisse, Henri 1, 2
Mauriac, François 1
Maurras, Charles 1, 2 f.
Mazzella, Camillo 1
McCool, Gerald A. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
McGinn, Bernard 1
McLuhan, Eric 1
McLuhan, Marshall 1 – 2, 3 – 4, 5, 6 – 7
Mercier, Désiré 1, 2 – 3, 4 – 5, 6 – 7, 8 – 9, 10, 11 – 12, 13
– 14, 15 – 16, 17 – 18, 19 – 20, 21 – 22, 23 – 24, 25, 26
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1, 2, 3 f.
Merrill, Thomas 1
Mertens, Heinrich 1
Messner, Johannes 1, 2 – 3, 4
Meszaros, Andrew 1
Michotte, Albert 1, 2 – 3, 4, 5 – 6
Miller, Alexander 1 f.
Mill, John Stuart 1
Mira, Emilio 1 f.
Misiak, Henry 1 – 2
Mitterrand, Françoise 1
Moberly, Walter 1, 2 f., 3 f.
Moeller, Charles 1 – 2, 3, 4 – 5
Mole, John 1, 2, 3
Montaigne, Michel de 1
Moore, Thomas Verner 1
Morpurgo-Tagliabue, Guido 1
Morrissey, Christopher 1
Mounier, Emmanuel 1, 2
Moyn, Samuel 1, 2, 3 f.
Mülberger, Annette 1 – 2
Muller, Camille 1 f., 2
Murry, John Middleton 1, 2 f., 3, 4 – 5, 6 – 7, 8
Napoleon Bonaparte 1 – 2
Nashe, Thomas 1 – 2
Navarro, Jaume 1
Newman, John Henry 1, 2 – 3, 4 f.
Newton, Eric 1 – 2
Niebuhr, Reinhold 1, 2, 3 – 4, 5 f., 6, 7, 8 f., 9 – 10, 11, 12
Nieto, Agustí 1
Nietzsche, Friedrich 1, 2, 3 f.
Noël, Léon 1, 2, 3 – 4, 5 – 6, 7, 8, 9 – 10, 11
Nuttin, Joseph 1 f.
Oakeshott, Walter 1 f.
Oldham, Joseph H. 1, 2 – 3, 4, 5, 6 – 7, 8, 9, 10
Olgiati, Francesco 1, 2, 3 f.
Orel, Anton 1
Orti i Lara, Juan Manuel 1
Orwell, George 1, 2 f.
Otto, Rudolf 1
Palacios, Miguel Asín 1
Palmés, Fernando 1, 2
Pascal, Blaise 1
Paton, William 1 f.
Paul, Herman 1
Pesch, Heinrich 1
Philips, Gerard 1
Pieper, Josef 1
Piketty, Thomas 1
Plato 1, 2 – 3
Poe, Edgar Allen 1
Poincaré, Henri 1, 2
Polanyi, Michael 1, 2, 3
Pope Francis 1, 2
Pope John Paul II 1, 2
Pope Leo XIII 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 f., 8, 9, 10
Pope Pius IX 1, 2
Pope Pius X 1, 2
Pope Pius XI 1 – 2
Pope Pius XII 1 f., 2, 3, 4
Poulat, Emile 1
Proctor, Robert 1
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 1
Przywara, Erich 1, 2, 3 – 4, 5, 6 – 7
Puig, Ignasi 1, 2
Ramírez, Santiago 1
Rancière, Jacques 1
Ravaisson-Mollien, Felix 1
Raven, Charles 1 f.
Régamey, Raymond 1
Reinhardt, Kurt 1
Reiring, Willem 1, 2 f.
Ribot, Théodule 1
Rocard, Michel 1
Rolnick, Philip 1
Roosevelt, Franklin 1
Rorty, Richard 1
Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen 1
Rosmini-Serbati, Antonio 1
Rouault, Georges Henri 1
Ryan, John 1 – 2
Sanz del Río, Julián 1
Sartre, Jean-Paul 1, 2, 3, 4 – 5, 6 f.
Sayers, Dorothy L. 1 f.
Scheler, Max 1, 2 f.
Schelkens, Karim 1
Schilling, Otto 1
Schmid, Alois 1
Schmidinger, Heinrich 1
Schulte, Karl Joseph 1, 2, 3
Scotus, Duns 1, 2 – 3, 4
Seipel, Ignaz 1
Shaw, Gilbert 1 f.
Siemer, Alexander 1
Smith, Henry 1
Sobry, Paul 1, 2
Socrates 1
Spann, Othmar 1
Spencer, Herbert 1
Spiegelberg, Herbert 1, 2 f.
Staudt, Virginia 1 – 2
Stehman, Samuel 1 – 2, 3 – 4
Stein, Edith 1 – 2, 3, 4
Sterenberg, Matthew 1
Stöckl, Albert 1 f.
Suaréz, Francisco 1, 2 – 3
Switalski, Wladislaus 1
Tawney, Richard Henry 1, 2 f., 3
Temple, William 1 f., 2, 3, 4
Thiéry, Canonigan Armand 1, 2 – 3, 4, 5, 6
Thils, Gustave 1 f., 2
Thompson, Maria Anthonius 1
Thurstone, Louis Leon 1
Thyssen, Fritz 1
Tillich, Paul 1
Titchener, Edward Bradford 1, 2 f.
Tomkins, Oliver 1 f.
Toynbee, Arnold 1 f.
Twardowski, Kazimierz 1
Tyrrell, George 1, 2 f.
Ugarte de la Ercilla, Eustaquio 1
Urráburu, Juan José 1
van Breda, Herman Leo 1, 2
Van Cauwenbergh 1
van de Pol, Willem Hendrik 1
Van Haecht, Louis 1
Van Hoonacker, Albin 1
Vanni Rovighi, Sofia 1, 2 – 3
van Roey, Jozef-Ernest 1
Van Steenberghen, Fernand 1, 2, 3 f., 4 – 5, 6 – 7, 8
Vermeersch, Arthur 1, 2
Vidler, Alec 1, 2, 3 – 4, 5, 6, 7
Viejo, Manual Barbado 1, 2
Vignaux, Georgette 1 – 2, 3 – 4, 5 – 6
Vignaux, Paul 1 – 2, 3 – 4, 5 f., 6 f.
Vincent of Beauvais 1
Virgil 1
Vitoria, Eduardo 1 – 2, 3, 4
Vives, Luis 1, 2
von Hildebrand, Dietrich 1
von Hügel, Friedrich 1
von Nell-Breuning, Oswald 1, 2 – 3, 4 f.
von Vogelsang, Karl 1
Walgrave, Jan Hendrik 1
Walschap, Gerard 1, 2
Watson, Thomas J. 1
Weil, Simone 1
Wendland, Heinz-Dietrich 1, 2 f.
Weymans, Wim 1
Whale, J.S. 1 f.
Wilhelmsen, Fredrick 1
Willebrands, Johannes 1, 2 – 3
William of Ockham 1 – 2
Winter, Ernst Karl 1, 2 f.
Wood, John Carter 1
Wundt, Wilhelm 1, 2, 3, 4 f., 5
Yela, Mariano 1, 2, 3, 4 – 5
Zaragüeta, Juan 1, 2, 3 – 4, 5 – 6
Zeferino González y Díaz Tuñón 1 – 2, 3 – 4, 5, 6
Ziehen, Theodor 1 f.
Zimmern, Alfred 1 f.
Zubiri, Xavier 1, 2, 3 f., 4
Endnotes
1
For a critical view on all that: Jones, Steve E., Roberto Busa, S.J. and
the Emergence of Humanities Computing, London 2016.
2
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 N
eo-Scholastic Thomism. See on this development: Peitz, Detlef, Die
Anfänge der Neuscholastik in Deutschland und Italien (1818 – 1870),
Bonn 2006.
3
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.
4
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.
5
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.
6
Morpurgo-Tagliabue, Guido, L’esthétique contemporaine. Une enquête,
transl. Marcelle Bourrette Serre, Milan 1960, 488.
7
This notion stands central in this tiny book: Verhoeven, Cornelis, Lof
van de micrologie: een voetnoot bij Plato’s Politeia, Baarn 1982, 6 – 7.
8
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.
9
“das Rad der Weltgeschichte zurückdrehen” Eucken, Rudolf, Thomas
von Aquino und Kant. Ein Kampf zweier Welten, Berlin 1901, 10 – 11
and 18.
10
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.
11
“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.
12
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.
13
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.
14
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.
15
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.’
16
Baring, Edward, “Ideas on the Move: Context in Transnational
Intellectual History,” in: Journal of the History of Ideas, LXXVII/4
(October 2016): 583.
17
Gottier, G., “Thomisme et modernité,” in: S. Bonino (ed.), Saint
Thomas au XXe siècle, Paris 1995, 352 – 361.
