Étienne Gilson

French philosopher

• Born: June 13, 1884
• Died: September 19, 1978

Gilson made the ideas of Saint Thomas Aquinas and other medieval theologians intelligible and relevant for twentieth century scholars. He believed deeply that faith and reason were not incompatible but symbiotic: They were mutual helpmates whose interaction via fundamental principles created a dynamic vitality essential for the proper development of both secular and sacred knowledge.

Early Life

Étienne Gilson (ay-tyehn zheel-sohn) was the third son of five boys in the family of Paul Anthelme Gilson, a shopkeeper, and Caroline Juliette (Rainaud) Gilson, the daughter of an innkeeper in Cravant, a small town in southeastern France. The family was devoutly Roman Catholic, and “his dear little Maman” instilled in young Étienne a faith that was to remain steadfast and untroubled throughout his life. From a very early age, he was guided in his thinking and feeling by the simple but profound truths of the catechism and the Creed.

Gilson’s formal education took place almost entirely within the comforting ambience of the Catholic Church. He attended the parish school of Sainte-Clotilde, and at the Petit Séminaire de Notre-Dame-des-Champs his religious instructors encouraged his interest in the Greek and Roman classics. He absorbed an enthusiasm for philosophy from the priests at the Lycée Henri IV. After his graduation in 1902, he spent a year in military service, during which he began to read the philosophical works of René Descartes. In 1903, he went to the Sorbonne of the University of Paris, where the great Jewish scholar Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, a disciple of Auguste Comte, was one of his teachers. Lévy-Bruhl gave Gilson the good advice to study history and historical methodology.

In 1904, Gilson took a course from Henri Bergson at the Collège de France, a course he later described as the greatest blessing ever bestowed by God on his philosophical life. He was sympathetic with Bergson’s attack against positivism, scientism, evolutionism, and other modern doctrines. When, in 1905, Gilson went to Lévy-Bruhl for a dissertation topic, his teacher advised him to study the ideas that Descartes had borrowed from Scholasticism, the medieval philosophical system that had been denigrated by most modern intellectuals. Gilson’s research led him to the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas, whose clarity and originality of thought invigorated him. Out of this encounter with Aquinas evolved Gilson’s creativity as a philosophical historian. Contrary to the then-pervasive opinion that nothing of intellectual importance had occurred in the thousand years from the fall of Rome to the Renaissance, Gilson discovered many exceptionally fascinating ideas and many highly innovative thinkers.

After obtaining his diploma in philosophy from the Sorbonne in 1906, he taught this subject from 1907 through 1913 in several lycées all over France. Since he now had a steady salary, he was able, in 1908, to marry Thérèse Ravisé, a cousin who lived in Melun, near Paris. The marriage was a success, mutually enriching both partners and eventually producing three children, two daughters and a son. During his years of teaching, Gilson was able to work on his major and minor theses for his doctorate from the Sorbonne, which he received in 1913. By this time, Gilson had come to believe that Aquinas, not Descartes, had the correct method for solving philosophical problems.

Gilson received his first university appointment at Lille in the fall of 1913. Even though he had not yet had a course in Scholasticism, he offered, in addition to the standard university courses in philosophy, a noncredit public course of lectures called the System of Saint Thomas Aquinas. At Lille, in addition to his teaching, he began research on Saint Bonaventure and other medieval theologians. His work was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I in August, 1914. He was called up as an army sergeant in a Lille regiment, and his first assignment was instructing recruits in central France. A year later, qualified as a machine-gun operator, he was sent, as a lieutenant, to the Verdun front, where he was wounded and captured by German troops in February, 1916 (he would later win the Croix de Guerre for bravery in action). He spent the next two and a half years as a prisoner of war. While a prisoner, he continued to study philosophy and even published articles on aesthetics and metaphysics. He also delivered a series of lectures on Bergson and liberty. Prisoners from the eastern front taught him Russian, an ability that he would find useful on a relief mission to Russia and the Ukraine in 1922 and at the San Francisco Conference in 1945.

Life’s Work

For Gilson, Aquinas was the paradigmatic Christian philosopher. Thomas had assimilated a large number of philosophical truths, especially from Aristotle, and transfigured them in the light of his theological understanding. The philosophy of Aquinas was the philosophy of a theologian, and he used philosophical truths, whether from Saint Augustine or Aristotle, for theological purposes. Gilson saw nothing wrong in this; in fact, he praised it, since he believed that the most profound truths are theological, and philosophical truths, properly grasped, never contradict the Christian faith. During his years of captivity, Gilson became convinced that Aquinas was the key for the correct understanding of philosophy and theology.

