Justified True Belief

(●) A student was told that nothing worth reading had been written between the last Greeks and Descartes, went to check for himself, and handed the Middle Ages back to philosophy. + In 1905 a young man at the Sorbonne went to his professor for a thesis topic, which is one of the least dramatic errands in academic life. The professor was Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, a distinguished scholar with no interest whatever in defending the Middle Ages, and the topic he suggested was a small dry one: trace the words Descartes borrowed from the medieval schools. Find out where the vocabulary came from. It was meant to be a piece of housekeeping. Étienne Gilson did the work, and what he found was that in order to understand what Descartes meant by his own technical terms he had to go and read the men Descartes was quoting. He had been taught, by teachers he respected, that those men were not philosophers at all: that philosophy was a Greek achievement which stopped, gave way to a thousand years of theology, and started again when a Frenchman shut himself in a stove-heated room and doubted everything. He went to look, and the thousand years turned out to be full of arguments. He spent the next seven decades reading them, editing them, and teaching them, until medieval philosophy was a field with a journal, an institute, a library and a shelf of critical editions, most of which he had put there himself. Two of his claims are why he belongs to Christian apologetics and not only to the history of scholarship. The first is that there is such a thing as Christian philosophy: thought that would never have occurred to anyone without the gospel, and that is argued out afterwards by reason on reason’s own terms. The second has to do with metaphysics, which is the part of philosophy that asks not what things are made of but what it is for anything to be there at all. His claim was that the name God gives Moses at the burning bush, "I am who I am" (Exodus 3:14), answers that question, and that the whole of Christian metaphysics hangs from it. He called it the metaphysics of Exodus, and the phrase stuck. Two facts measure the reach of the work. The institute he founded in Toronto in 1929, on a continent he had first visited three years earlier, is still publishing. And in 1998, twenty years after his death, John Paul II put his name in an encyclical, one of the circular letters a pope addresses to the whole church, in a list of five Western thinkers whose work shows what faith and reason can do when they are not at war.

(●) 1884 AD: Born in Paris to a shopkeeper and his wife, and schooled by priests in a republic that was busy taking the schools away from them. + Étienne Henry Gilson was born in Paris on 13 June 1884, the third of five sons. His father, Paul Anthelme Gilson, kept a shop. His mother, Caroline Juliette Rainaud, came from Cravant, a village in Burgundy, and it was from her that the faith came: steady, undramatic, and never afterwards in question. He would go back to her village at the end to live out his last years. The schooling was clerical from the start. After a parish school he went in 1895 to the Petit Séminaire de Notre-Dame-des-Champs, a minor seminary, which meant a boarding school run by the diocese for boys who might become priests and for a good many who would not. He stayed seven years, got a thorough grounding in Latin and Greek, and did not become a priest. In 1902 he crossed over to the state system for a year of philosophy at the Lycée Henri IV. The timing matters, because the France he grew up in was in the middle of a quarrel about exactly the kind of education he had received. The Third Republic was anticlerical, which means more than unbelieving: it was set on getting the clergy out of the classrooms, the hospitals and the town halls, and in 1905, the year Gilson was casting about for a thesis, it separated church and state by law. He therefore walked out of a seminary classroom and into the most confidently secular university in Europe, carrying a faith the university regarded as a survival. Nothing in his long career is quite intelligible without that.