18
Gilman, Nils, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold
War America, Baltimore 2003, 25.
19
Merrill, Thomas W./Smith, Henry E., “What Happened to Property in
Law and Economics?” in: The Yale Law Journal 111 (2001): 357 – 98,
357.
20
Purdy, Jedediah, The Meaning of Property: Freedom, Community, and
the Legal Imagination, New Haven 2010.
21
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.
22
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/SS0
66.html#SSQ66OUTP1. Accessed August 2016.
23
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.
24
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.
25
Corrin, Jay, Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy,
Notre Dame, IN 2002.
26
Kraus, J.B., Scholastik, Puritanismus und Kapitalismus. Eine
vergleichende dogmengeschichtliche Übergangsstudie, Leipzig 1930.
27
Piffl, Friedrich Gustav, et al., Lehren und Weisungen der
österreichische Bischöfe über soziale Fragen der Gegenwart, Wien
1926, 5.
28
Wassermann, Janek, Black Vienna: The Radical Right in the Red City,
1918 – 1938, Ithaca, NY 2014.
29
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.
30
Horváth, Sándor, Eigentumsrecht nach dem h. Thomas von Aquin, Graz
1929, 10, iv. For Cajetan citations, see 83n, 156n, 1891, 198n, 201n,
215n.
31
Ibid. 72, 83, 98, 180.
32
Ibid. 12, 11, 64, 96, 180.
33
For a bibliography, see A.M, “Driot de propriété,” in: Bulletin Thomiste
9 (1932): 602 – 606.
34
Pieper, Josef, “Thomas von Aquin und das Eigentumsrecht,” in:
Berthold Wald (ed.) Frühe soziologistche Schriften, Hamburg 2004,
53 – 60.
35
Laros, Matthias, “Eigentum und arbeitsloses Einkommen.
Auseinandersetzung zwischen den christlichen Soziallehren und dem
Sozialismus,” in: Hochland 27 (1929 – 1930): 120 – 34, 126.
36
Mertens, Heinrich, “Das naturrechclichte Eigentumsprinzip und die
Sozialisierung,” in: Das rote Blatt 2 (1930): 313 – 17, 314, 315.
37
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
38
For Mounier, see Mounier, Emmanuel, “De la propriété capitaliste à la
propriété humaine,” Esprit 2 (1934): 5 – 70
39
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.
40
Ibid., 496, 503.
41
Skinner, Quentin, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 2,
New York 1978.
42
Rerum novarum, section 6, available here: http://w2.vatican.va/content/l
eo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novar
um.html. Accessed 15 August 2016. 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.
43
Ibid., paragraph 15. For more on this see Habiger, “Papal Teaching on
Private Property.”
44
Schulte, Karl Joseph, “Richtlinien über Kapital und Arbeit,” in: Soziale
Kultur 47 (1927): 81 – 3.
45
Horváth, Eigentumsrecht nach dem h. Thomas von Aquin, 8 – 11.
46
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.
47
Keller, Franz, Unternehmung und Mehrwert; eine sozial-ethische Studie
zur Geschäftsmoral, Köln 1912.
48
Dietz, Eduard, Das heilige Eigentum und die Arbeiter-Encyclica des
Papstes Leo XIII, Karlsruhe 1927, 4.
49
Schilling, Otto, Der kirchliche Eigentumsbegriff, Freiburg 1920, 50,
53 – 4; Haessle, Johannes, Das Arbeitsethos der Kirche nach Thomas vo
n Aquin und Leo XIII. Untersuchungen über den Wirtschaftsgeist des
Katholizismus, Freiburg 1923, 252 – 57 on capitalism, 201 for this
quotation.
50
Schilling, Otto, Christliche Gesellschaftslehre, Freiburg 1926, 91.
Commissioned, and in a series edited by, Georg Schreiber.
51
Gundlach, S.J., Gustav, “Zur Christianisierung unseres
Wirtschaftslebens,” in: Stimmen der Zeit 109 (1925), 268 – 80, here
270 – 1.
52
von Nell-Breuning, Oswald, S.J., Grundzüge der Börsenmoral,
Freiburg, 1928, 4.
53
Messner, Johannes, Sozialökonomik und Sozialethik. Studie zur
Grundlegung einer systematischen Wirtschaftsethik, Paderborn 1927,
54, 33.
54
Vermeersch, Arthur, S.J., “Soziale Krise und Reformtheorien,”
Theologisch-praktische Quartalschrift 82 (1928): 687 – 724, 702 – 3; Bi
ederlack, Joseph, S.J., “Zu P. Horvath’s Buch ‘Eigentumsrecht nach
dem heiligen Thomas,” in: Theologisch-praktische Quartalschrift 83
(1930): 524 – 35, 526 – 8.
55
Habiger, “Papal Teaching on Private Property,” 94, 98, emphasis added.
56
von Nell-Breuning, Oswald, “Eigentum vor Gott,” in: Das Neue Reich
12 (1929 – 30): 295 – 7, 321.
57
Ibid., 295, 297.
58
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.
59
Quadragesimo anno, paragraph 47, available here: http://w2.vatican.va/
content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19310515_quadr
agesimo-anno.html. Accessed 15 August 2016.
60
Rerum Novarum paragraph 22.
61
von Nell-Breuning, Oswald, Reorganization of Social Economy: The
Social Encyclical Developed and Explained, transl. Bernard W.
Dempsey, New York 1936, 101 – 5.
62
Vermeersch, “Soziale Krise und Reformtheorien,” 47.
63
For more on this, see James Chappel, Catholic Modern: The Challenge
of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church, Cambridge MA
2018.
64
Ryan, John, A Better Economic Order, New York 1935, 150 – 153.
65
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 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 Nell-Breuning’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.
66
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.
67
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/encyclicals/documents/papa-f
rancesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html. Accessed 15 August
2016.
68
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.
69
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; Rosanv
allon, 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.
70
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.
71
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.
72
Hamon, Hervé/Rotman, Patrick, La deuxième gauche. Histoire
intellectuelle et politique de la CFDT, Paris 2002, 13, 21 (my
translation).
73
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.
74
Ibid., 137 – 138.
75
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.
76
See Imbach, “Paul Vignaux et la philosophie Chrétienne,” 139 – 140.
77
Moyn, Samuel, Christian Human Rights, Philadelphia 2015, 83.
78
Ibid., 83.
79
Maritain, Jacques, Man and the State, Washington D.C. 1998, 150.
80
Ibid., 84.
81
Ibid., 90.
82
Ibid., 176.
83
Ibid., 175.
84
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.
85
Maritain, Man and the State, 96 – 97 (my emphasis).
86
Ibid., 88.
87
Vignaux, Paul, Philosophy in the Middle-Ages. An Introduction, Transl.
E.C. Hall, Westport 1959, 152.
88
Ibid., 152.
89
Ibid., 152.
90
Ibid., 152.
91
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.
92
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: “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.
93
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.
94
See Hebding, Rémy, “Réalisme chrétien et CFDT,” in: Autres temps.
Les cahiers du christianisme social 2 (1984): 24 – 30.
95
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.
96
Diggins, John Patrick, Why Niebuhr now?, Chicago et al. 2011, 4, 6.
97
Ibid., 16.
98
Niebuhr cited in ibid., 16.
99
Diggins, Why Niebuhr now?., 19.
100
Ibid., 53.
101
Ibid., 43.
102
Ibid., 46.
103
Ibid., 44.
104
Entitled La théologie de l’histoire chez Reinhold Niebuhr.
105
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.
106
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.
107
Berger, “Religious Transformation,” 31.
108
Ibid., 30.
109
See Moyn, Christian human rights, 104, 134 – 135.
110
Something that was unlikely in the Christian realist camp where
Niebuhr disdained human rights. See Moyn, Christian human rights,
135.
111
See for all this Vignaux, “A propos de ‘Christianisme et démocratie’,”
458.
112
Müller, Contesting Democracy, 137 – 138.
113
Vignaux, “Conscience politique et conscience religieuse,” 17 – 24 and
Hebding, “Réalisme chrétien,” 24.
114
Hamon/Rotman, La deuxième gauche, 44 – 45, 54.
115
Ibid., 45.
116
See on all this: Moyn, Samuel, The Last Utopia. Human Rights in
History, Cambridge Mass. et al. 2010 , 64 – 68, 73 – 81.
117
Berger, “Religious Transformation,” 23.
118
See Jean-Pierre, “Paul Vignaux; inspirateur de la ‘Deuxième Gauche’,”
50, 53 and Loyer, Paris à New York, 200 – 201, 321 – 323.
119
Confédération française des travailleurs chrétiens (French
Confederation of Christian Workers).
120
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.