After the armistice, Gilson returned briefly to Lille, but the minister of education soon named him to the Strasbourg Mission. As a result of the war, Strasbourg was in French hands, and Gilson became one of the thirty-eight professors making up the University of Strasbourg’s new Faculty of Letters. At Strasbourg, he published three books: Le Thomisme: Introduction au système de S. Thomas d’Aquin (1919; The Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas , 1924); Études de philosophie médiévale (1921); and La philosophie au moyen-âge(2 vols., 1922). These writings exhibit Gilson’s powers as a historian.

Gilson was able to pursue his research on Aquinas at the University of Paris, because in 1921 he returned to the Sorbonne to teach a course on medieval philosophy (a chair in medieval philosophies was created for him in 1926). He was also appointed a director of graduate studies in religion at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. His courses and writing on medieval thinkers soon brought him fame, and in 1926 he made the first of a series of regular visits to the United States and Canada. He became a part-time professor of philosophy at Harvard University from September, 1926, to January, 1927, when the Congregation of St. Basil invited him, in association with St. Michael’s College of the University of Toronto, to set up an Institute of Mediaeval Studies. When this institute formally opened in the fall of 1929, Gilson was its director, and from then on, he divided his academic year between Paris and Toronto (in 1939, Pope Pius XII honored the institute with a Pontifical Charter).

Gilson’s ideas on and participation in educational institutions grew out of his Thomism, in particular, his belief that a dynamic equilibrium should exist between faith and reason. For him, the primary function of education is intellectual, and he was very critical of educators who used social or political substitutes for intellectual formation. He saw the intellect as the special locus of the divine presence in human beings. Therefore, the teacher, as a servant of the truth, participates in a divine work in communicating truth to others.

During the late 1920’s, Gilson shifted the emphasis of his research from history to Christian philosophy. Many scholars objected to his use of the term, “Christian philosophy,” which they found as contradictory as “Christian biology” or “Christian mathematics.” Some of Gilson’s arguments in defense of Christian philosophy appeared in what many see as his greatest work, L’Esprit de la philosophie médiévale (1932; The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy , 1936). This book derived from the Gifford Lectures that he delivered at the University of Aberdeen in 1930 and 1931. His main argument in these lectures was that Aquinas and other theologians, under the influence of Christianity, created new philosophical ideas that were significant in their own right and that passed into modern philosophy. He called philosophy in the Middle Ages “Christian philosophy,” which he defined as a philosophy that considers Christian revelation an indispensable aid to reason, though the two orders of faith and reason still preserve their individual identities. While agreeing that there can be no “Christian biology,” he argued that philosophy’s autonomy was a myth, since, in its concrete historical embodiment, philosophy is always intertwined with something, either Christianity or scientism or something else. Thus, Gilson believed that Christian philosophy could be genuinely philosophical, since its philosophical reasoning could be valid apart from its theological premises. On the other hand, Christianity performs a valuable service for philosophy, because the truth that exists in the world and the rationality that exists in humans come from the same God who is the ultimate author of both Scripture and nature. God’s grace perfects nature, and His revelation perfects reason. Therefore, in becoming Christian, philosophy discovers its true character. Conversely, in abandoning Christianity, modern philosophy has lost its vital communion with theology.

Gilson developed his critique of modern philosophy more fully in the middle and late 1930’s. He criticized not only modern philosophers but also Thomists who, he believed, were contaminated by the false ideas of Descartes and Immanuel Kant. In his books, Le Réalisme méthodique (1936; Methodical Realism , 1990) and Réalisme thomiste et critique de la connaissance (1939; Thomist Realism and the Critique of Knowledge , 1986), Gilson argued that Descartes, in methodically doubting all of his actual knowledge and then trying to decide if genuine knowledge is possible, was creating a pseudoproblem, since Descartes could not even ask his question unless he knew what knowledge is. Gilson, on the other hand, was a realist who held that the actual act of knowing something reveals to the mind its ability to know. Similarly, he objected to the critical method of Kant, who pointed out the insurmountable difficulties experienced by the human being in attempting to acquire a genuine knowledge of things in themselves. For Gilson, Descartes and Kant were both mired in their own minds, whereas Aquinas had a healthy recognition that knowledge is immediately evident and naturally realistic.