(●) 1905 AD: A positivist professor handed him a small thesis on Descartes, and it opened a thousand years his teachers had told him were empty. + At the Sorbonne his teachers were the best the Republic had: Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Victor Delbos, Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss. A few hundred yards away at the Collège de France, where the lectures are free and public and anyone at all may walk in off the street and sit down, he heard Henri Bergson, and he took two courses of fifteen lectures each down in his notebooks. Sixty-three years later it was Gilson, an old man by then and speaking for the Académie française, who stood in the Panthéon in 1967 to give France’s public tribute to Bergson. The prevailing temper was positivism, the view that real knowledge is what the natural and social sciences establish and that everything which came before them is a stage humanity has outgrown. On that view the Middle Ages were not a period of philosophy. They were the gap between two periods of philosophy. The thesis topic changed everything, and the joke of it is that nobody intended it to. Lévy-Bruhl was a positivist and a scrupulous historian, and he wanted the scholastic vocabulary in Descartes tracked down because it was an open question and nobody had done it. Scholastic means belonging to the schools, and the schools were the medieval universities, Paris and Oxford above all, where the teachers known ever since as the schoolmen worked by putting a question, setting out every objection to it they could find, and answering them one at a time in front of an audience that was allowed to argue back. Gilson took the topic, produced a dissertation in 1906 on Descartes and the schoolmen, and then ran into the difficulty that made him. Descartes writes that a cause must contain at least as much reality as its effect, and that a cause may contain its effect formally or eminently. Those are not Descartes’ coinages. They are school terms with settled meanings, and to know what Descartes was claiming Gilson had to go and find out what the schools had meant by them. So he read the schools. What he found there was not devotional writing with a few Greek scraps in it. It was philosophy: positions, objections, replies, and men changing their minds under pressure from arguments. The rest of the decade was the ordinary grind of a French academic, and the discovery had to be carried through it, because there was no year in it set aside for thinking. He passed the agrégation, the national competitive examination that qualifies a man to teach, on 24 August 1907, and then spent six years in provincial lycées, moving from Bourg-en-Bresse to Rochefort-sur-Mer to Tours to Saint-Quentin to Angers, teaching philosophy to schoolboys while the medieval reading went on in whatever hours the job left him. In 1908 he married Thérèse Ravisé of Melun, and there were three children. Then, on 29 January 1913, he defended two theses at Paris: La liberté chez Descartes et la théologie, on freedom in Descartes and the theologians behind him, and, as the secondary thesis, an Index scolastico-cartésien, a word-by-word index of Descartes’ scholastic vocabulary, which is the sort of thing a man produces when he has decided to settle a question rather than argue about it. That autumn he went to the University of Lille as a lecturer, and one of the first things he did there was announce a course on the system of Thomas Aquinas.

(●) 1916 AD: Taken prisoner at Verdun, he spent nearly three years behind wire and went on doing philosophy there. + In August 1914 the young lecturer at Lille who had just announced a course on Thomas Aquinas put on a uniform along with the rest of his generation. He was mobilized as a sergeant and ended as a second lieutenant commanding a machine-gun section. In February 1916 he was captured at Verdun. Verdun is a word that has gone flat with repetition, and what it names is this: not a battle in the sense of a day, but ten months of fighting on a front a few miles wide, which by the time it stopped had killed something in the region of three hundred thousand men on the two sides together. He was taken in its first weeks, and he was awarded the Croix de Guerre for what he had done before he was. Then nearly three years in German prison camps, which for most men meant boredom of a kind that eats people. He treated it as time. He lectured to his fellow prisoners, worked at philosophy and published articles on aesthetics and metaphysics from captivity, and picked up Russian from prisoners who had been taken on the eastern front, a language that turned out to be useful to him twice over in the decades that followed. He was demobilized on 3 March 1919. Very little of this appears in his books, and he was not a man who traded on it. It is worth knowing anyway, because the philosopher who would spend his life insisting that ideas have consequences whether or not anyone likes them had watched a continent find that out.

(●) 1919 AD: Le Thomisme appeared, and over the next ten years he built a field: chairs in Strasbourg and Paris, a journal, and an institute in Canada. + He went to the newly French University of Strasbourg as a professor in April 1919 and published Le Thomisme in the same year. Thomism, which is what the title means, is the body of thought descending from Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century Dominican friar whose Summa theologiae the Catholic schools had been teaching in one form or another ever since. The book’s method was its argument. Thomas Aquinas had been read for centuries through his commentators, and in the seminaries mostly through textbooks that summarized the commentators; Gilson proposed to read Thomas, in order, in his own works, and to say what was there. He never stopped doing it. Le Thomisme went through six editions over forty-six years, each one substantially rewritten, and the last appeared when he was eighty-one. In November 1921 he came to Paris to lecture on medieval philosophy, was made a professor there in 1927, and simultaneously held a directorship of studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études from 1921. The books came steadily, and the shape of them tells you what he thought the job was: Études de philosophie médiévale in 1921, La philosophie au moyen âge in two volumes in 1922, La philosophie de saint Bonaventure in 1924, Introduction à l’étude de saint Augustin in 1929. He was taking the medievals one at a time and refusing to let them dissolve into a single grey thing called scholasticism. Bonaventure is not Aquinas; Augustine is not either; the differences are where the philosophy is. In 1926 he founded, with the Dominican Gabriel Théry, the Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge, a journal for exactly this work, and it is still appearing a century later. Then North America, which he had begun visiting in 1926 to teach at Harvard. The Basilian Fathers of St Michael’s College in Toronto asked him to help them found an Institute of Mediaeval Studies, and it opened in the autumn of 1929, with Gilson as its first director alongside Henry Carr and Edmund McCorkell of the Basilians and Gerald Phelan of Louvain. Pius XII gave it a pontifical charter in 1939, which is why it is now the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. For the next thirty years, the occupation excepted, he taught half of each academic year in Paris and half in Toronto, crossing the Atlantic by ship. On 17 January 1932 he was elected to the Collège de France, to a chair in the history of medieval philosophy, which was a public verdict on the question he had set out to settle in 1905.

