Introduction
In the history of philosophy, several philosophers have attempted to reach for a more comprehensive and inclusive account of reality through metaphysical speculation. In recent years, this effort has been used in attempting to overcome the individualism of western liberalism. Another way of understanding this more recent effort of metaphysics is as an effort to reconnect the human person with the common good and through this with our final end as human beings. It often has been remarked in some quarters that it is the metaphysics of the medieval Christian tradition that has been philosophy's best example of such an overarching synthesis.Footnote 1
However, always accompanying such an assessment is the cautionary note that our metaphysical speculations tend to fall short in providing the definitive personal and social values required for action in our concrete situations. And they carry the further risk of thinkers becoming lost amidst disorienting abstractions.
Lawrence Dewan's Christian Philosophy and His Recurring Tribute To Gilson
It is a useful exercise to closely follow the well known contemporary Thomist, Fr. Lawrence Dewan in one of his last papers, and in perhaps one of his clearest efforts, to tell us through St. Thomas “what it is all about.”Footnote 2 If we go quickly to the heart of Fr. Dewan's presentation, we must say simply that we as human beings are ordered to God. And to make the most of this ordering requires supernatural faith. We are in need of both divine revelation and the faith to receive it.
But then what does this have to do with philosophy? Fr. Dewan tells us, again through St. Thomas, that to answer this we must consider the dignity of human beings made in the image of God as agents and sources of events in the world. This situation of ours requires both a general philosophical treatment and a more particular theological treatment. It is here that we find St. Thomas is the exemplary teacher of humanity where he emphasizes the positive qualities of our behaviour as human agents that bring us into this intimate relationship with God's life.Footnote 3
In this work we are directed and called beyond our human nature; for our human nature is subject to being elevated, to being raised up to higher levels of being. In this work we need to believe something beyond the products of our natural reason in order to come to our true well‐being – to salvation.
Fr. Dewan tells us that St. Thomas speaks of Christ's role in elevating human life into an eternal and familial friendship with God. This is given particular treatment in Summa Theologica III which Thomas was unable to complete because of his own death.
Interestingly, Fr. Dewan at the end of his paper wants to provide a broader cultural and historical context for this concern for the human virtues and the elevation of the human person towards a divine friendship. And in attempting this he turns to Etienne Gilson, his teacher. Gilson always wants to consider the ideas that underlie our practices. Fr. Dewan tells how Gilson found underlying so many modern ideas “a universal will for annihilation”.
Kenneth Schmitz has helped to clarify the precise meaning of this “annihilation” spoken of by Gilson in a much earlier version of Christian philosophy's encounter with modern thought and it's problematic.Footnote 4 Schmitz himself is often engaged with thinkers such as Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida who are considering both “the death of God” and “the death of man”. What is intended by such jarring phrases is not the denial of man's continued physical existence but rather the intellectual problem of the alleged failure of all prior philosophical attempts to recognize some stable human structure and purpose in human life. It is thus the alleged failures especially of the philosophies of human nature and natural law to establish this structure and purpose that is at issue. Thus, in so many respects, this “… will for annihilation” both reflects and aims at the overthrow of Catholic‐Christian philosophy.
For Gilson writing in 1948 in a paper entitled Intellectuals and Peace, this will is rooted in the prideful pretence man has taken on himself to replace God as creator and ruler. The only antidote, according to Gilson, was for humankind to re‐enter the natural order of divine creation and to return to the wisdom of Christ. In this account of “what it is all about” both Gilson and Fr. Dewan would be in firm agreement.
Gilson's Contribution to Christian Philosophy and its Continuing Relevance
In Gilson's own philosophy, we see an account of knowing based upon a common sense experience of sensible individuals some of which include a spiritual reality in their composition.Footnote 5 In this he, like St. Thomas and Fr. Dewan, follows Aristotle for the most part. But Gilson believed Aristotle's philosophy was transformed by Christian revelation. He saw this transformation having to do with the primacy of existential act and the return of essence to its proper ground in existential act. This for Gilson was the special insight of Christian philosophy best expressed among the medievals in the philosophy of St. Thomas and it became central to Gilson's own philosophy.Footnote 6 Much of Gilson's own project becomes the development of this insight against the background of its absence in the thought of others which he characterized as various types of essentialism.