While he was expounding his Christian philosophy and attacking critical realism, Gilson experienced great changes in his life. In 1932, he became a faculty member in the Collège de France and withdrew from his positions at the Sorbonne and École Pratique des Hautes Études (he continued, however, as director of the Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto). During his years at the Collège de France, several books resulted from series of lectures that he delivered in his own country and in the United States. For example, in the fall of 1936, he gave, at Harvard University, the William James Lectures, which were published as The Unity of Philosophical Experience (1937). He used this occasion to attack the philosophical pragmatism of James. For Gilson, philosophers think not as they wish but as they can. A philosopher is free to choose his or her principles, but, once he or she does, the laws of logical reasoning take over.

With the outbreak of World War II, Gilson’s custom of lecturing in France and America changed abruptly. He was forced to spend the war years in Paris, mainly lecturing at the Collège de France. Despite the mayhem about him, his research became increasingly theological and ecclesiastical, and he adamantly refused to collaborate with the Nazi occupiers of France. He was also critical of some Catholic officials who tried to have the Jesuit Henri de Lubac’s book about the supernatural order placed on the Roman Index of Forbidden Books. The culmination of Gilson’s public life in France occurred a year after the war’s end, when he was elected to the Académie Française, in recognition of his contributions to Thomism and for his record of service to France in two wars.

In 1948, Gilson published L’Ětre et l’essence (Being and Some Philosophers , 1949), a book that grew out of his analysis of Aquinas’s authentic existentialism and his criticism of Descartes’s reduction of reality to clear and distinct ideas (and his omission of any serious consideration of the act of existence). According to Gilson, a creature’s act of existence is not conceptualizable, since existence is not an essence but the act through which an essence exists. Thomas was primarily concerned with the relation between the pure act of being, or God (whose existence and essence are the same), and the contingent beings of the universe, whose existence is a mysterious gift.

When his wife Thérèse died in 1949, some of the passion went out of Gilson’s life. She had been his diligent student, his beloved companion, and the solicitous mother of his children. He tried to carry on his normal routine of courses and research, but on January 1, 1951, he resigned his chair at the Collège de France. He wanted to devote himself full time to the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. While in Canada, he was able to summarize a lifetime of learning in his survey, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (1955), but he found himself increasingly ignored by a new generation of Catholic philosophers, who viewed him as an “eccentric Thomist.”

Gilson had been entranced by the arts from his youth, when he developed a passion for the exotic novels of Pierre Loti and the grandiose operas of Richard Wagner, but this passion was soon channeled into his preoccupation with the Middle Ages. During the 1950’s and 1960’s, however, he recollected his passion for art in the tranquillity of his old age, and what resulted were some important studies in aesthetics. After Painting and Reality (1957) came The Arts of the Beautiful (1965) and Forms and Substances in the Arts (1966). The most significant of these was Painting and Reality , which derived from his Mellon Lectures of 1955. As might be expected, he approached painting as a Thomist, and so, following Aquinas, he viewed art as the creation of beautiful objects that cause contemplative enjoyment.

During the 1960’s, Gilson’s influence, even among Catholic scholars, declined, particularly after the Second Vatican Council. He himself became disillusioned over the rapid disappearance of the Catholic philosophical culture that he had labored so assiduously to create. He witnessed with chagrin the change of interest among most Catholic intellectuals away from the great medieval theologians to such socially and politically concerned new theologians as Karl Rahner and Hans Küng. As a result of the ecumenical council that Pope John XXIII had instigated, Gilson found himself out of fashion. He tried to apply his Thomist approach to human technology in La Société de masse et sa culture (1967), but in the end he returned to his great love, the Middle Ages, and his last published book was Dante et Béatrice: Études Dantesques (1974). From 1960, he lived mainly in France, and in 1971 he retired to his mother’s hometown of Cravant in Burgundy. As friends and colleagues died, he became the eldest member of the French Academy. He died at the age of ninety-four in Cravant on September 19, 1978. His requiem was celebrated in the Cathedral of Saint Étienne in Auxerre, and his body was laid to rest next to his wife’s in the north cemetery of Melun. When Jacques Maritain, his fellow Thomist, had died a few years earlier, Gilson had remarked, “As is the case with the angels of Thomas Aquinas, he was a species all his own.” The remark applies equally well to Gilson.

Significance

On several occasions, when asked to describe himself, Gilson responded that he was a “simple historian.” He certainly achieved renown as a historian of medieval philosophy, but his accomplishments were much broader than this, since the philosopher and theologian in him kept surfacing in most of his works. Many scholars regard him as the twentieth century’s most articulate expositor of Thomistic philosophy. His best works are a commingling of historical interpretation and metaphysical analysis. As a historian, he concerned himself with scrupulous explications of the thought of Aquinas and other medieval theologians in their historical setting. He also championed a vital, contemporary Thomism that would shed light on the enormous amount of knowledge that had accumulated since the Middle Ages. He was not very successful in this task, however, and he was unable to specify satisfactorily the new understanding that Thomism would bring to quantum mechanics, evolution, or psychoanalysis, to choose only three important determinants of modern intellectual life.