(●) 1931 AD: He told the philosophers of France that Christian philosophy exists, and the quarrel ran for a decade. + The quarrel began with a good objection. Émile Bréhier, a serious historian of philosophy and no polemicist, argued in lectures in Belgium in 1928 that the phrase "Christian philosophy" is empty: one can no more speak of a Christian philosophy than of Christian mathematics or Christian physics. Either an argument works by reason, in which case its author’s religion is beside the point, or it does not, in which case it is not philosophy. Put that way it sounds unanswerable, and a good many people thought it was. Gilson answered it twice over, first at length and then in public. The length came at Aberdeen, where he gave the Gifford Lectures in 1931 and 1932. The Gifford Lectures are an endowed Scottish lectureship on natural theology, which means whatever can be found out about God from the world itself, without appeal to any revealed book. They were founded by a judge who wanted the question of God treated as a science, and they carry real weight in the Protestant academic world; twenty lectures of Gilson’s became L’esprit de la philosophie médiévale in 1932, translated as The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy. The public part came on 21 March 1931, when the Société française de philosophie gave a whole session to "the notion of Christian philosophy," with Gilson presenting the case and Bréhier, Léon Brunschvicg, Édouard Le Roy and Jacques Maritain answering. Two years later, on 11 September 1933, the Société Thomiste devoted a study day at Juvisy to the same question. Maritain was on his side and disagreed with him about how to say it, which is the most useful kind of ally. Maritain distinguished philosophy’s nature, which is purely rational, from its state, the concrete conditions a philosopher actually works in; Christian philosophy on that account is philosophy itself, placed in certain conditions. Gilson thought the distinction more elegant than necessary, and preferred to point at the historical record: here are philosophies that exist only because Christianity did, and they are philosophies. The argument between them went on, affectionately, for forty years. In the first half of the Harvard academic year of 1936 to 1937 he gave the William James Lectures there, and published them in 1937 as The Unity of Philosophical Experience. It is the most readable book he wrote, and the one that carries his other great thesis: that the history of philosophy is an experiment which keeps producing the same result.

(●) 1945 AD: Out of the occupation and into public life, he worked on the charter of the United Nations and took a seat in the Senate. + The war found him in North America, lecturing at Harvard and Indiana and in Toronto and Montreal and putting the case against Hitler wherever he was given a platform. He was home again by May 1940, and after that the crossings stopped, and the Toronto half of his year with them. He went on lecturing at the Collège de France through the occupation, to whoever came and sat down, and he would have nothing to do with collaboration, which was the arrangement by which a good many French public men decided that the German victory was permanent and had better be worked with. When it ended he was drafted, at sixty, into the building of the postwar order. From 3 April to 26 June 1945 he was attached to the French delegation at San Francisco, where the Charter of the United Nations was drafted, working as a technical adviser; his fluent English, and the Russian he had learned behind wire, made him useful in a way few professors of medieval philosophy have ever been, and he worked on the French text of the Charter itself. That autumn, from 31 October to 24 November, he was in London for the conference that created UNESCO, the new United Nations agency for education, science and culture, in a French delegation led by Léon Blum. Honours and offices followed. On 24 October 1946 he was elected to the Académie française, the body of forty that has guarded the French language since Richelieu. From 28 March 1947 to 7 November 1948 he sat as a senator in the Conseil de la République for the Mouvement Républicain Populaire, the Christian democratic party of the Fourth Republic. He was not much of a politician and he knew it. What he had was a voice the country listened to, and he was about to find out what happens when a man uses one.

