Francesca Aran Murphy is Professor of Christian Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom. Her most recent book, God is not a Story (Oxford University Press, 2007) is available in book form or as an electronic download. This excerpt and excerpts that follow are taken from Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Étienne Gilson, (University of Missouri Press, 2004) which is published in the Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy. This appears with permission.

This is an "intellectual life" of Étienne Gilson. The "intellect" follows a thematic order, but lives are chronological. I have tried to give both chronology and thematicism their due, for certain intellectual themes shaped Gilson's life. The thematic currents all flow from one historical fact, the French modernist crisis. Gilson was an impressionable nineteen-year old when the modernist crisis began in France. It was like being nineteen during the French Revolution, or like being a real-life Johnny Tremaine at the start of the American Revolution. One can hardly imagine a real Johnny Tremaine putting it all behind him when the War of American Independence con­cluded. This book tries to show how Gilson was marked throughout his life by his reactions to modernism.

If Gilson's reaction had been straightforward, it would have been easy to describe, but perhaps not worth describing. If a historian could play with counterfactuals, one would say that if, between 1903 and 1914, Gilson had been simply for the modernists, or if he had simply been against them, he would have made no contribution to twentieth-century philosophy. In fact, his response made for a serious internal conflict. Gilson was a devout and loyal French Catholic who felt a great sympathy with the modernists. So modernism worked in him like the grit in the oyster, producing a pearl.

There were four great issues at work in the French modernist crisis, each of which played out in Gilson's life and thought. The first — the political theme — is the most difficult to grasp for people who are not natives of France. It concerns the battle of many French Catholics against "social modernism," or political liberalism. Nearly all French Catholics resented the French Revolution; many do so to this day. In the minds of many of Gilson's contemporaries, both believers and their adversaries, monarchism went along with Catholic faith and republicanism was inimical to it. Opposition to everything that they imagined to have resulted from the Revolution, such as the emancipation of Jews, was ingrained in the French Catholic mentality. Thus, they lined up against the Jewish Dreyfus: being anti-Dreyfus, and anti-Semitic, was a natural deduction from the monarchist creed.

In 1903 this conviction was repaid by the decision of a French republi­can government to expel all the religious orders from France. Thousands of nuns and priests were compelled to abandon the work of centuries and depart for Belgium, the Channel Islands, England, and Canada. If you can imagine the reaction of American Catholics to a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court to expel the religious orders from the United States, that could help to put you in the picture; but you would have to consider also that this Catholic versus secular tug-of-war for the heart of France had been going on since Voltaire, that secular schools were the temples of French republican culture, and that nearly all religious school teaching had been in the hands of priests and nuns.

Now ask, how would the American Catholic media and episcopate re­spond to vociferous American critics of the decision to expel the religious orders from the United States? And what if those critics did not happen to be Catholic or even believers in God? What happened in France, with the strong encouragement of the papacy, was that they welcomed with open arms the backing of atheist monarchists like Charles Maurras. To them, Maurras' atheism was far less significant than his pro-Catholic ideology, the result of his monarchism.

What was Gilson to make of this? Loyalty to the church and to friends was one of the deepest character traits of this fierce but humble man. He was not sufficiently pompous to imagine that one could stand outside or above the conflict, and the situation did not allow for noncombatants. Gilson trod the boards of French intellectual life for sixty years, and he waited until 1965, when he was eighty-one years old, to criticize the church in public. He revered priests. Every letter that Gilson wrote to lifelong priest friends opens, "Mon réverend Père." He said he considered priests as "sacred ani­mals:" for him, the curtain between lay and cleric symbolized the sanctity of the church. In 1902, Gilson no more wanted to see the church uprooted from France than to pull out his fingernails. He took no delight in the expulsion of the orders from France. Equally, Gilson detested Charles Maurras and his atheist monarchism. Gilson was a republican. He was a not a thor­oughbred political animal; the philosopher racehorse is seldom much good at practical politics. Gilson was sure, however, that French Catholic monar­chism was impractical and spiritually dangerous.

