Art and Philosophy in the Life of Étienne Gilson –Pt 3 of Chapter 1
by Francesca Aran Murphy
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 the earlier excerpts were 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.
Social Modernism or Action Française?
Where Bergson took individually experienced time as the key to the creativity activating the cosmos, Auguste Comte thought of ideas as emerging from set stages of humanity's social evolution toward positivism. Fr. George Tyrrell asserted that the thought of Aquinas was produced by the civilization of the Middle Ages. Tyrrell complained that Leo's promotion of Thomism, in Aeterni Patris, makes "the medieval expression of Catholicism its primitive and its final expression." In effect, for Tyrrell, Thomism can be reduced to mediaeval culture. He felt it was absurd to expect anyone living in a modern liberal society to think as Thomas had done.30 Assigning the former Jesuit to the cohorts of the modernists, Pius X responded to Tyrrell's contentions by denouncing what he called "social modernism," that is, liberal individualist society, as a corollary of doctrinal modernism.
Charles Maurras agreed with Pius as to the evils of social modernism. Like Comte, Maurras believed that monotheism begets the virus of individualism. Both men considered that mediaeval Catholicism had modified the disease endemic to Christian monotheism. Comte had attempted ralliement with the Jesuits, "the outcome of which was a comic fiasco." Maurras, who created the Action Française during the Dreyfus Affair, "with a view to combating the pernicious effects of individualism" and to welding "an alliance between positivists and Catholics,"31 had some success in the latter aim.
In 1905 Combes instigated the disestablishment of the church. The 1801 Concordat was repealed. If the state would no longer pay the clergy, said Pius X, neither would it select the bishops. The act ordered that all church buildings be handed over to "associations" of lay people. In Vehementer Nos, of 1906, the anti-modernist Pope condemned the separation of church and state; in Gravissimo officii, he forbade the clergy to allow their property to be managed by devout lay people.32 The state reclaimed its property, and the church was materially bankrupted.
Received with initial protest, and then valiant submission, by the French episcopacy, not widely welcomed by the laity who would henceforth discharge their clergy's upkeep, Pius's actions delighted Maurras. He stated his "profoundest admiration for Vehementer Nos and Gravissimo officii." The Action Française attacked the repeal of the Concordat and mobilized resistance to state inventories of church property. The object of the republican government's assault recognized an ally. What did it matter if the apologist was an atheist: "As a member-priest remarked, 'If one is not politically a Catholic, one does not join the Action Française: metaphysically, you can be whatever you like.'" The southwestern priest who wrote to Maurras, "You are completely right to say 'our philosophy of nature in no way excludes the supernatural'"33 typifies one Catholic reaction to him.
Marc Sangnier exemplifies a different response. He created the Sillon in 1894 in order to give Catholics an arena in which to discuss democratic values. At the age of twenty, Gilson was enthusiastic about the Billon's effort to create a "sincerely Republican" and "social" Catholicism. These were the politics called for by Leo XIII. Gilson recalled that "there were many of us who felt a heart-felt union with Marc Sangnier and solidarity with him in his battles." These began in 1904, when Sangnier published an article urging Catholics to choose between the "Social Christianity of the Sillon''' and the "Monarchical positivism of the Action Française." Maurras hit back at some length in the Action Française newspaper. The collected pieces, Le dilemme de Marc Sangnier (1905), opens with a preface that repeats the phrase "I am Roman" like an incantation: "I am Roman, because without my Roman guardian, the second barbarian invasion, which took place in the sixteenth century, the Protestant invasion, would have made me a type of Swiss." The apologist claimed that Catholics and positivists may share the same societal vision: "Joan of Arc incarnated a . . . miracle, but the operations of that holy girl have been found to be conformed to all the most subtle laws of the tactics of those times. Where did she learn them? It matters little. She knew them. This social Christianity thus attains a certain degree of positivism. Monarchist positivism: it had to have been by the anointing at Rheims that Joan began the salvation of the country. Exactly, and trait for trait, this is the program of the Action Française. Like Joan of Arc, we say that there must first be a king, an authority . . . recognized by all."34
In 1907 Pius X's decree Lamentabili condemned sixty-five modernist propositions. In 1908 the encyclical Pascendi devoted a paragraph to the erroneous "apologetics" of L'évangile et l'église. Pascendi proscribes the "poison" disseminated by the modernists, men who feel "no horror at treading in the footsteps of Luther." Loisy was excommunicated in the same year.