(●) 1951 AD: Widowed and denounced in the French press over the Cold War, he gave up his Paris chair for Toronto, and ended in his mother’s village. + Thérèse died on 12 November 1949, after forty-one years of marriage, and he never really recovered the ordinary happiness of his life. Then came the affair that carries his name. Between 1949 and 1951 he argued in Le Monde that France should have a foreign policy matching its actual means, and he was sceptical of the rearmament and the Atlantic strategy then being pressed on Europe. Raymond Aron answered him in Le Figaro, and the exchange became the "affaire Gilson," a set piece of early Cold War France in which a scholar of the thirteenth century was denounced as a neutralist, which was the word of the moment for anyone who wanted his country to stand outside the quarrel between Washington and Moscow, and, by some, as worse. He was not a Soviet sympathizer and nothing in his life suggests otherwise, but the campaign was personal, it was loud, and it went on. On 1 January 1951 he resigned his chair at the Collège de France. The stated reason was that he wanted to give his whole time to Toronto, and that was true; it was not the only thing that was true. The Toronto years, which ran until he retired from directing the Institute in 1968, produced the summary works of a lifetime. History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages came out in 1955, a single volume covering a thousand years with a bibliography running to a third of its length. In the same year he gave the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery in Washington, published as Painting and Reality in 1957, on how a painting exists: an old man’s metaphysics applied to canvas and pigment. In 1960 he published Le Philosophe et la théologie, the nearest thing he wrote to an autobiography, and the place to hear him tell the story of that Sorbonne thesis in his own voice. From 1960 he lived mainly in France, and in 1971 he retired to Cravant, his mother’s village in Burgundy. He went on writing: a book on Dante and Beatrice appeared when he was ninety. He died on 19 September 1978, aged ninety-four, at Auxerre, where he had been brought from the house at Cravant, which is why some accounts name one town and some the other. His requiem was sung in the cathedral of Saint-Étienne at Auxerre, and he was buried beside Thérèse at Melun.

What He Taught

(T1) The Middle Ages did philosophy, and a civilization that has forgotten them has mislaid its own memory. + Think of a family that has thrown out the photographs. They still know their own names. They have simply lost the ability to say how they came to be the people they are, and after a generation of that they will start explaining themselves by guesswork. Gilson thought Europe had done this to a thousand years of its own thinking, and that the guesswork had begun. The story he was taught went like this. Philosophy is a Greek invention. It reaches its height in Plato and Aristotle, runs down through the Stoics and Plotinus, and stops. Then a long religious interval in which nobody argues about anything because everything is settled by authority. Then Descartes, sitting alone in a heated room in 1619, doubts everything and starts again, and philosophy resumes. The interval is dark, and the darkness is the point of calling it that. He went and read the interval. Some of what he found: - Anselm, around 1078, arguing that the very idea of a being than which nothing greater can be conceived entails that it exists, and being answered in his own lifetime by a monk called Gaunilo, who replied that the same trick would prove the existence of a perfect island. Whatever that exchange is, it is not two men deferring to authority. - Aquinas, in the 1250s, arguing that in everything except God, what a thing is and the fact that it is are really distinct (T4), and building a proof of God out of the gap. - Duns Scotus, around 1300, arguing for the univocity of being: that the word "being" has to mean the same thing when we say God is and when we say a stone is, or we cannot reason from the stone to God at all. That is a technical position in philosophical semantics, and men have taken sides on it for seven hundred years. - William of Ockham, in the 1320s, arguing that universals, the general kinds like "horse" or "triangle" that our words pick out, exist only in the mind, and that nothing outside it is general. And there is the continuity his thesis had turned up. Descartes did not begin from nothing. When he writes that an effect cannot contain more reality than its cause, or that a cause may contain its effect formally or eminently, he is reaching for tools that had been made in the schools and handed to him in his Jesuit classroom at La Flèche. The revolution had an inheritance, and it did not mention it. Two things he was careful not to claim. He did not say the medievals were right about everything; his own books are full of them being wrong and correcting each other. And he did not say they were doing what the Greeks did. He thought they were doing something the Greeks had not done, for reasons the next teaching gives. What he denied was the gap.

(Q) "It is a sad old age that loses all its memories. If it were true, as some have said, that St. Thomas was a child and Descartes a man, we, for our part, must be very near decrepitude." + Source: Étienne Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, ch. XX, "The Middle Ages and Philosophy" (A. H. C. Downes translation). This is the last page of twenty Gifford Lectures, and he has just quoted Bernard of Chartres on the medieval habit of standing on other men’s shoulders: we are dwarfs seated on the shoulders of giants, and we see further not because our sight is sharp but because they lent us their height. "Decrepitude" is the weakness of great age. The sting in the sentence is that the moderns thought of themselves as the grown-ups (T1).