121
Berger, “Religious Transformation,” 31 – 32.
122
Hamon/Rotman, La deuxième gauche, 369.
123
Berger, “Religious Transformation,” 31.
124
Hamon/Rotman, La deuxième gauche, 44, 47, 53, 57, 90 – 94, 107.
125
Ibid., 38, 44 – 45, 54, 322, 372.
126
Ibid., 33, 135.
127
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.
128
Moyn, Christian human rights, 100. See also Lefort, “Politics and
human rights,” 261 – 265 and Moyn, The Last Utopia, 166 – 171.
129
Lefort especially was aware of this challenge (much more so than
Vignaux), see Lefort, “Politics and human rights,” 240 – 245 and Weym
ans, “Freedom through political representation?,” 272 – 276 and Moyn,
The Last Utopia, 170 – 171, 227.
130
Newton, Eric, “Modernism and Religious Art,” in: Liturgical Arts,
XIIX/4 (august 1950): 88.
131
Blumenberg, Hans, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. transl. Robert
M. Wallace, Cambridge 1983, 64 – 65.
132
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, 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; 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.
133
Stehman, Samuel, “L’art dans la vie humaine,” in: L’art d’église,
XXII/2 (1954): 269 – 270, 269.
134
Stehman, Samuel, “nous voyons parce que nous savons,” Ibid, 270.
Stehman, “L’art dans la vie humaine,” 270.
135
Stehman, “L’art dans la vie humaine,” 272.
136
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.
137
Janssens, P., “Liturgie en eigentijdse sacrale kunst,” in: Tijdschrift voor
Liturgie, 37 – 39 (1953): 196. In his reaction to this critical comment St
ehman 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
rational. 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.
138
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.
139
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.
140
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.
141
Fouilloux, Etienne, “Nouvelle théologie’ et théologie nouvelle (1930 – 
1960),” in: B. Pellistrandi (ed.), L’histoire religieuse en France et
Espagne, Madrid 2004, 411 – 425.
142
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.
143
Spiegelberg, Herbert, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical
Introduction. Dordrecht et al. 2012, 444.
144
See the article of Edward Baring in this volume. And see also: Taminia
ux, Jacques, “Le mouvement phénoménologique,” in: Revue
Philosophique de Louvain, LXVIII/1990: 243 – 254.
145
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.
146
Van Haecht, Louis, “Kunst en liefde,” in: Tijdschrift voor Philosophie,
21 (1959): 215.
147
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.
148
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.
149
De Keyser, E., “Art religieux et signification,” in:
E. De Keyzer/W. De Pater/A. De Waelhens (ed.), Miscellanea Albert D
ondeyne. Godsdienstfilosofie. Philosophie de la Religion, Leuven 1974,
232.
150
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.
151
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, 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.
152
De Wulf, Maurice, Art et Beauté. Conférences philosophiques, Leuven
1943, 7, 201.
153
Dupont, Christian, Phenomenology in French Philosophy: Early
Encounters, Dordrecht et al. 2014, 104 – 108. Quote on 104.
154
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.
155
Dondeyne, Albert, “Christelijk universalisme: een boodschap voor 58,”
in: Universitas. Speciaal nummer, Universitas-schrift: de mens in 58,
XX (1958): 57.
156
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.
157
This notion was developed in: Sussman, Henry, The Aesthetic Contract.
Statutes of Art and Intellectual Work in Modernity, Stanford 1997.
158
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.
159
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.
160
Proctor, Robert, “Churches for a Changing Liturgy: Gillespie, Kidd &
Coia and the Second Vatican Council,” in: Architectural History, 48
(2005): 291 – 322, 291.
161
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.
162
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.
163
McGinn, Summa Theologiae, 163.
164
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.
165
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.
166
Schloesser, “Sacrificed Generation,” 30.
167
Ibid., 35.
168
Einfalt, Michael, “Debating Literary Autonomy: Jacques Maritain
versus André Gide,” in: Heynickx/De Maeyer, Maritain Factor, 154.
169
Hastings, Adrian, A History of English Christianity 1920 – 1990,
London 1991, 280 – 282.
170
Ibid., 298.
171
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,” 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.
172
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.
173
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.
174
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.
175
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.
176
McGinn, Summa Theologiae, 117 – 119.
177
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.
178
Adam, Intercultural Transfers, 6; Paulmann, “Interkultureller
Transfer.”
179
Clements, Keith, Faith on the Frontier: A Life of J.H. Oldham,
Edinburgh 1999, 5.
180
Ibid., 15 – 35, 102.
181
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.
182
These organisations were supported and funded by the main British
Protestant denominations, with a lead role by the Church of England.
183
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.
184
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.
185
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.
186
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.
187
Also Eleanora Iredale. Fenn was also the BBC’s Assistant Director of
Religious Broadcasting during the war.
188
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.
189
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).
190
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 mid-1920s 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.
191
Wilson, “Frenchified Doctrine,” 99 – 100.
192
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.
193
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.
194
Clements, Moot Papers, 182, 188.
195
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.”
196
For the meeting’s minutes, see Clements, Moot Papers, 126 – 183.
197
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.
198
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.
199
But he noted his “bad-tempered and undiscerning attack on Luther in
his Trois Reformateurs”: ibid., 1.
200
Ibid., 1 – 2.
201
Ibid., 2.
202
Ibid.
203
Ibid., 3.
204
Ibid.
205
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.
206
Baillie, “True Humanism,” 6.
207
Ibid., 7. Emphasis in original.
208
Ibid., 7. Emphasis added.
209
Ibid., 9.
210
Ibid., 9 – 10.
211
Ibid., 10.
212
Ibid., 10. Emphasis in original.
213
Ibid., 10, 11.
214
Clements, Moot Papers, 138 – 145. Alexeiev’s paper was ten pages.
215
Ibid., 173.
216
Mannheim, Karl, Some Remarks on ‘Humanisme Intégral’ by Jacques
Maritain (n. d.), OA 14/3/82, 1.
217
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.
218
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; Ho
dges, 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.
219
Baillie, “True Humanism,” 6.
220
Löwe, “Some Remarks,” 1.
221
Vidler, “Comments,” 1.
222
Murry, “Comments,” 1.
223
Murry, John Middleton, “Towards a Christian Society,” in: Times
Literary Supplement, (28 January 1939): 56.
224
Alexeiev, “Bericht,” 2.
225
Loew, “Stellungnahme,” 1.
226
Baillie, “True Humanism,” 9. On the idea of a “clerisy” see Grimley,
“Civil Society.”
227
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.”
228
Vidler, “Comments,” 1.
229
Hodges, H.A., Politics and the Moot (9 June 1943), OA 14/1/43, 2.
230
Clements, Moot Papers, 626 – 627.
231
[Oldham, Joseph H.], Statement of Policy, 25 November 1938, LPL
Lang 26, ff.38 – 49, 5 – 6.
232
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.
233
[Anon.], Christianity and the Secular (19 April 1944), OA 13/6/35, 1.
234
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.
235
Mannheim, Karl, Copy of Letter, (n. d. [possibly after the second
meeting of the Moot, 23 – 26 September 1938]), OA 9/3/12.
236
Hodges admired Aquinas but doubted traditional Thomism could be
revived: Clements, Moot Papers, 49.
237
Ibid., 130, 163, 205, 410.
238
Ibid., 172.
239
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.
240
Much of Diagnosis of Our Time: Wartime Essays of a Sociologist,
London 1943 had been presented to the Moot for discussion (see ibid.,
100).
241
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.
242
Clements, Moot Papers, 506.
243
Mannheim, “Planning for Freedom,” 18 – 19.
244
Clements, Moot Papers, 70.
245
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; 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.
246
Mannheim, Diagnosis, 106 – 107.
247
Ibid., 110.
248
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.
249
Ibid., 127, 222 – 223.
250
Baillie, “True Humanism,” 6.
251
Murry, John Middleton, The Betrayal of Christ by the Churches,
London 1940, 123.
252
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.
253
Oldham, Joseph H., “15 L,” in: CNL (7 February 1940): 4.
254
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.
255
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.
256
Alexeiev, “Bericht,” 4.
257
Ibid., 4 – 5.
258
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.
259
Baillie, “True Humanism,” 4, emphasis in original; Murry,
“Comments,” 1.
260
Oldham, Joseph H., “187 L,” in: CNL (28 July 1943): 2.
261
Oldham, Joseph H., The Root of Our Troubles: Two Broadcast Talks,
London 1941, 22.
262
Maritain, Jacques, True Humanism, London 1938, 156.
263
Visser ’t Hooft, W.A/Oldham, J.H., The Church and Its Function in
Society, London 1937, 210.
264
Clements, Moot Papers, 155.
265
Baillie, “True Humanism,” 8.
266
Ibid., 8.