It is this distinction between essentialism and existentialism that will aide us in illuminating the differences between Fr. Dewan and Gilson. Kenneth Schmitz has suggested that Gilson's interpretation of modern and contemporary thinkers in terms of this distinction perhaps prevented him from fully appreciating these thinkers’ efforts to understand human history's impact on metaphysics. As a consequence, Gilson has not been able to fully engage the problematic of contemporary philosophy as expressed in existentialism and hermeneutics.Footnote 7 And yet to the extent that contemporary philosophy tries to move away from a distorting and disorienting type of abstraction, it has much in common with Gilson's critique of essentialistic thinking that is forgetful and devaluing of the act of existence.
It is this commitment and orientation towards the concrete in Gilson's philosophy that can help us to see and appreciate the relevance of his concern for the question of existential act for contemporary thought and it's problematic. Schmitz argues that this central feature of Gilson's thought can help give the genuinely historical concerns of modern philosophy the only metaphysics able to ground this concern in the worth it knows to be its own.
Fr. Dewan's Criticism and the Gilsonian Rejoinder
When Fr. Dewan criticizes Gilson it is always directed at Gilson's metaphysics and to his ontology in particular.Footnote 8 According to Fr. Dewan, Gilson gives us two senses of being's act of existence – its act of substance and its act of existence. Gilson understands the cause of a substance to be different from the cause of its act of existence. Fr. Dewan has charged that such a distinction is a troublesome fiction for metaphysics. For Fr. Dewan, it is form that has primacy in metaphysics and there is an intimate kinship between form and the act of existence.Footnote 9 But Gilson always pushes any metaphysical enquiry to ask what makes the individual subject to be a being? For him a thing is a real power, an energy, an act having two aspects: 1) the thing by itself and 2) the things actions.
Aristotle, in Gilson's view, leaves the individual substance unknown in its depths. He always wants to ask what sort of being is it that reality is by virtue of its act? He believed strongly that avoidance of this deep question led to a forgetfulness of being, forgetfulness that a thing be real. This forgetfulness, according to Gilson, begins with both Plato and Aristotle.Footnote 10 For Gilson, with such forgetfulness permeating western philosophy the “is” becomes reduced to “what” and so “is” recedes into the background and is forgotten.
Fr. Dewan, in contrast, has argued that the whatness of the thing is its very being. What then is most real in substance is that whereby it is in act. And it is form that is the act whereby substance is what it is. Existence for Fr. Dewan, if not reducible to, is always subordinate in some way to form. We thus know the form through the being to which it gives rise and we know the being through its definition.
But Gilson would persist in asking does not the form remain the same in all its individual instantiations? If so, what then of individuality? If being means “that a thing is” then individuals are and forms are not; if it means “what a thing is” then forms are and individuals are not.Footnote 11
Aristotle's concern according to Gilson, seems to be focused on individuation, that is – how form is predicated over many, and not so much on individuality, that is – how many individual beings are the same by virtue of their participation in the one essence or species. An adequate ontology has to distinguish between individuation and individuality, and thus even more deeply than a reflection on essence this requires that existence and our existential situation be brought into the discussion of actual being as much more than a “troublesome fiction”. This again, as Gilson repeatedly points out, is because as a subject of existence, I am not identical with my act of existing nor am I the source of my own existence.
Fr. Dewan carefully tries to avoid identifying being with essence, and so his ontology cannot be easily characterized as essentialist in any strict sense. However, to the extent Fr. Dewan supposes the many without explaining their actual existence, there remains a tendency towards essentialism to the degree he does not consider the cause of their existence seriously.Footnote 12 According to Fr. Dewan, things exist under the causal work of intelligent form and at times he has argued that any further enquiry into the matter as Gilson urges can be dismissed as unnecessarily troublesome and unjustified.