(T2) Revelation can hand reason work that reason would never have found on its own, and what reason then does with it is still philosophy. + Take the objection first, because it is a good one and deserves to be felt. Philosophy proceeds by reason alone. The moment a thinker accepts a premise because a book or a church tells him to, he has stopped philosophizing and started doing theology, whatever he calls it. So there can no more be a Christian philosophy than a Christian mathematics. That was Émile Bréhier’s argument in 1928, and it is not a cheap one. Gilson’s reply began as a historian’s observation rather than a theory. Look, he said, at what actually happened to philosophy after the gospel reached the Greek-speaking world. Certain ideas enter the record which nobody had held before and which then get argued about, rationally, by people using ordinary philosophical tools: - Creation out of nothing. No Greek philosopher taught it. Plato’s craftsman shapes material that is already there; Aristotle’s world has always existed. The claim that the world came from nothing at all, and that its existence is received every moment rather than merely started, arrives with Genesis and is then defended with arguments in the schools of Baghdad, Cordoba and Paris. - A God who is not a principle but someone. Aristotle’s first mover thinks itself and does not know the world exists. The God of Exodus has a name and gives it to a man he is sending on an errand (T3). - The person as something absolute. That a slave and an emperor have the same standing because each is made in the image of God is not a conclusion any ancient philosopher drew, and it becomes a philosophical claim about what a human being is. - History going somewhere. The ancients mostly thought time went round. That it runs from a beginning to an end, and that what happens in it matters permanently, is a biblical habit of mind that became a philosophical position. Here is the shape of the claim. Somebody hands you a map of a country you had never thought of visiting. You go, and once you are there you survey the ground yourself, with your own instruments, and you check every measurement. The map did not do the surveying and cannot be cited in your results. But you would not be standing there without it. That is what Gilson meant by calling revelation an auxiliary to reason: something brought alongside from outside, which does not become part of the argument and without which the argument would not have been attempted. He insisted on the other half just as hard, and this is where he is often misread. The two orders stay formally distinct. A philosophical argument must stand on reason or it is not an argument; a Christian philosopher who smuggles a revealed premise into a proof has cheated, and Gilson says so. Scripture itself keeps the two apart in the same way: Paul at Athens quotes a pagan poet back to pagans, "In him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28), and tells the Romans that God’s "eternal power and divine nature" have been visible in what he made since the world began (Romans 1:20), while also warning the Colossians against being taken captive "by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition" (Colossians 2:8). Reason reaches real things; reason left to itself also goes wrong; both are in the text. The objection has never entirely gone away, and it should not. Bréhier’s worry was that "Christian philosophy" is a way of getting the prestige of philosophy for conclusions held on other grounds, and any Christian who argues in public should keep that worry in his pocket.

(Q) "Thus I call Christian, every philosophy which, although keeping the two orders formally distinct, nevertheless considers the Christian revelation as an indispensable auxiliary to reason." + Source: Étienne Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, ch. II, "The Concept of Christian Philosophy" (A. H. C. Downes translation). An "auxiliary" is a help brought in from outside, the way an auxiliary engine is not part of the ship’s own machinery. "The two orders" are faith and reason, and keeping them "formally distinct" means that neither is allowed to do the other’s job inside an argument. He is defining, not asserting, and the sentence is doing a lot of work: it concedes Bréhier’s point about method in the first clause and takes back the conclusion in the second (T2).

(T3) The name God gives Moses is a claim about what God is: to be is what he is. + Start with the scene, because it is not a lecture hall. A fugitive in his eighties is minding another man’s sheep in the desert, a bush burns without burning up, and he is told to go back to the country he fled and get a nation out of it. He asks a practical question: when they ask me who sent me, what do I say? Every other god in that world had a name of the ordinary kind, a name that distinguished one god from the others. The answer he gets is not that sort of name at all. "God said to Moses, 'I am who I am.' And he said, 'Say this to the people of Israel: "I am has sent me to you."'" (Exodus 3:14) To see what Gilson heard in that, two ordinary words have to be split apart. Essence is what a thing is. Existence is that it is. In everything you have ever met, these come apart cleanly. You can know exactly what a unicorn is, in as much detail as you like, and the question of whether any exist is a separate question with a separate answer. An architect can hold a house entirely in his head, every measurement of it, and the question whether it has been built is not answered anywhere in the plans; the builder answers it, or nobody does. Gilson’s claim, following Aquinas, is that in God alone these two do not come apart. There is nothing God is over and above his being. He does not have existence the way a house has existence, as something added to a design; he is not a specimen of the class of existing things; his essence is to be. That is why Aquinas said the name "He who is" is the one supremely proper to God, because unlike "good" or "wise" or "almighty" it does not signify some form God possesses but existence itself. Pull on that and a great deal comes away with it: - God is not the first item on the list of things that exist. He is why there is a list. That is the difference between a very great being among beings and the source of being, and it is the difference apologetics keeps having to explain to people who picture God as a very large object. - Everything else is contingent. If only one thing has existence as its nature, then everything else has existence as a gift, held now and not owned. Creation out of nothing follows, and so does the fact that it is a continuing dependence rather than a shove at the start. - The classic proofs get their point. An argument from contingency is not counting backwards through a queue of causes. It is asking why anything at all is exercising the act of being, and it is looking for something whose answer is in itself. He called this the metaphysics of Exodus, and he was careful about what he meant. Exodus is not a treatise and contains no metaphysics; he said so himself, in the very passage where he drew the conclusion. His claim was that the sentence is there in the text, that people who believed it had to think about what it meant, and that fifteen centuries of metaphysics came out of the thinking. The Greeks had climbed high and stopped short: Aristotle’s god is thought thinking itself, Plotinus’ One is beyond being altogether, and neither of them ever says anything to anybody. What Moses got was not a higher principle. It was a voice, with a name, keeping an appointment. The New Testament takes the name up again and puts it in the mouth of Jesus, "before Abraham was, I am" (John 8:58), which is precisely why the men listening reached for stones.