This assurance worked on him in an affective, emotional way. It made him take intellectual decisions on the existential level, before he began to turn them into unemotive prose. Gilson's great friend, Jacques Maritain — a pro-monarchist until 1928 — composed deliciously affective texts, which sprang from cold intellectual intuition of principles. By contrast, the elegant, lucid philosophy of Gilson's books emerged, not just from his heart, but from his viscera.

So that they could ally with the atheists who, like them, detested social modernism and who wrote pro-Catholic propaganda, French Catholic monarchists had to conceive of "nature" and "grace" as different worlds. How else should they find common ground with their nonbelieving allies? If both were right that political liberalism is wrong, then both must have achieved that insight on the "neutral" ground of natural political philoso­phy and ethics. As they saw it, the only difference was that the Catholics had grace as well. Gilson's rejection of this separation of nature and grace was visceral; his philosophical theology posed a direct alternative to it, one he claimed to find in Saint Thomas Aquinas.

Between 1903 and 1914, modernists like Alfred Loisy were brought to book for "fideism." Fido is a faithful dog, from the Latin "I believe," and fideism is literally "faith-ism." When they excommunicated Loisy as a fideist, the church authorities did so because they thought he was taking the rational substructure of philosophical argument away from doctrine, basing doctrine purely on belief stripped of reason. From time to time throughout his career, Gilson took delight in being called a fideist. The second theme generated by the modernist crisis is reason and faith, faith and reason. Which way round does it go?

Gilson was no irrationalist. He was a great debater, brilliantly skilled in reasoned argument. So why was he so determined to make faith and mystery the hinge on which reason turns? It was not because he rejected reason or philosophy, but because he felt that something was being forgotten when fideism was condemned during the modernist crisis, namely, the mystery of faith. Gilson considered that, if the mystery of faith had not already been swept under the carpet for decades by an excessively rationalist Thomism, men like Loisy would not have denied the use of reason within theology. Somewhat as the anti-Dreyfusard campaigning of Catholic ideologues cre­ated a republican counterreaction, so neo-Scholasticism got the comeback it deserved in irrationalist philosophies. The fact that Maurras fought and won a campaign to have the books of Gilson's intellectual father, Henri Bergson, set on the Index on the grounds that Bergsonism amounted to fideism did not endear the rationalist attitude to Gilson. In his second book, written before the First World War, about Thomas Aquinas, he insisted that the saint was first and foremost a theologian. Christian reason can no more be separated from faith, for Gilson, than nature from grace. This came to the fore in Gilson's defense of "Christian philosophy." For him, Christian phi­losophy is created neither by Christians who wander into philosophy by acci­dent nor by philosophers whose Christianity is accidental to their thought, but by believers who think by means of their faith.

Many contemporary Christians would buy into "Gilson the fideist" a little too quickly for his liking. For those believers who have made a ghetto peace with nonbelief, revealed faith is without philosophical foundations. They give up the claim that revelation tells them what reality is like and say, "This is reality for me, a believer." Gilson, too, was a nonfoundationalist. He did not think we can intuit principles on which to build the house of reason and to which construction the rooftop of faith can be added. But he was a nonfoundational realist. He claimed that revealed faith stimulates better arguments for metaphysical and epistemological realism than any non-Christian philosophy can reach. Thus, the third theme of Gilson's life is realism. For Gilson, Thomas Aquinas was a great philosophical realist because he was a theologian.

The evangelical flaw in the "Christian fideist temperament" is not that it lacks the zest for a good argument — who could accuse Tertullian, Kierkegaard, or Stanley Hauerwas of that? The flaw in much Christian fideism is that it is inward looking. Many Christian fideists devote their evangelical talents, not to communicating the Gospel of Christ, but to arguing with other Christians, telling them to stop being so rationalist and foundationalist. Pascal is an exception, and Gilson is his heir. He was a ceaseless, dynamic apologist for Christian philosophy. He saw the public defense of Christian­ity as part of the territory of being a Catholic professor in a secular French university, much as any good chess player knows that the only way to win the game is not just to defend but to attack. Does that mean that Gilson put rational argument at the top of his priorities? Not precisely.