267
Murry, “Towards a Christian Society,” 56.
268
Anon., “Stellungnahme,” 2 – 3; Alexeiev, “Bericht,” 8 – 9.
269
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.
270
Clements, Moot Papers, 138.
271
Ibid., 141.
272
Alexeiev, “Bericht,” 3.
273
Hodges, H.A., Christian Thinking Today (n. d. [ca. August 1941]), IOE,
MOO /63a, 11.
274
Macmurray, “Comments,” 1 – 2.
275
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.
276
Clements, Moot Papers, 141; Alexeiev, “Bericht,” 8.
277
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.
278
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”: Clements, Moot Papers, 91. On “militant democracy,” see Mülle
r, Jan-Werner, Contesting Democracy. Political Ideas in Twentieth-
Century Europe, New Haven 2011, 147.
279
Oldham, “Predicament of Society and the Way Out. II,” 3.
280
Temple, William, “What Christians Stand for in the Secular World”, in:
CNL (29 December 1943): 5. Clements, Moot Papers, 615 – 616.
281
Church Assembly, The Church and the Planning of Britain, London
1944, 28.
282
On “revolution from above” see Clements, Moot Papers, 149, 164, 176,
266, 295, 387.
283
Clements, Moot Papers, 81, 90, and 182. The idea of “permeating”
society with Christian values preceded the third meeting: ibid., 54, 69,
and 73.
284
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.
285
Clements, Moot Papers, 156 – 157.
286
Maritain, True Humanism, 266.
287
Clements, Moot Papers, 209.
288
Baillie, “True Humanism,” 9 – 10.
289
Ibid., 12.
290
Anon., “Stellungnahme,” 2.
291
Mannheim, “Some Remarks,” 1, 2.
292
Löwe, “Some Remarks,” 3.
293
Ibid., 4. Loew similarly suggested that Maritain, while seeking to avoid
utopia, seemed economically and politically utopian: Loew,
“Stellungnahme,” 2.
294
Clements, Moot Papers, 285.
295
Bliss, Kathleen, “Letter 263,” in: CNL (26 June 1946): 3.
296
See ibid., and Bliss, Kathleen, “Letter 281,” in: CNL (19 March 1947):
4 – 5.
297
Bliss, “Letter 263,” 3; [Anon.], “Christians in Politics: I. Christian
Conservatism and Christian Radicalism. 263S,” in: CNL (26 June
1946); Clements, Moot Papers, 211.
298
McGinn, Summa Theologiae, 168.
299
O’Meara, Thomas Aquinas, xv.
300
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.
301
Clements, Moot Papers, 128.
302
Vidler, “Comments,” 1.
303
Fenn, Eric, Letter to J.H. Oldham (31 March 1941), IOE, MOO /48, 2 – 
3.
304
Grimley, “Civil Society.”
305
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.
306
Clements, Moot Papers, 487 – 488.
307
E. g., ibid., 360, 628, 648 – 649.
308
Visser ’t Hooft/Oldham, Function in Society, 117.
309
Ibid., 119.
310
Ibid., 220.
311
O’Meara, Thomas Aquinas, 178.
312
Review of Jacques Maritain, True Humanism, Church Times,
(25 November 1938): 595.
313
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.
314
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.
315
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.
316
Sterenberg, Matthew, Mythic Thinking in Twentieth-Century Britain:
Meaning for Modernity, Basingstoke 2013, 1 – 2.
317
Ibid. 3 – 4.
318
Maritain, “Copy of a Letter,” 2.
319
Maritain, True Humanism, 158.
320
Oliver, John, The Church and Social Order: Social Thought in the
Church of England 1918 – 1939, London 1968, 118 – 139.
321
Oldham, Joseph H., “Prospect for Christendom. Supplement 237,” in:
Christian News-Letter (27 June 1945): 8.
322
Quoted in van Buren, John, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the
Hidden King, Bloomington 1994, 54.
323
Stein, Edith, Finite and Eternal Beings, Washington 2005, 12.
324
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.
325
Husserl to Otto quoted in Pöggeler, Otto, Philosophie und
Hermeneutische Theologie, Munich 2009, 64.
326
See for example Vidal, Jacques, “Phénoménologie et conversions,” in:
Archives de Philosophie, (1972): 209 – 243.
327
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.
328
Zybura, John (ed.), Present-day Thinkers and the New Scholasticism,
New York 1926, 129 – 31.
329
Mercier, Désiré, Critériologie Générale 2nd (ed.), Louvain 1900, 39.
330
Ibid., 33.
331
See on this van Riet, Georges, Problèmes d'épistemologie, Louvain
1960, 86 – 91.
332
Mercier, Critériologie, 21 – 2.
333
Ibid., 367.
334
Mercier, Désiré, “La Notion de la vérité,” in: Revue Néo-Scolastique
(1899): 388.
335
Husserl, Edmund, Logical Investigations I, transl. J Findlay, London
2001, 32.
336
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.
337
Husserl, Logical Investigations I, 226.
338
See Ibid., 46 – 55, 113 – 5, and 160 – 1
339
Husserl, Logical Investigations I, 86.
340
Ibid., 86.
341
See Zahavi, Dan, Husserl's Phenomenology, Stanford 2002, 22 – 7.
342
Husserl, Logical Investigations I, 231.
343
Husserl distinguishes between meaning and its objective reference.
Ibid., 196 – 8.
344
Or more precisely the expressions had objects, but those objects did not
exist.
345
Zahavi, Husserl's Phenomenology, 32.
346
Geyser, Joseph, Grundlagen der Logik und Erkenntnislehre, Münster
1909, 23.
347
See Ibid., 15 – 7.
348
Ibid., v.
349
Ibid., 7 and 274. Here Geyser explicitly aligned Husserl's thought with
scholasticism.
350
Ibid., 17.
351
Ibid., 47.
352
Ibid., 51.
353
Ibid., 49. See also Gruss, Heribert, Transzendenz-Erkenntnis im
Phänomenologischen Ansatz : zur method. Neubegründung theist.
Weltsicht, Paderborn 1980, 56.
354
See Gruss, Transzendenz-Erkenntnis, 36.
355
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.
356
Ibid., 411.
357
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.
358
Noël, Léon, “Les Frontières de la logique,” in: RNSP, 1910: 231.
359
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.
360
Noël, “Les Frontières,” 226.
361
Gemelli, Agostino, “Revue Néo-Scolastique,” in: Rivista di filosofia
neo-scolastica (hereafter RFNS) (1910): 353 – 5.
362
Chiocchetti, Emilio, “Review of Geyser, Grundlagen der Logik und
Erkenntnislehre,” in: RFNS, (1911): 706 – 9.
363
Masnovo, Armato, “Logos,” in: RFNS, (1911): 473.
364
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.
365
Arnáiz, Marcelino, Psicología fundada en la experiencia, Madrid 1914.
366
Grabmann, Martin, Der Gegenwartswert der Geschichtlichen
Erforschung, Vienna 1913, 46 – 7.
367
Zybura, Present-day Thinkers, 181 – 2.
368
Stein, Edith, Life in a Jewish Family, Washington 1986, 250.
369
See Husserl, Ideas, transl. W. Boyce Gibson, London 2010, 123 – 5.
370
Ibid., 180 – 1.
371
See Ibid., 130 – 2.
372
Ibid., 138.
373
Ibid., 150.
374
Ibid., 153. Husserl explicitly put aside the theory that an exterior thing
caused our sensations: Ibid., 158 – 64.
375
Ibid., 154.
376
Husserl did not actually use the term idealism in Ideas, but had in
earlier lecture courses and would in his later publications.
377
Noël, Léon, Notes d'Épistémologie Thomiste, Louvain 1926.
378
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.
379
See for instance, Folghera, J. D., “Jugement et Vérité,” in: Revue
Thomiste (Sept 1899): 427 – 46.
380
See Robiglio who articulates clearly the differences between Noël and
Mercier, as well as the inadequacy of Gilson's reading. Robiglio, “Alle
cose stesse.”
381
Gilson, Étienne, “Le réalisme méthodique,” in: Fritz-Joachim von
Rintelen (ed.) Philosophia Perennis II, Regensburg 1930, 745.
382
Ibid., 746.
383
Ibid., 751.
384
Przywara, Erich, “Drei Richtungen der Phänomenologie,” in: Stimmen
der Zeit (1928): 252.
385
Maritain, Jacques, Les Dégrés de savoir, Paris 1932, 195 – 7.
386
Ibid., 198 – 9.
387
Ibid., 197.
388
Jolivet, Régis, Le Thomisme et la critique de la connaissance, Paris
1933, 137.
389
Ibid., 142.
390
La Phénoménologie: Journées d’études de la Société thomiste, Kain
1932, 30 – 1.