(Q) "There is but one God and this God is Being, that is the corner-stone of all Christian philosophy, and it was not Plato, it was not even Aristotle, it was Moses who put it in position." + Source: Étienne Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, ch. III, "Being and its Necessity" (A. H. C. Downes translation). He has just quoted Exodus 3:14 in Latin, in the wording of the Vulgate, the translation that was the Bible of the Western church for a thousand years: Ego sum qui sum. Then he remarks that there is no hint of metaphysics in it: God speaks, and, in Augustine’s phrase for an argument that is over, causa finita est, the case is closed. The metaphor of the corner-stone is exact and deliberate. A corner-stone is not the most beautiful stone in a building; it is the one that fixes where every other stone will go (T3).

(T4) To exist is an act, not a fact, and a philosophy that forgets this ends by losing the world. + Consider a song. The score is what the song is: every note of it, fixed, and you can study it for years without a sound in the room. The performance is that it is. Nobody would say the performance is a small extra detail added to a finished score, or that the interesting part is the notation and the playing is a footnote. The playing is where the song happens. Gilson spent his later life arguing that Western philosophy had made exactly that mistake about being, and he had a vocabulary for it, taken from Aquinas: - Ens, a being: that which is. A horse, a star, a man. - Essentia, essence: what it is. Horse-ness, the definition, the score. - Esse, to be: the act by which it is. Not a property the thing has alongside being brown and four-legged, but the act that makes there be anything there to be brown. The claim is that in every creature these last two are really distinct, and that existence is the act, the deepest thing about the thing, the actuality of everything else in it. A horse is not an essence that happens to have the extra feature of existing. It is an act of being, going on, taking the shape of a horse. The failure mode he hunted through eight hundred years he called essentialism: the habit of treating being as though it were itself a kind of essence, the thinnest and most general one, so that existence quietly becomes a detail. Once that has happened, existence is either a property some essences turn out to have, or a brute fact with nothing philosophical to say about it. He traced the habit from Avicenna through Duns Scotus and Suárez to Christian Wolff, the German textbook writer who handed the whole apparatus to the eighteenth century, and out into modern philosophy, where the question "why is there anything at all?" gradually comes to look not like the deepest question but like a confusion. Two things ride on the distinction, and they are not small. - For God. If existing is an act, then saying God’s essence is to be (T3) is saying something enormous: he is the act of being itself, not a thing that is exercising it. If existing is just a fact, that sentence collapses into a tautology and the metaphysics of Exodus has nothing to stand on. - For the world. If existing is an act, then the world’s existing is received, moment by moment, from something that does not receive it. Creation is not an event at the far end of the past; it is the relation the world is in now. He pressed the case hard, and on one point too hard. His reading of Duns Scotus as the head of the essentialist line has not stood up well to later scholarship, and the honest thing is to say so in the same breath as the thesis it was built to support.

(Q) "Essence never cuts loose from actual being; it is, rather, bound to it by a life line, and, if that line is cut-off, essence is dead. No knowledge will ever come out of it." + Source: Étienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, ch. VI, "Knowledge and Existence" (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1949). A life line is the rope that keeps a diver or a climber attached to the people who can pull him back. Gilson is arguing that knowing has two movements which cannot be separated: conceiving what a thing is, and judging that it is. Abstraction can take the essence apart from the thing for a while, the way a diagram takes the skeleton out of the body, and that is legitimate and useful. What is fatal is forgetting that it was a diagram (T4).