Gilson had an aesthetic perception that the rationalist presentation of Christian faith that detonated the modernist crisis was ugly. On the other hand, he sensed beauty in the philosophy of Bergson — in particular, a musical sort of beauty, a sense of existence and reality as being beautiful in the way that, for Gilson, the operas of Wagner are entrancing. Gilson allies the real to the beautiful, in whose face he saw mystery. Bergson thought that the lesson of his own philosophy was about how we know reality: he staked his claim on a "musical" perception of reality, as against the tone-deaf pos­itivism of his day. But Gilson, a realist from the bones, heard Bergson say that reality itself is musical. He was not satisfied with his own presentations of what it means "to be" until he was able to articulate existence as a spring­ing tempo.

The fourth issue is time and eternity. It entered the consciousness of early twentieth-century Catholicism through the historical study of scripture, the revelation of the eternal God. In 1900, Catholic Church authorities were suspicious of the historical study of scripture, thinking it dangerous because it seemed to undermine the absolute quality of scriptural revelation. When Loisy tried his hand at biblical criticism, he noticed a disparity between the Thomist conception of revelation, as timeless truth, and the slow emergence of religious ideas over time that he saw in Old and New Testament history. Because the two struck him as irreconcilable, and because an evolutionary history was the more attractive to him, Loisy rejected the Thomist concep­tion of revelation. He felt that revelation is living and growing, like a root vegetable, whereas Thomism canned the temporality and the life out of it. Loisy wanted to "historicize" Christian doctrines, and so got himself con­demned, in 1907, as a "historicist." He was looking for a livelier way of un­derstanding God's revelation than as the transmission of timeless truths. But the way he expressed the idea that doctrines are alive and growing smelled to the authorities of relativism, making the words in scripture just relative to their time, not the revelation of the eternal God.

The question was serious for Gilson and planted a seed that took forty years to bear fruit, so difficult did he find it to create an analogy that bal­anced the claims of history and eternity. The aim of Gilson's musical, "exis­tential Thomism" was to put across an idea of God's eternal being as active, a supernatural "fourth-dimension" of divine vitality. For the truth is that when Thomas is defining revelation, he says that revelation is expressed in timeless propositions, and when he is defining faith, he compares God's eternity to youthfulness and vigor.

It is not just the historical fact of the modernist crisis that creates the four themes of this book, but Gilson's reaction to that fact. If we want to know how modernism affected Gilson, we need to explain the various issues in the French modernist crisis, of course; but we must also recognize what Gilson thought and felt about those facts. One has to surrender oneself to time in order to allow it to reveal its goods, and in a sense, one must trust one's subject. The philosopher who most influenced Gilson was Bergson, and Gilson got it into his head that Bergson was an Aristotelian. Whether Bergson was or not, I do not attempt to say. All that matters for the purposes of this book is that Gilson believed that Bergson taught him to be a metaphysical realist. One will get "Aristotle" out of Bergson, not by reading him blind or through the filter of modern Bergson scholarship, but by read­ing him through Gilson's eyes. Gilson appears to have felt that, between 1905 and 1914, the church's reaction to the emergence of modernism was not especially well managed.

I do not attempt to portray the controversy from every possible perspective — or perhaps I should say I did try, just as I tried to put down an objective description of the contents of Bergson's writings. Most of it had to come out. In order to get inside what formed Gilson's mind, one had to trust his own perspective, and that meant de­scribing matters as he saw them. Ronald Knox or Jacques Maritain were made Catholics by their approval of the church's firm stand against rela­tivism between 1900 and 1915. Gilson's life-line is very different, because, unlike them, he was already wholly Catholic and was disturbed by how the church treated the people it called modernists. Is it possible to use texts that Gilson composed up to sixty years after the event as genuine testimonies to what he experienced during the modernist crisis? I have come to trust such late documents, because they offer the best explanation of why he reconceived Thomism, presenting it as a theology whose truth is eternal and yet living.