The central issue dividing Fr. Dewan and Gilson in their respective ontologies is just this question – why do many things exist rather than not? This for Gilson is the pivotal question for Christian philosophy that becomes the basis for speculations upon the whole order of things in the community of existents.Footnote 13
An existentialist ontology assumes this knowledge of many existents is the only valid starting point for knowledge. Our knowledge then begins with the sensible, the singular, the actual, and the contingent. It is this knowledge that grounds our knowledge of essence, the intelligible, the universal, the possible, and the necessary. An existential ontology in Gilson's terms begins with the knowledge of being in this sense and it must find in that knowledge the explanation for knowing the other factors of being.
In contrast Fr. Dewan's ontology begins with the knowledge of essences and tries to introduce into this knowledge the knowledge of existence. He may be correct in saying that knowledge of being whose essence it is to exist is knowledge that such a being exists. However, because the connection between knowledge and being as the act of existence is not given the attention it warrants, what Fr. Dewan is able to establish, at least according to the Gilsonian view, is that such beings whose essence it is to exist can only be thought to exist.
Fr. Dewan has argued through Thomas that existence and individuation stand and fall together. Thomas’ texts do not show that existence is the cause of individuation but that rather when a thing has esse it has it in something other than the quiddity itself.Footnote 14 There is a subject which has esse and the essential nature. The idea in St. Thomas is not that esse as such is intrinsically individual and the cause of individuation. Fr. Dewan insists that it is God, not esse that is the cause of esse and this he argues in specific reference to the human soul. So here, perhaps finally, we come to the precise point of difference between these two Christian philosophers; and it is in their respective approaches to the understanding of God.
We can imagine Gilson's key point in responding to Fr. Dewan's insistence “that it is God, not esse, that is the cause of esse(in things)” would be that we must remember that ultimately God's intellect is his very essence and thus is identical with God's very existence and the knowledge God has of it.Footnote 15 An idea in God is his own esse; and so it is indeed the divine esse that is the cause of esse (in things).
Conclusion
In upholding the continuing importance of Gilson's existential ontology, I have frequently recounted an experience from actual practice to which most people can relate. Often health and/or social service professionals can meet to discuss the “form” of a person where they speak about the person's “case and file” in the absence of the person. But there is a profound difference that is experienced when the actual person is included in such discussions. It is in such situations where we can sense and know “being’ as first the very “act of existence” in the sense of giving “form” its direct reality as well as in the further sense of grounding it in reality. There is simply an important distinction and difference that is revealed, we might say phenomenologically, in such situations. It is not regarding the degree of “intelligible adhesion” of belief in the existence of the thing but instead it is the encounter with, and thus distinction of the direct presence of the person (or thing) in the sensible world. This is not a demonstration involving inference; it is a direct intuitive evidence.Footnote 16
And yet over time, as I have attempted to better understand the issue of our individual and collective motivations to pursue the good, I also recognize the need for “form” (as intelligibility) and for the recognition of the Supreme Being which can be understood as the “form of forms”, the author of intelligibility itself. Gilson also refers to this in his stress on the importance of purpose in human practice. We must have some ultimate sense of purpose that we are directed to in theory or all our lesser purposes eventually fall into disarray. There is the recurring need for a renewal of purpose in human affairs, individually and collectively.
This speaks clearly to the perennial need for philosophy on both the individual and corporate levels, and in particular for Christian philosophy. It also witnesses to the centrality of the doctrine of being for this philosophy, and perhaps for two fundamental ways of approach to being or the question of being – by way of substantial form and by way of the act of existence; the way of reflection and the way of practical action.
As for the question which has primacy – it depends upon one's disposition and circumstances which, in my humble view, circles back around to one's existential situation does it not?