(T5) The history of philosophy is the philosopher’s laboratory, and the same experiments keep coming out the same way. + A chemist who mixes two things and gets an explosion does not conclude that he was unlucky. He concludes that those two things do that, and he writes it down, and the next chemist who wants an explosion knows where to start. Gilson’s claim in the William James Lectures is that philosophy has the same kind of record and has never learned to read it. The pattern he charted goes like this. Somebody decides that philosophy cannot be trusted on its own and puts another discipline in charge of it: logic, or theology, or mathematics, or physics, or sociology. Judged by a standard that is not its own, philosophy is found wanting, as it must be. Scepticism follows, because if philosophy cannot reach reality then nothing much can. Then, because human beings cannot live in scepticism, consolations appear: a moralism that tells people how to live without claiming to know anything, or a mysticism that claims to know without argument. Then someone gets tired of that and starts the whole thing again with a new dogmatism. He ran the cycle three times in one book, with the names attached: - The medieval experiment. Logic set over philosophy in Abelard’s twelfth century, theology set over it in the schools that came after, Ockham cutting the root in the fourteenth, late medieval scepticism, and then the consolations: Petrarch turning to moral eloquence and Gerard Groot to devotion. - The Cartesian experiment. Descartes puts mathematics in charge; Locke follows; the position disintegrates into Berkeley and Hume, with Rousseau’s moralism and Swedenborg’s visions as the reaction. - The modern experiment. Kant rebuilds on physics, Comte on sociology, and the twentieth century inherits an agnosticism with an assortment of substitute mysticisms to hand. The conclusion he drew is not that Thomism is thereby proved. It is narrower and harder to dodge: a man may choose his principles freely, and after that his conclusions choose him. And there is a second, cheerier conclusion, which is that the announcements of philosophy’s death have a poor track record. Anyone arguing for the Christian faith today who is told that the questions have been settled and the discipline has moved on has grounds to ask which funeral this is.

(Q) "The history of philosophy is to the philosopher what his laboratory is to the scientist; it particularly shows how philosophers do not think as they wish, but as they can." + Source: Étienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience, ch. IV, "The Breakdown of Mediaeval Philosophy". He has been describing how the fourteenth century talked itself into scepticism, and the sentence continues: "the interrelation of philosophical ideas is just as independent of us as are the laws of the physical world. A man is always free to choose his principles, but when he does he must face their consequences to the bitter end." That is the whole doctrine of the book in three lines (T5).

(Q) "The first law to be inferred from philosophical experience is: Philosophy always buries its undertakers." + Source: Étienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience, ch. XII, "The Nature and Unity of Philosophical Experience". An undertaker is the man who arranges funerals, and the joke is that philosophy keeps outliving the people who announce its death. He is not smug about it. The next sentence raises the obvious objection against himself, that this time the pitcher may have gone once too often to the well, and he spends the rest of the chapter answering it, mostly by way of Kant: if metaphysics is arbitrary knowledge then so is science, and our confidence in the one stands or falls with our confidence in the other.

Legacy

(†) He gave medieval philosophy a journal, an institute and a library, and all three are still running. + It is easy to say that a scholar founded a field and hard to see what the sentence means. In Gilson’s case it means specific things that a reader can go and check. - A journal, 1926. The Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge, founded with the Dominican Gabriel Théry, took unedited manuscripts and doctrinal history seriously when almost nothing else did. It is still an annual, a hundred years on, and its first fourteen volumes are online at the Bibliothèque nationale. - An institute, 1929. The Institute of Mediaeval Studies at St Michael’s College, Toronto, which Pius XII raised to pontifical status in 1939. It came with a research library built for the purpose and a journal of its own, Mediaeval Studies, running since 1939 and given over to work on manuscript sources. - A generation of scholars. Gerald Phelan, Anton Pegis, Armand Maurer, Joseph Owens and Laurence Shook came through Toronto, and the critical editions and translations they and their successors produced are still what a student picks up. - Two books that became the standard shelf. History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages of 1955 remained for decades the first place an English-speaking reader went, and its bibliography, running to a third of the volume, was for many people the map of the whole territory. Le Thomisme, rewritten across six editions between 1919 and 1965, did the same work for Aquinas alone. The point of all of it was a method rather than a monument: read the man himself, in his own works, before you read what anyone said he meant. That sounds obvious. It was not being done.