So far as understanding what made Gilson who he was is concerned, we need to stand in his shoes. In that sense, the historian's task is like the phenomenologist's. But if we remained on the descriptive level in ascertaining Gilson's achievements, all we would know at the end of it was what he thought he achieved, and so what? Gilson always claimed that his achieve­ment lay in giving the accurate historical interpretation of the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Even if that is objectively the case, history moves on. History is a positive science in that respect. Gilson said himself, in 1939, that his first book, about Descartes, published thirty years earlier, was "now out of date." He did not rewrite his own book on Saint Thomas seven times over sixty years because he thought history and interpretation stand still. Building on the revolution in understanding Aquinas, which Gilson helped to create, historians now know more about the historical Thomas Aquinas than he did. You will not be hearing much here about the "true" interpretation of Thomas's theology because this is a book, not about Gilson the mediaeval historian, which is where memory has currently buried him, but about Gilson the living philosopher, who taught timeless truths. What matters about Gilson's Thomism is not so much that it was true to Thomas as that it was true to reality.

Gilson's combination of "fideism" and realism issued not only in the his­torical description of Aquinas as a theologian but also in a very interesting Thomist philosophy. As a seasoned and reasoned opponent of rationalism, Gilson realized more than any other twentieth-century Thomist that doing philosophy is not a matter of constructing a system. It is, rather, a matter of experiencing reality and thinking about it. Thomas spoke of the beautiful as "that which pleases when seen." Instead of devising a "theory of everything" a priori from Thomist principles, Gilson made a series of ad hoc philosophical excursions into those avenues of reality which especially pleased him. And if reality is, in fact, more of a jungle of fiercely ad hoc animals than a stuffed system, this approach made him a better philosopher than the Thomist systematicians.

If Gilson was a Thomist, he was one who claimed he learned how to write about Thomas from Lucien Lévy-Bruhl's lectures on David Hume; one whose first great book was about Franciscan spirituality; one whose late pres­entation of the arguments for God's existence was influenced by Hume's Essay on Human Understanding and who drew on Pascal for his description of the vocation of the Christian intellectual. Gilson presented a way of doing Christian philosophy that was not prey to the pitfalls of the opposite error to fideism — rationalism. Very few Thomist philosophers have achieved this. To do so, one needs not only to nod piously at the "mystery of faith" but to experience reality as mysterious. And that takes some grit in the pearl.

A historical inquiry into Thomas and an inquiry into Étienne Gilson make for different narratives: I have planted my themes and chronology in the twentieth century. Therefore, the "Victorian voice-over," George Eliot's timeless moralizings about her characters' vicissitudes, had to be avoided. Having chosen the historical-narrative mode, it became impossible to make a detour into a timeless realm in which I could compare and contrast, for example, Gilson's analysis of Thomas's texts with those of later schools.

This book is about Gilson, and not about Aquinas, Bonaventure, Descartes. A book following a synchronic order could have had a timeless chapter about the textual rights and wrongs of Gilson's interpretation of Aquinas or Siger of Brabant; one that grappled with the diachronies of Gilson's life could not. The only way to present the historian would have been to step out of history and test his historical theses against current historical hypotheses. That would have meant doubly stepping outside of the time in which Gilson lived, into the past that he studied, and into analyses of the past that post­date his work.

We begin by jumping into the cauldron of the modernist crisis, the epoch in which Gilson grew to intellectual maturity. Here we see all four of the great themes of his life, the Catholic republicanism that led him to believe in the intrinsic relation of nature to grace, and thus of reason to faith, his aesthetic realism, always directed to mystery, and his sense of the dramatic, mobile quality of existence. In the subsequent chapters, the themes branch off, reappearing on stage at their own volition, for a person's biography is a spiritual drama but it is not a continuous story. Novelists tell stories, but biographers cannot quite do so, because human lives are too ad hoc for such a treatment.

Gilson served his apprenticeship in philosophical realism by studying textual, historical facts. We will see how Gilson's first, historical studies of Descartes and Thomas Aquinas led him toward a realistic epistemology, which does not provide its own foundation, or "script," but requires the prompting of faith. Gilson worked as a historian for a quarter of a century before he began writing philosophy books. Rather than noting all of Gilson's historical writings, the book leads in with a few that best symbolize his his­torical research, like his studies of Descartes and Thomas. Chronology en­ables one to show how one thing leads to another, and I have selected for description those Gilsonian histories that had some causative influence on his philosophical thought.