391
Ibid., 69.
392
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 Scholasticism (1937). de Corte,
Marcel, “Idée sommaire de la phénoménologie,” in: Revue de
Philosophie (1935).
393
See Söhngen’s discussion of the differences in La Phénoménologie,
87 – 8.
394
Przywara, Erich, Gottgeheimnis der Welt, Munich 1923, 21.
395
Burgert, Helmut, “Zur Kritik der Phänomenologie,” in: Philosophisches
Jahrbuch, (1925): 227 – 8.
396
La Phénoménologie, 69. See also 90.
397
See also Vanni Rovighi, “Cogito,” 777 – 80.
398
Przywara, Erich, “Drei Richtungen der Phänomenologie,” in: Stimmen
der Zeit: 254 – 5.
399
Geyser, Joseph, Neue und Alte Wege der Philosophie, Münster 1916,
300. Feuling, La Phénoménologie, 33.
400
Stein, Edith, “Husserls Phänomenologie und die Philosophie des
hl. Thomas von Aquino,” in: Jahrbuch für Philosophie und
Phänomenologische Forschung, (1929): 317 – 8.
401
Przywara, “Drei Richtungen der Phänomenologie,” 264.
402
Vanni Rovighi, Sofia, La filosofia di Edmund Husserl, Milan 1939,
165 – 6.
403
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).
404
“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)’).
405
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.
406
“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)’).
407
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.
408
Pope Leo XIII, “Aeterni Patris, encyclical of pope Leo XIII, 4 August
1879,” in: Acta Sanctae Sedis 12 (1879), 97 – 115.
409
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.
410
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 1960], Rome 1961).
411
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.
412
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.
413
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; B
osschaert, Dries, “A House with Many Mansions: The Anthropological
Turn in Louvain Theology (1942 – 1962),” in: Church History and
Religious Culture 95 (2015): 293 – 314.
414
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.
415
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.
416
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.
417
Charlier, Louis, Essai sur le problème théologique, Thuillies, Ramgal
1938.
418
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.
419
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.
420
Pope Pius XII, “Humani generis, encyclical of pope Pius XII, 12. 08. 
1950,” in: AAS 42 (1950) 561 – 578.
421
Weigel, Gustave, “Gleanings from the Commentaries on ʻHumani
Generisʼ,” in: Theological Studies 12 (1951): 520 – 549.
422
Pope Pius X, “Pascendi dominici gregis, encyclical of pope Pius X, 08. 
09. 1907,” in: AAS 40 (1907), 593 – 650.
423
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.
424
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.
425
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.
426
“[…] 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, encyclical of pope Pius XII,
12. 08. 1950,” in: AAS 42 (1950) 561 – 578. English translation: http://w
2.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_12
081950_humani-generis.html (access on 24 February 2016).
427
“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).
428
Cf. Labourdette, Marie-Michel, “Les enseignements de l'encyclique,”
in: Revue thomiste 60 (1950): 32 – 55.
429
See for a summary of these two stages, esp. Dupont, Christian,
Phenomenology in French Philosophy: Early Encounters, Dordrecht
2014, 307 – 313.
430
An example to this can be found in De Lubac, Henri, Le drame de
l'humanisme athée, Paris 1945.
431
Dondeyne, Albert, “L'agnosticisme de Kant,” Dissertation, Université
catholique de Louvain, 1922.
432
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.
433
“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.
434
“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
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.
435
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.
436
An overview of a number of these reactions to Humani generis can be
found in Weigel, “Gleanings.”
437
“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.
438
“[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.” Dondey
ne, “Les problèmes philosophiques,” 188.
439
Ibid., 356.
440
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.
441
See esp. Dondeyne, “Les problèmes philosophiques,” 296.
442
Ibid., 335 – 336.
443
Esp. Ibid., 343.
444
Dondeyne, Albert, Geloof en Wereld, Antwerpen 1961.
445
Crowley, Theodore, “Review of Foi chrétienne et pensée
contemporaine,” in: Irish Theological Quarterly 19 (1952): 203 – 204,
204.
446
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.
447
See Suenens, Léo-Joseph, Souvenirs et espérances, Paris 1991, 32 – 34.
See also rapport, 27. 05. 1942, Fonds Dondeyne, Archives of the
University, 290.
448
“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.
449
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.
450
E. g. Maritain, Jacques, La philosophie bersonienne, Paris 1914.
451
[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.
452
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.
453
“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, 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).
454
Ibid., 313.
455
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.
456
Cf. Grégoire, Questions. Fasc. II.
457
Coppens, “Le chanoine Franz Grégoire,” 401 – 402.
458
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.
459
“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.
460
“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.
461
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.
462
“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.
463
Esp. Moeller, Charles, “Pierres d'attente et obstacles au ʻKèrugmaʼ
chrétien, au XXe siècle,” in: Lumen Vitae 1 (1946) 222 – 241, esp. 228.
464
Esp. Moeller, Charles, “Existentialisme et pensée Chrétienne,” in:
Revue nouvelle 13 (1951): 570 – 581.
465
Esp. Moeller, Humanisme et sainteté, 21.
466
Esp. Moeller, Humanisme et sainteté, 195.
467
Moeller, “Existentialisme.”
468
“Cet article est presque entièrement tributaire de la magistrale étude de
A. Dondeyneˮ (Ibid.)
469
Esp. Moeller, Charles, “Les chrétiens ont-ils encore la foi,” in: Revue
Nouvelle 11 (1950): 113 – 121, 117.
470
Esp. Moeller, Charles, “Sagesse grecque et Paradoxe chrétien,” in:
Revue Philosophique de Louvain, 11 (1948): 395 – 397.
471
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.
472
“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.”
473
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.
474
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.
475
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.
476
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, Gregory B., Reason Fulfilled by Revelation: The 1930s
Christian Philosophy Debates in France, Indiana 2011, 46 – 98.
477
Bars, Henri, “Sur le rôle de Bergson dans l'itinéraire philosophique de
Jacques Maritain,” in: Cahiers Jacques Maritain 9 (1984): 5 – 31
478
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.
479
Maritain, Jacques, Art et scolastique, Paris 1920.
480
Ibid, 2.
481
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.
482
For example, see Gilson, Introduction, 145 – 159. Maritain, Art et
scholastique, 93 – 98.
483
On Passivity in Aesthetics, see Seel, Martin, Aktive Passivität. Über den
Spielraum des Denkens, Handelns und anderer Künste, Frankfurt am
Main 2014.
484
Maritain, Art et Scolastique, 15.
485
Gilson, Matières et formes, 17.
486
Efal, Adi, “Naturalization: Habits, Bodies and their Subjects,” in:
Phenomenology and Mind 6 (July 2014), accessible here: http://www.fu
press.net/index.php/pam/article/view/19555.
487
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.”
488
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.
489
Maritain, Creative intuition, see in the available online text at http://ww
w.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=9099, accessed
24. 11. 2016.
490
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.
491
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.
492
See Gilson, Etienne, “Souvenir de bergson,” in: Revue de metaphysique
et de morale 64/2 (1959): 129 – 140.
493
For example, in Gilson, Introduction, 110.
494
In Bergson, Henri, L’évolution créatrice, Paris 2009.
495
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.
496
Bergson, L’évolution créatrice,140 – 159.
497
Ibid., 184.
498
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.
499
On the Stalinist approach to art, building social material reality, see Gro
ys, Boris, Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin: Die gespaltene Kultur in der
Sowjetunion, Munich 1988.
500
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.
501
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.”
502
Weil, Simone, La condition ouvrière, Paris 1951.
503
Gilson, Introduction, 115.
504
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.”
505
Ibid., 115.
506
Gilson, Matières et formes, 140.
507
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.”
508
Sampaio, Laura Fraga, “Intuition et création artistique,” in: L'Intuition
Dans la philosophie de Jacques Maritain, Paris 1963, 136 ff.
509
Maritain, Creative intuition, 216 – 218. See also Fitzgerald, “Maritain
and Gilson on Painting,” 193.
510
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.
511
The Institute of Ethnology at the Sorbonne was instituted by Marcel
Mauss and Lucien Levy-Bruhl at 1925.
512
Murphy, Francesca Aran, Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Etienne
Gilson, Columbia et al. 2004, 33 – 36.
513
Gilson, Etienne, Index Scolastico Cartésien, Paris 1979.
514
Gilson, Étienne, “Le Descartes de L. Lévy-Bruhl,” in: Revue
Philosophique de la France et de l'Étranger 147 (1957): 432 – 451.
515
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.”
516
See Patterson, Bradley W., Redefining Reason: The Story of the
Twentieth Century “Primitive” Mentality, USA: XLibris 2011, 120 – 
151.
517
Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, La mentalité primitive, Paris 1922.