(†) He made "Christian philosophy" a question the century had to answer, and the answer he gave reached an encyclical. + The debate he started in 1931 did not stay in Paris. Maritain argued with him about how to state the thesis, Fernand Van Steenberghen of Louvain argued for decades that the category should be dropped altogether, and Maurice Blondel sent a sharp letter to the 1931 session complaining that neither side had got the question right. That is what a live question looks like. It travelled a long way outside Catholic philosophy, partly because of where he chose to speak. The Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen are a Scottish Protestant institution, and he put his case there, in a hall of people with no reason to be friendly to it. The English translations followed quickly, and they were read by people with no professional interest in the thirteenth century at all. Thomas Merton, an undergraduate at Columbia, saw The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy in Scribner’s window on Fifth Avenue in 1937 and bought it. On the train home he unwrapped it and found the nihil obstat and the imprimatur on the first page, the two Latin formulas by which a Catholic censor certifies that a book contains nothing contrary to the faith and a bishop allows it to be printed, and the sight of them disgusted him. He read it anyway, and wrote in The Seven Storey Mountain that it gave him a conception of God he had not known was available; the word that stopped him was aseitas, the scholastic term for existing of and from oneself. He entered the Catholic Church the following year. The formal recognition came twenty years after his death. In Fides et Ratio, the 1998 encyclical of John Paul II on faith and reason, section 74 names five Western thinkers as examples of philosophical enquiry enriched by engaging the data of faith: John Henry Newman, Antonio Rosmini, Jacques Maritain, Étienne Gilson and Edith Stein. The pope adds, in the same paragraph, that in naming them he does not mean to endorse every aspect of their thought, which is exactly the sort of qualification Gilson would have wanted attached to his own name.

(†) His reading of Aquinas put the act of existing at the centre, and Thomists have been arguing about it ever since. + Before Gilson, the Aquinas most seminarians met was the Aquinas of the manuals: a system of theses about essences, substances and causes, learned in Latin from textbooks that stood at the end of a long line of commentators running back through Cajetan in the sixteenth century. It was orderly, teachable, and, Gilson argued, missing the thing Thomas actually cared about. Read the texts themselves and what you find at the centre is esse, the act of existing (T4). The reading that came out of this is usually called existential Thomism, a name that has caused trouble ever since, because it has nothing to do with Sartre and everything to do with the claim that existence rather than essence is the first thing in metaphysics. Joseph Owens worked it out in Toronto; Cornelio Fabro reached much the same place in Italy from his own study of participation in Aquinas; and the argument over whether they had found Thomas or invented him has been running in Thomist journals for seventy years. What changed downstream is worth naming, because it shows up in ordinary apologetics. An argument for God from contingency stops looking like a count backwards through a queue of causes to a first one, which invites the schoolboy objection that you could always add another, and starts looking like a question about why anything is exercising the act of being at all. That is a different argument with different defects, and it is the form the contemporary debate mostly takes. He also fought, and largely lost, a running battle with transcendental Thomism, the attempt by Joseph Maréchal and later Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan to answer Kant by starting where Kant started, inside the knowing subject, and working outwards. Gilson thought the concession fatal: a philosophy that begins inside the mind never gets out, and he wrote two books saying so. The twentieth century mostly went the other way, and the argument is not finished.

(†) Where he fell short: he wrote the history of philosophy as a story of decline, and his chief villain has not survived the scrutiny. + The honest entry in Gilson’s ledger is not a doctrine he denied but a habit of mind that shows in his own books, and the sharpest form of it is a charge he made against a man who cannot answer. - Duns Scotus and the essentialist line. In L’être et l’essence of 1948 and in Jean Duns Scot of 1952, Gilson put Scotus at the head of the tradition that loses existence (T4), with Suárez and Wolff behind him and modern philosophy’s indifference to the question of being at the end. The difficulty is that Scotus holds a distinction between essence and existence of his own, and specialists who have gone through the texts since have found Gilson’s Scotus hard to recognize. Allan Wolter, who spent a career editing and translating him, rejected both halves of the reading: that Scotus had given up on proving God by reason, and that his account of being is the essentialist one. Richard Cross has argued that Scotus distinguishes an individual creature’s essence from its existence, which puts him, by Gilson’s own definitions, on the existentialist side. And the opponent Scotus was actually arguing against was Henry of Ghent, so a line drawn from Avicenna straight to Scotus leaves out the man in the middle. - The shape of the narrative. The Scotus judgment is a case of a wider habit. Gilson liked to date the fall and name the man who caused it, and a history written that way reads every position by the worst thing that was later made of it. Aquinas becomes a summit and the six centuries after him a descent, which is a powerful story and not obviously a true one. - A thesis that kept moving. He restated what he meant by "Christian philosophy" more than once across thirty years, in The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, in Christianisme et philosophie and again in the Introduction à la philosophie chrétienne of 1960, without always flagging the shift, and sympathetic readers have found it hard to say which version they are defending. Two things belong on the other side of the ledger, in fairness rather than as excuse. He had read more of the manuscripts than almost anyone then living, so when he was wrong he was wrong with the texts open. And he corrected himself in public: the six editions of Le Thomisme are the visible record of a man revising his account of Aquinas for forty-six years, which is not the behaviour of someone defending a position for its own sake.