In the midst of the modernist crisis, the Parisian Gilson learned to love the new art forms that were being invented by Picasso, the cubists, and the expressionists. Appreciation for the modernist painters helped Gilson to write his first truly beautiful historical book, his study of the Franciscan Bonaventure. However much he protested the historical accuracy of his Thomism, Gilson's own philosophy was profoundly colored by a Franciscan spirituality that inches towards the sur-real and trans-rational. In the 1920s, Thomism became fashionable in France, its promoters putting themselves forward as defenders of reason in their culture war against "irrationalism."

Gilson was at edge with this self-understanding. It was in the mid-1920s that Gilson wrote his first defense of the intrinsic urge of the natural human mind for supernatural vision. If this set him somewhat apart from contemporaries like Jacques Maritain, the debate about the possibility of Christian philosophy that took place in France in the early 1930s made the two men friends. It also initiated Gilson's transition from historian to philosopher. He began to argue that Christianity can combine with philosophy, because Christians make better realists than do their nonbelieving friends. Henri de Lubac was almost alone in appreciating the uniqueness of this presentation of Christian philosophy, that Gilson was staking the debate on the heightened metaphysical reality of nature as revealed in the Old Testament scripture, not on the epistemological foundations or spiritual edification supplied to the philosopher by his religious beliefs. In that debate, and in the brilliant books that flowed out of it, Gilson used arguments that look historical but are really neat philosophy, a philosophy of "graced factuality." It was in the mid-1930s that Amer­ica recognized Gilson's achievement as one who had shown the unity of faith and reason. This book contends that American Catholics saw a valuable part of the man, but not the whole. Great actor that he was, he was well-enough attuned to his audience to know what they could hear and what they could not. The "Loisy problem" was outside their auditory range.

As the Second World War approached and the drums of the French rationalists beat louder in their support for Hitler's campaign against social modernism, Gilson argued ever more clearly that realism is grounded, not in the epistemic clarity of intuition, but in the simple mystery of facts. This elite intellectual gave some energy in the mid-1930s to writing popular social and political journalism, trying to turn the tide away from the French dream of a new dictator who would issue the command for the entire French pop­ulation to attend the Mass. Some of Gilson's historical, mediaevalist opin­ions, such as his conceptions of Averroes and Dante, have been surpassed by contemporary scholarship. But if one sees these writings for what they are, as products of the late 1930s, their timeless value emerges. For now one can see what Gilson was trying to get at, politically and philosophically, by posing Averroes as a rationalist and Dante as an advocate of an emperor who need take no spiritual, or moral, advice from the church.

It was not by accident that Gilson discovered his existential Thomism in occupied Paris in 1942. It was the summit of forty years' thought about the errors of paleo-conservativism and about how to ground reason in a faith to which the call of the transrational sounds like music. Gilson's priest friends, like the Dominican Marie-Dominique Chenu, had followed him in working out historical, factual, and existential interpretations of Aquinas's thought. Others, like de Lubac, had taken his idea that grace speaks from within nature to their hearts. De Lubac's Surnaturel (1946) can be seen as a successor volume to Gilson's defenses of Christian philosophy. Thus there came about, in the late 1940s, the French "nouvelle théologie," followed almost immediately by its condemnation. De Lubac's "intrinsicism" was stigmatized in the encyclical Humani Generis (1950). It was at a Thomist Congress in 1950 that one of the triumphant opponents of new theologies indicated to Gilson that L'être et l'essence had the modernist tinge. At the very same time, the remnants of Charles Maurras' monarchist party began a campaign against Gilson that led to the loss of his retirement pension.

Throughout the 1950s, a rather embittered Gilson began to move still further away from this reactionary Thomism, with its rejection of a "graced nature," to form an epistolary friendship with de Lubac, the disgraced author of Surnaturel, and to write a sideways attack on what he saw as a contem­porary, political version of "extrinsicism" in Maritain's propagandizing for world government. He did not just compose counterblasts, but a philoso­phy of particularity.