518
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 – 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; Leroi-Gourhans paläontologische Bildtheorie,” in: Image (July
2011): 76 – 88; Sigaut, François, Comment Homo devint faber.
Comment l’outil fit l’homme, Paris 2013.
519
Gilson, Peinture et réalité, 182 – 223.
520
Ibid., 205.
521
Focillon, Henri, La vie des formes, Paris 1996.
522
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.”
523
“Le premier moment de l’opération est celui où la forme germinale se
met en quete d’un corps.” Ibid.
524
Ibid., 206.
525
“Il n’y a jamais eu deux tableaux, peints par le même artiste, dont
l’histoire ait été la même.” Ibid., 205.
526
: “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.
527
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.
528
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.”
529
Gilson, Etienne, Le Réalisme Méthodique, Paris 1935; Gilson, Etienne,
Réalisme Thomiste et Critique de la connaissance, Paris 1939.
530
Gilson, Réalisme Méthodique, 38 – 51.
531
Gilson, Réalisme Thomiste, 213 – 239: “L’appréhension de l’existence.”
532
Ibid., 218.
533
Gilson, Introduction, 84 – 90, 84: “il n’y a pas d’intuition créatrice, car
la connaissance ne crée rien.”
534
See Alexandrakis, Aphrodite/Moutafakis, Nicolas J. (ed.),
Neoplatonism and Western Aesthetics, Albany 2002, 3 – 52.
535
Gilson, Peinture et réalité, 232.
536
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.”
537
Kant, Immanuel, Kritik der Urteilskraft, Hamburg 2004, 58.
538
Gilson, Peinture et réalité, 236.
539
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.”
540
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.
541
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.
542
I tried such an elaboration in my forthcoming Efal-Lautenschlaeger,
Adi, Habitus as Method: Revisiting a Scholastic Theory of Art, Peeters:
forthcoming.
543
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.
544
This research received support from the Spanish Ministry (Ministerio
de Economía y Competitividad, HAR2014 – 58699P) and the Catalan
Government (AGAUR, 2017 SGR 1138).
545
Van Weddingen, Alois, L’encyclique de SS Léon XIII et la restauration
de la philosophie chrétienne, Paris et al. 1880, 33.
546
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.
547
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.
548
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.
549
Misiak, Henryk/Staudt, Virginia, Catholics in Psychology: A Historical
Survey, New York NY 1954.
550
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.
551
Misiak/Staudt, Catholics in Psychology, xiii.
552
Ibid., p. 41, 57.
553
Ibid., p. 108 – 109.
554
Yela, Mariano, “La forja de una vocación,” in: Psicothema, Vol. 8
(Supl.) (1996): 49.
555
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).
556
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).
557
de Raeymaeker, Louis, Le Cardinal Mercier et l’Institut supérieur de
philosophie de Louvain, Louvain 1952, 99.
558
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.
559
Arnáiz, Marcelino, Diccionario manual de filosofía, Madrid 1927.
560
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.
561
de Raeymaeker, Le Cardinal Mercier, 55.
562
Mercier, Désiré-Joseph, Cours de philosophie. La psychologie, Ed. 5, 3
Vols., Louvain 1899 [1st printed edition 1892].
563
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.
564
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.
565
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.
566
E. g. de Raeymaeker, Le Cardinal Mercier, 39.
567
For more information see Callahan, William J., La iglesia católica en
España (1875 – 2002), Barcelona 2003.
568
Bernal, Jesús/Delgado, Mariano, “El mundo español y portugués,” in
Coreth et al. (ed.), Christliche Philosophie, 704 – 709.
569
Latinus, J. “Une excursión philosophique en Espagne,” in: Revue néo-
scolastique, Vol. 8, No. 30 (1901): 182 – 195.
570
See Van Riet, Georges, “La critériologie de Mgr Mercier,” in: Revue
Philosophique de Louvain, Vol. 44, No. 1 (1946): 7 – 9.
571
See Carpintero, “Bélgica y la psicología española”.
572
Marín Niño, Manuela/de la Puente González Cristina, Los Epistolarios
de Julián Ribera Tarragó y Miguel Asín Palacios, Madrid 2009.
573
Arnáiz, Marcelino, El Instituto Superior de Filosofia de la Universidad
de Lovaina, Madrid 1901.
574
Mercier, Rapport sur les études supérieures de philosophie présenté au
Congrès de Malines.
575
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.
576
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.
577
Arnáiz, Marcelino, Los fenómenos psicológicos (cuestiones de
psicología contemporánea), Madrid 1903.
578
Arnáiz, Los fenómenos psicológicos, 10 – 11 [“exotismo filosófico,
envuelto en nebulosidades y expresado en jerga ininteligible”]
579
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.
580
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”]
581
Ibid. [“imitar el espíritu expansivo y propagandista, conocer bien
primero y acudir después al terreno de la lucha (…).]
582
Arnáiz, Marcelino, Elementos de psicologia fundada en la experiencia:
La vida sensible, Madrid 1904.
583
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 psychology – New historical and philosophical
perspectives,” in: Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological
and Biomedical Sciences, Vol. 43, (2012): 425 – 433.
584
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.
585
For Arnáiz these were Wilhelm Wundt, Hugo Münsterberg, Eduard B.
Titchener, Hermann Ebbinghaus, Willam James, George T. Ladd, and
Theodor Ziehen.
586
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”].
587
Arnáiz, Marcelino, Las metáforas en las ciencias del espíritu, Madrid
1908.
588
Annuaire de l'Université Catholique de Louvain, Vol. 72, Louvain
1907: 166; Annuaire de l'Université Catholique de Louvain, Vol. 73,
Louvain 1908: 161.
589
This new post was announced in the Louvain Philosophy home journal
Revue néo-scolastique, Vol. 15, No. 60 (1908): 561.
590
Marín et al., Los epistolarios.
591
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”.
592
Letter of Mercier, quoted in Noël, Léon, “Mouvement néo-Thomiste,”
in: Revue néo-scolastique, Vol. 15, No. 60 (1908): 558 – 559.
593
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).
594
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.
595
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.
596
Starting in 1905, Michotte presented his instruments at international
conferences. Several were taken into production by the prestigious
scientific instruments company Zimmerman.
597
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.
598
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.
599
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”).
600
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.
601
Michotte, La perception de la causalité, 251.
602
Idem, v.
603
Mercier, Désiré-Joseph, Cours de Philosophie. Vol. IV. Critériologie
générale ou théorie générale de la certitude, Louvain 1899: 224 ff (§
Critique du positivisme).
604
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.
605
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.
606
Michotte, Albert, “A propos de la méthode d’introspection dans la
psychologie expérimentale,” in: Revue Néo-Scolastique, Vol. 14,
No. 56 (1907): 507 – 532.
607
Michotte, Albert, “Théorie de la causalité phénoménale. Nouvelles
perspectives – 1961,” in: Causalité, permanence et réalité
phénoménales: Études de psychologie expérimentale, Louvain 1962,
9 – 90.
608
See Leyssen, Sigrid, “La phénoménologie expérimentale d’Albert
Michotte : un problème de traduction,” in: Philosophia Scientiæ,
Vol. 19, No. 3 (2015): 45 – 71.
609
Yela, Mariano, “La Forja de una Vocación”, Psicothema, Vol. 8 (Supl.)
(1996): 49.
610
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.
611
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.
612
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.
613
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.
614
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.
615
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.
616
Zaragüeta, Juan, “La Escuela de Lovaina: Su Evolución,” in: Revista de
Filosofía, Vol. 7, No. 25 (1948): 349.
617
Ibid., 351.
618
Yela, “La Forja de Una Vocación,” 43 – 51.
619
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.
620
For example in Michotte, “Théorie de La Causalité Phénoménale,” 49.
621
On scientists and engineers working in Franco Spain, see e. g. Camprub
i, Lino, Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime, Cambridge
MA 2014.
622
E. g. in Yela, Mariano, Psicología de las aptitudes: el análisis factorial
y las funciones del alma, Madrid 1956.
623
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.
624
Zaragüeta, Juan, Curso de Filosofía (Vol. 1 and 2), Madrid 1968.
625
Cited by Sanchez-Ron, J.M., (ed.), Ciencia y Sociedad en España,
Madrid 1988, 14.
626
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.
627
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.
628
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.
629
González, Zeferino, La Biblia y la Ciencia, Madrid 1981, 187—190.
630
Ibid., 36.
631
Ibid., 246.
632
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.
633
On Arbos see Bernat, Pasqual, “Jaume Arbós i Tor: Científic i tecnòleg
osonenc del segle XIX,” in: Ausa 21, (2003): 51 – 74.
634
Arbos, Jaume, El clero y la ciencia moderna, Barcelona 1876, 12.