In 1909 Pius beatified Joan of Arc, kissing the tricolor at the ceremony. In 1910 the Pope condemned the Sillon. The principal objection Pius urged upon his "Venerable French Brothers" was that the "priests and seminarians" who belonged to the movement were learning "democratic habits," which had issued in a lack of "docility" to themselves, who "represent hierarchy, social inequality, authority and obedience, antiquated ideals to which their souls, smitten with another ideal, cannot conform themselves." Moreover, ''the breath of the Revolution has passed through" men who say that "the great bishops and kings who have created and governed France so gloriously have given to their people neither true justice nor true happiness, because they did not have the Sillonist ideal.'' The Sillon had erred in attaching '"its religion to a political party,' said the Pope in words that could have been applied to the Action Française,"35 but were not. The Sillonists were convicted, finally, of failing to come to the aid of the church under duress.
Gilson was dispirited: "Did there remain as the only possible political attitude for a French Catholic that of the royalists or the conservatives? If there was one, we could not see what it was." A year later Pius X named Maurras "a good defender of the Holy See and of the Church." Partly because anti-modernism had such cultural concomitants, Gilson's youthful sympathies became so engaged in Loisy's case that it was not until sixty years later that he was able to "see him objectively (dead) for the first time."36
Gilson's Loyalty to Bergson
The childhood source of Gilson's existential philosophy was not pedagogical. It may have been an experience that he dated from his fourteenth or fifteenth year. He became aware that his need to explore every "road, footpath, summit or valley accessible to me from my father's house in the summer holidays . . . expressed . . . my love for it." Here, "in the June sun," he had an "unexpected meeting with a miraculous bank of little wild orchids, flowering vanilla." Gilson experienced this love in relation to things, such as the "humble flint," rather than for intelligent people, because, he said, if you take away thinking, talking, doing, one is left with the fact that "all entities do at least this, that they are." One cannot intellectualize the humble flint. Gilson would never be noted for hostility to fideism.
Gilson spent the later years of the modernist crisis as a Lycée professeur, teaching philosophy to schoolchildren. He remembered "often having said to my pupils that the supreme philosophical question in my eyes was to know 'why there was something rather than nothing.' I had not just read it in Leibniz, I had rather made it my own, as if it spontaneously flowed from my own thought, so intimately mine that I could never have borrowed it from someone else. It was much later, retrieving it in the writings of Martin Heidegger, that I became aware of my involuntary theft." Very long after those schoolmastering days, Gilson claimed that Leibniz must have "known this marveling in contact with this mysterious act which we call being, that in virtue of which one says of entities that they are"37
At the behest of the Ministry of Public Instruction, Gilson taught in the Lycée of Bourg in 1907, in the Lycée of Rochefort-Sur-Mer from 1908 until 1910, in the Lycée Descartes, in Tours, from 1910 to 1911, at the Lycée Saint-Quentin from 1911 to 1912, and finally in the Lycée in Angers. Despite the church of Pius X and the maneuvers of an omnipotent education ministry, Gilson remained "always first a Catholic, then, with equal fervor of a different order, a Frenchman of the Third Republic."38
The yearning of Jacques and Raïssa Maritain for truth had been stimulated but not satisfied by Bergson's philosophy. They believed that they must decide between relativism and unstinting faith in an authority that teaches truth. Pascendi launched their journey toward the church of Saint Thomas Aquinas. They began their Catholic lives under the tutelage of the Dominican friar Humbert Clérissac, who had gone into exile under Combes's laws, and who was an impassioned enthusiast for monarchism, Maurras, and the Action Française.
In 1913 Maritain gave a series of lectures at the Paris Institut Catholique, "castigating the Bergsonian philosophy with the severity of the preacher of a crusade" and "shocking certain of his auditors when he treated as a 'poison' a set of ideas which for many of them, as for himself, had been their intellectual liberation." Maritain's talks were intended to inoculate the seminarians in his audience against the "application of Bergsonianism to religious and dogmatic matters." He "denounced" as "a peril to the faith" the "ruinous doctrine which corrupts the life of the Christian soul in the measure that it is radically incompatible with the Thomist doctrine that is the . . . 'only philosophy of the Church.'"39
Bergson nauseated the anti-modernist conscience because his demarcation between scientific understanding and intuition made certain Catholics remember Loisy's divide between empirical knowledge and faith. The clear line that Bergson drew between intellectual knowledge of facts or ideas, on the one hand, and intuitive vision, on the other, reminded the anti-modernists of Loisy's distinction between the empirical science of history and the constants of faith, outside and beyond history. Once the two are thus separated, it was thought, there are no external, factual proofs of faith, and faith is therefore relegated to "subjective" belief. The objection to Bergson was that his epistemology promoted fideism.