It was as a medievalist, then, and particularly as a historian that Gilson made his greatest impact, especially during the 1920’s and 1930’s. With objective and sympathetic accounts of Saint Augustine, Saint Bernard, Saint Bonaventure, John Duns Scotus, and Aquinas, and with his several histories and syntheses of medieval thought, he did more than any other scholar to bring about a reinterpretation of medieval philosophy. As a historian, he saw himself as a scientist and the Middle Ages as a laboratory of ideas. He had an unswerving commitment to the truth wherever he found it a trait that several critics have found at the core of his scholarship. In his role as objective historian, he could be faithful to all kinds of ideas, and he could follow their influences much in the way that a scientist follows the progress of an experiment. He could therefore be faithful not only to the medieval thinkers themselves but also to the transformation that Christianity wrought on the philosophical methods and ideas that these thinkers inherited from the ancient world. In his writings, Gilson exhibited an empathetic ability to grasp and explain systems of ideas that he did not share. Nevertheless, he was always able to bring out the centrality of theology to both the Middle Ages and the modern world. The thoroughness and integrity of his scholarship have guaranteed him respect and readers even among those who do not share his deeply held Catholic beliefs.

Together with Maritain, Gilson took Thomism from the narrow ecclesiastical world, where it had found a home, and made it a significant element in contemporary philosophical discussions. Though Gilson characterized himself as a disciple of Thomas, his own understanding of Thomas’s thought underwent considerable development, and, especially in his later career, Gilson’s Thomism became an issue of contention among Catholic and secular philosophers. To modern secular rationalists, he did not seem a philosopher at all, but rather, an apologist for the Catholic Church. To modern Thomists, he seemed an eccentric conservative who opposed any effort to modernize Thomism as a philosophy for a new age. The central theme of Gilson’s oeuvre the validity of Christian philosophy exasperated Thomists who were striving to construct a Thomism separate from theology. Despite these attacks from outside and within his church, Gilson tirelessly reiterated the historical evidence and philosophical analysis that led him to justify Christian philosophy as the best way to understand the natural and supernatural worlds.

Bibliography

Brezik, Victor B., ed. One Hundred Years of Thomism: Aeterni Patris and Afterward. Houston, Tex.: Center of Thomistic Studies, University of St. Thomas, 1981. This volume, composed of papers delivered by American and Canadian Thomists at a symposium held in October, 1979, has analyses of the past, present, and future of Thomism. Armand A. Maurer’s article, “Legacy of Étienne Gilson,” gives a good account of Gilson’s influence on Thomism. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

Copleston, Frederick. A History of Philosophy. Vol. 9, Maine de Biran to Sartre. New York: Newman Press, 1975. Copleston discusses the life and work of Gilson in his chapter on Thomism in France. In this and other chapters, he avoids philosophical jargon, and hence his work is readable by a broad audience. Contains a selective bibliography of both primary and secondary sources of the philosophers and schools discussed.

McGrath, Margaret. Étienne Gilson: A Bibliography. Toronto, Ont.: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1982. The most detailed and complete listing of Gilson’s works available. McGrath’s bibliography has become the standard reference tool for students and scholars doing research on Gilson.

Miller, Robert G. “Étienne Henri Gilson.” In The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Paul Edwards, vol. 3. New York: Macmillan and the Free Press, 1967. Consists of a brief look at Gilson’s life and a somewhat longer look at his “philosophical position.” Includes a bibliography.

Murphy, Francesca Aran. Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Étienne Gilson. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. An intellectual biography, charting the stages of Gilson’s scholarly development and his efforts to reconcile reason and faith.

Pegis, Anton C. Introduction to A Gilson Reader: Selected Writings of Étienne Gilson. Edited by Anton C. Pegis. Garden City, N.Y.: Hanover House, 1957. In his introduction, Pegis provides basic facts about Gilson’s life and work. The bulk of the book serves the needs of the general reader who is interested in the basic writings of Gilson on history, philosophy, and theology.

Shook, Laurence K. Étienne Gilson. Toronto, Ont.: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984. On the centennial of Gilson’s birth, Shook, a former colleague and translator of Gilson, published this biography of the founder and director of the Institute of Mediaeval Studies. Shook’s biography was in preparation for many years, and he interviewed Gilson as well as several members of his family. It is therefore the most extensive account of Gilson’s life that has yet appeared. Contains bibliographic references and an index.