635
Arbos, Jaume, Ensayo de Física y Química trascendentalmente
consideradas con arreglo a la doctrina de Santo Tomás de Aquino,
Barcelona 1879, xi – xii.
636
Ibid., xiii.
637
Ibid., xxxi.
638
Ibid., xxxiv.
639
Ibid., 161.
640
Ibid., 218.
641
See Glick, Thomas, Darwin en España, Barcelona 1982, 43.
642
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.”
643
Ibid, footnote 95.
644
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.
645
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.
646
Razón y Fe, “A los lectores,” vol. 1 (1901): 1.
647
Ibid., 2 – 3, my emphasis.
648
Murillo, Lino, “La ciencia libre y la Revelación,” in: Razón y Fe, vol 1
(1901): 8 – 9.
649
Ibid., 22.
650
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!”
651
“Cronica Científica,” Razón y Fe, vol. 10 (1904): 544.
652
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.
653
del Barrio, Jaime Maria, “Doce años de Radioactividad. Parte 4,” in:
Razón y Fe, vol. 23, (1909): 355.
654
Urráburu, Juan José, “El principio vital y el materialismo”, in: Razón y
Fe, vol. 8 (1903): 319.
655
Ibid, 326.
656
de Laburu, José Antonio, “Los tejidos humanos cultivados fuera del
organismo”, in: Razón y Fe, vol. 51 (1918): 64 – 70.
657
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.
658
Vitoria, Eduardo, “La disolución de los cuerpos”, in: Razón y Fe, vol. 8,
(1904): 502.
659
Ibid., 496.
660
Ibid., 497.
661
Puig, Ignasi, “La discontinuidad física de la materia,” in: Razón y Fe,
vol. 72, (1925): 324 – 346.
662
Vitoria, Eduardo, La catálisis química. Sus teorías y aplicaciones en el
laboratorio y en la industria, Barcelona 1912.
663
Vitoria, Eduardo, “Reseña de Química Orgánica de Agustín Murua y
Valerdi,” in: Razón y Fe, vol. 32 (1925): 252.
664
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.
665
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. Nieto-Galan/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.
666
Cirera, Ricardo, Ibérica, Nº Preliminar (1913): 19.
667
Vitoria, Eduardo, “La Química y los Progresos Industriales. VI,” in:
Iberica, vol. 4, n. 8 (1915): 159.
668
Palmes, Fernando, “Necesidad de los estudios de psicología
experimental,” in: Ibérica, vol. 11, n. 276 (1919): 282.
669
Ibid., 281.
670
de Rafael, Enrique, “Francisco Suárez, S.J. (1617 – 1917),” in: Ibérica
8, 194 (1917): 188.
671
Ibid.
672
de Rafael, Enrique, “Valor objetivo del conocimiento y las teorías
científicas,” in: Ibérica 8, 204 (1917): 346 – 351.
673
Poulat, Emile, La crisis modernista. Historia, dogma y crítica, Madrid
1974, French original from 1962, 15.
674
McLuhan, Marshall, The Medium and the Light: Reflections on
Religion, ed. Eric McLuhan/Jacek Szlarek, Corte Madera 2003, 69.
675
McLuhan, Marshall, The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas
Nashe in the Learning of His Time, Corte Madera 2006, 26.
676
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.
677
Deely, “Absence of Analogy,” 547 – 8.
678
Ibid., 535.
679
Ibid.
680
Deely, “Absence of Analogy,” 536.
681
Pace Barth, Karl, Church Dogmatics III/3, transl. G.W. Bromiley and
R.J. Ehrlich, Edinburgh 1961, 101 – 107.
682
See McInerny, Ralph, Aquinas and Analogy, Washington 1996.
683
Deely, “Absence of Analogy,” 523.
684
Ibid., 524.
685
Ibid., 522.
686
Ashley, Benedict, The Way toward Wisdom: An Interdisciplinary and
Intercultural Introduction to Metaphysics, Notre Dame 2006, 286.
687
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”.
688
Deely, “Absence of Analogy,” 527.
689
Ibid., 525.
690
Ibid., 527.
691
See Rolnick, Philip A., Analogical Possibilities, Atlanta 1993, 259 and
295 – 296, on how analogy in Aquinas is the path of the middle way.
692
Ibid., 298.
693
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”.
694
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.”
695
Ashley, Way toward Wisdom, 288.
696
Ibid.
697
Jüngel, God as the Mystery, 277 – 284.
698
Ibid., 277.
699
Deely, “Absence of Analogy,” 528.
700
Ibid., 528.
701
Ibid., 530.
702
Ibid., 530 translating from Aquinas, De veritate q. 2 a. 11.
703
Ibid., 543.
704
See McGrath, S.J., The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy:
Phenomenology for the Godforsaken, Washington 2006, 224.
705
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.
706
Maurer, Armand, “Introduction,” in: Thomas Aquinas, On Being and
Essence, Toronto 1968, 18.
707
Deely, “Absence of Analogy,” 545.
708
Ibid., 549.
709
See Deely, Four Ages, 226 – 231, 357 – 362.
710
Deely, “Absence of Analogy,” 550.
711
Ibid., 531 quoting Aquinas, In librum de causis, lect. 6.
712
McLuhan, The Classical Trivium, 177.
713
Ibid., 35 – 36.
714
Ibid., 36.
715
Ibid., 174n14.
716
Ibid., 26.
717
Ibid., 49.
718
Ibid., 143.
719
Ibid., 149.
720
Ibid., 149.
721
Ibid., 174n14.
722
Ibid., 174n14.
723
Ibid., 187.
724
McLuhan, Marshall, “Address at Alliance for Life Festival” (Ottawa,
6 May 1977).
725
McLuhan, Marshall, “Letter to John Atkin (March 16, 1971),” in: id.
Letters of Marshall McLuhan ed. Matie Molinaro/Corinne
McLuhan/William Toye, Oxford 1987.
726
McLuhan, Marshall, “Letter to Fredrick Wilhelmsen (March 10,
1971),” in: id. Letters of Marshall McLuhan, ed. Matie
Molinaro/Corinne McLuhan/William Toye, Oxford 1987.
727
McLuhan, Marshall, “Introduction,” in: Hugh Kenner, Paradox in
Chesterton, New York 1947, xi–xii.
728
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.
729
McLuhan, Marshall, “Introduction,” in: Hugh Kenner, Paradox in
Chesterson, xvii.
730
McLuhan, Marshall/Nevitt, Barrington, Take Today: The Executive as
Dropout, Ontario 1972, 7.
731
McLuhan, Marshall, “Introduction,” in: Sorel Etrog, Images from the
Film Spiral, Toronto 1987, 125.
732
McLuhan, Marshall/Fiore, Quentin/Agel, Jerome, The Medium is the
Massage: An Inventory of Effects, New York et al. 1967, 63.
733
Ibid., 113 – 4.
734
McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews, ed.
Stephanie McLuhan/David Staines, Toronto 2003, 285.
735
McCool, Gerald A., The Neo-Thomists, Milwaukee 2003, 155.
736
Ibid., 148 – 149. See also McCool, Gerald A., From Unity to Pluralism:
The Internal Evolution of Thomism, New York 1989, 208.
737
White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-
Century Europe, Baltimore 1973, 9 – 10.
738
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.
739
Mercier, Désiré, “The Philosophical Assessment of the Nineteenth
Century” (1900), Ibid, 323 – 343, 339.
740
De Wulf, Maurice, Scholasticism Old and New: An Introduction to
Scholastic Philosophy, Medieval and Modern, transl. P. Coffey, Dublin
et al. 1907, 158.
741
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.
742
De Wulf, Scholasticism Old and New, 157.
743
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.
744
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.
745
La Piana, George, “Recent Tendencies in Roman Catholic Theology,”
in: The Harvard Theological Review 15 (1922): 233 – 292, 250 – 256.
746
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.
747
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.
748
Leo XIII, “The Pope’s Encyclical,” in: The Catholic World 30 (1879 – 
1880): 111 – 131, 130.
749
Ch. Gabriel [pseudonym of Gabriel Charmes], untitled article on
Aeterni Patris, in: Journal des débats politiques et littéraires
(19 August 1879).
750
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.
751
Ibid., 100.
752
Ibid., 59.
753
Ibid., 118.
754
Mercier/Van Weddingen, “Ibid.,” 70, 72.
755
Ibid., 72.
756
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.
757
Mercier, “Philosophical Assessment,” 340.
758
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.
759
Mercier, “Philosophical Assessment,” 340.
760
Mercier, “Talk,” 257.
761
Mercier, “Philosophical Assessment,” 338.
762
Mercier, “Opening Discourse,” 306.
763
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. St
eel, 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, 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.