For Bergson, human language expresses scientific knowledge only; he did not believe that intuitive vision can be put into words. If one applied this philosophical attitude in theology, then it would be impossible to define the objects of faith in verbal propositions, or dogmas. The Catholic anti-fideists considered that if the human mind does not have the ability to express the constants of faith in prepositional language then dogmatic formulas cannot contain ultimate, unalterable truths. The solution to modernism would then appear to be the Thomist epistemology, the principle that human reason knows objective truth and can state it in objectively true propositions. For Maritain, the uprights of objectivist Thomist philosophy upheld the rooftop of faith.
Maritain's strictures on Bergson's epistemology were published as La philosophic bergsonienne (1913), earning the congratulations of Pius X and Charles Maurras's benefaction.40 Bergson's works were placed on the Index in 1914. In the "same year, Bergson was elected to the Académic Française, following a widely publicized debate over his candidacy launched by the royalist Action Française.''41 Forty years later, when they fell out over aesthetics, Gilson said that he could never forgive Maritain his book about Bergson.
Gilson's friend Abbé Paulet overlaid the statutory Scholasticism with a Bergsonian tinge. He was for that reason removed from seminary teaching; this "heart devoured by the love of Christ threw himself into the parochial ministry, without feeling himself diminished."42 Lucien Paulet was killed in action in 1915. Gilson kept his photograph throughout his life. The biographical fact which best explains Gilson's intellectual development is what Paulet's photograph represented to him.
Gilson considered that the faults of omission in official Thomism had helped to provoke the modernist crisis, with its ruin of lives. "Here," he wrote, "is the wound of that troubled epoch: a truth which the guardians had lost. They were astonished that others refused to see, but they showed something else instead of it, and they did not know themselves where the truth lay. When I try today to understand the Modernist disorder in philosophy, it is first of all there," in the neo-Scholastics' misinterpretation of Thomas, so that a priest with "philosophy in his blood" looked elsewhere for inspiration. Lucien Paulet had conveyed to him a "strong bias against manuals of philosophy" that would stay with Etienne until his own death. Gilson's verdict was that "modernism was a tissue of errors made by responsible people but we should not forget the responsibility of another order of those who began by frequently permitting the truth to be misunderstood or ignored. They had travestied it to the point that it had become impossible to accept it."43 
[This is the last of four parts. Intro may be read HERE. Part 1 may be read HERE. Part 2 may be read HERE.]
NOTES
30. Quoted in Daly, Gabriel, OSA. "Apologetics in the Modernist Period," in "Chsterton and the Modernist Crisis," edited by Aidan Nichols. Special issue, Chesterton Review 15 no.1-2 (May 1989): 79-83, 82.
31. Sutton, Michael. Nationalism, Positivism, and Catholicism: The Politics of Charles Maurras and French Catholics, 1890-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, 1.
32. Chadwick, Owen. A History of the Popes, 1930-1914. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998, 394.
33. Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism, and Catholicism, 96; Weber, Action Française, 35, citing Abbe Appert; Maurras, "Le dilemme de Marc Sangnier," 39.
34. Pezet, Ernest. Chrétiens au service de la cité: de Léon XIII au Sillon et au MRP 1891-1965. Paris: Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1965, 27-33; Gilson, Le philosophe et la théologie, Paris. Librarie Arthème Fayard, 1960, 64-65; Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism, and Catholicism, 2; Maurras, Charles. "Le dilemme de Marc Sangnier: Essai sur la démocratie religieuse." In La déemocratie religieuse. Paris: Nouvelle Librarie Nationale, Paris, 1921," 26, 35.
35. Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 398; Letter of Pius X on the Sillon, August 15, 1910, in La démocratie religieuse, 167-68, with Maurras' italics; Weber, Action Française, 66.
36. Gilson, Le philosophe et la théologie. 65; Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism, and Catholicism, 100; Gilson to Henri Gouhier, July 19, 1963, in "Lettres d'Étienne Gilson a Henri Gouhier,"Prouvost, Géry, ed. In "Autour d'Étienne Gilson: Études et documents." Special issue, Revue Thomiste 94, no. 3 (July-September 1994): 460-78, 473-74. Gilson had just read the essay by Gouhier cited above.
37. Gilson, Constante philosophiques de l'être. Edited by Jean-Françoise Courtine. Pais: J.Vrin, 1983, 146-47. Gilson retracted the description of this youthful summer from the manuscript of Constantes that he left for posthumous publication; the editor replaced it.
38. Shook, Laurence K., CSB. Étienne Gilson. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984, 6.
39. Barré, Jean-Luc. Jacques et Raïssa Maritain: Les mendiants du ciel. Paris: Stock, 1996, 174-75.
40. Ibid., 176.
41. Antliff, Mark. Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, 4.
42. Gilson, Le philosophe et la tbéologie, 50.
43. Ibid., 50, 59-60; Shook, Gilson, 21; Gilson, Le philosophe et la. théologie, 60.