764
D. Mercier, “Neo-Scholastic Philosophy (1894),” in: Boileau, Cardinal
Mercier: A Memoir, 361 – 367, 364.
765
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.
766
De Wulf, Scholasticism Old and New, 159.
767
De Wulf, Maurice, “Western Philosophy and Theology in the
Thirteenth Century,” in: The Harvard Theological Review 11 (1918):
409 – 432, 425.
768
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.
769
De Wulf, Scholasticism Old and New, 160.
770
Mercier, “Philosophical Assessment,” 327; De Wulf, Philosophy and
Civilization, 140.
771
E. g., De Wulf, Scholasticism Old and New, 161 – 162.
772
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.
773
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.”
774
De Wulf, Scholasticism Old and New, ix.
775
Ibid., viii.
776
Ibid., ix.
777
Ibid., 187.
778
Coreth, Emerich, “Schulrichtungen neuscholastischer Philosophie,” in:
Coreth/Neidl/Pfligersdorffer, Christliche Philosophie, vol. 2, 397 – 410.
779
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.
780
De Wulf, Scholasticism Old and New, 158.
781
E. g., Mercier, “Philosophical Assessment,” 324.
782
De Wulf, Scholasticism Old and New, 163.
783
Ibid., 41, 46.
784
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 Ingli
s 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.
785
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 Imbach/Alfonso
Maierù (ed.), Gli studi di filosofia medievale fra Otto e Novecento,
Rome 1991, 75 – 95, 94.
786
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.
787
De Wulf, Scholasticism Old and New, 207.
788
Ibid., 217.
789
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” permeated 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.
790
Axters, Stephanus, Scholastiek lexicon: Latijn-Nederlandsch, Antwerp
1937, 3.
791
De Vleeschauwer, H. J., Schets eener critiek der thomistische
wijsbegeerte, Ghent 1930, 11.
792
Gerard Walschap to Herman J. De Vleeschauwer, 15 August 1943, in:
Brieven 1921 – 1950, ed. Carla Walschap/Bruno Walschap, Amsterdam
1998, 800 – 801, 800.
793
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.
794
Heynickx, Rajesh, Meetzucht en mateloosheid: kunst, religie en
identiteit in Vlaanderen tijdens het interbellum, Nijmegen 2008, 160 – 
166.
795
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.
796
De Raeymaeker, Louis, Inleiding tot de wijsbegeerte en het thomisme,
Mechelen et al. 1933, 133.
797
De Raeymaeker, Louis, “De philosophie van den H. Albertus den
Groote,” in: Collectanea Mechliniensia 7 (1933): 137 – 150, 150.
798
As evidenced by De Raeymaeker, Louis, Ontologie: algemeene
metaphysica, Antwerp et al. 1933.
799
De Raeymaeker, Louis, De metaphysiek van het zijn, Antwerp 1944, 5.
800
Ibid., 30, 35, 36.
801
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.
802
De Raeymaeker, Louis, “What St. Thomas Means Today,” in: The
Review of Politics 20 (1958): 3 – 20, 19.
803
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.
804
De Raeymaeker, “What St. Thomas Means,” 19.
805
De Raeymaeker, Louis, “Wat is het ‘wieledenken’?” in: Ons Geloof 26
(1940): 179 – 182, 179 – 180.
806
De Raeymaeker, Louis, Inleiding tot de wijsbegeerte en het thomisme,
Mechelen et al. 1933.
807
De Raeymaeker, “Authority of Saint Thomas,” 21.
808
De Raeymaeker, Inleiding tot de wijsbegeerte, 207 – 224.
809
Van Breda, H. L., “Voorwoord,” in: Edward Lowyck, Substantiële
verandering en hylemorphisme: een critische studie over de neo-
scholastiek, Leuven 1948, 5 – 6, 5.
810
De Raeymaeker, Louis, Le Cardinal Mercier et l’Institut Supérieur de
Philosophie de Louvain, Leuven 1952.
811
Noël, L., “[Editorial],” in: Revue philosophique de Louvain 46 (1944),
5*-6*, 6*.
812
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 Berthie
r, 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.
813
De Raeymaeker, “Thomisme als levende filosofie,” 8.
814
Dodeyne, Albert, “Rouwhulde bij de plechtige lijkdienst van
Monseigneur Louis De Raeymaeker” (1970), KU Leuven, University
Library, Albert Dondeyne papers, inv. no. 61, 3.
815
Van Steenberghen, Fernand, “Thomism in a Changing World,” in: The
New Scholasticism 31 (1952): 37 – 48, 38.
816
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.
817
Van Steenberghen, “Thomism in a Changing World,” 41.
818
Ibid., 47.
819
Van Steenberghen, Le retour à Saint Thomas, 41.
820
Van Steenberghen, Fernand, “L’interprétation de la pensée médiévale
au cours du siècle écoulé,” in: Revue philosophique de Louvain 49
(1951): 108 – 119, 117.
821
Van Steenberghen, “Thomism in a Changing World,” 40.
822
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.
823
Van Steenberghen, “Thomism in a Changing World,” 45.
824
Ibid., 47.
825
De Raeymaeker, “What St. Thomas Means,” 18.
826
Van Steenberghen, “Thomism in a Changing World,” 38.
827
Ibid., 44, 48.
828
With reference to Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel
Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 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).
829
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.
830
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.
831
A term popularized by Walt Rostow, among others, in The Stages of
Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, Cambridge 1960
before it became associated with Robert Bellah and, especially, Shmuel
Eisenstadt.
832
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.
833
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 Me
rrigan, Terrence, “The Enduring Influence of Newman on Willebrands’
Ecumenical Views,” in: idem., 31 – 47.
834
Lash, Nicholas, “Newman and Vatican II,” in New Blackfriars 92
(2011): 243 – 246.
835
Cf. Nichols, Aidan, From Newman to Congar. The Idea of Doctrinal
Development from the Victorians to the Second Vatican Council,
Edinburgh 1990.
836
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.
837
Cf. Meszaros, Andrew, “A Theology of History and Doctrinal
Development according to J.H. Newman and Y. Congar,” Dissertation,
Leuven 2014.
838
Daly, Gabriel, “Newman, Divine Revelation, and the Catholic
Modernists,” in: Terrence Merrigan/Ian Ker (ed.), Newman and the
Word, Leuven 2000, 49 – 68.
839
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.
840
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 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.
841
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.
842
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.
843
Meszaros, “A Theology of History and Doctrinal Development,” 5.
844
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.
845
Greitemann, Nico, Op zoek naar de tweede onschuld, Baarn 1981, 76
846
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.
847
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.
848
The details behind Willebrands leaving the novitiate are explained in Sc
helkens, 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.
849
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.
850
Willebrands, Johannes, De Aristotelis, quam posuit de actu et potential
doctrina. Hujus theoriae origo ejusque historica evolutio. Archives
Willebrands, Dossier 18.4: De.
851
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.
852
de Haan, Peter, “Wetenschap en praktische vorming in de Warmondse
studentenvereniging Paulus en het studententijdschrift Cassiciacum,”
in: Trajecta 9 (2000): 191 – 205.
853
See Noord Hollands Archief (NHA): Archives Major Seminary of
Warmond 437.251.
854
May, John Lewis, John Henry Newman, Voorhout 1931.
855
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.
856
On De Groot, see Monteiro, Marit, Gods predikers. Dominicanen in
Nederland, Hilversum 2008, 158 – 160.
857
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.
858
NHA, Warmond Seminary papers, 437.300: Paulus-Academie.
859
Willebrands, Johannes, Notes personnelles, Archives Willebrands,
Dossier 324.5.
860
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.
861
Willebrands, Johannes, Libellus studiorum. Archives Willebrands
Dossier 1.
862
Willebrands, Johannes, Interview with cardinal Willebrands by Fr.
Gerbert Goossens, Archives Willebrands Dossier 379.1.
863
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.
864
Barth, Karl, Der Römerbrief, 1919 (Gesamtausgabe), ed. Hermann
Schmidt, Zürich 1985.
865
In Willebrands’s opinion, Platonism – quite other than Aristotelic
thinking – constituted the major undercurrent of Newman’s
philosophical enterprise.
866
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.
867
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.
868
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.
869
Schelkens/Witte, J.G.M. Willebrands, 116.
870
Mettepenningen, Jürgen, New Theology. Inheritor of Modernism,
Precursor of Vatican II, New York 2011, 32.
871
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.
872
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 Dominicans of Le Saulchoir and their efforts for the renewal of
Thomism before and during Vatican II, see Michael Quisinsky,
XXXXX
873
Schelkens/Witte, J.G.M. Willebrands, 90 – 91.
874
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.
875
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.
876
Willebrands, Johannes, Oratio inauguralis. In festo Praesentationis
B. V.Mariae, Archives Willebrands Dossier 2.