Cornelio Fabro (1911-1995)

Before becoming one of the most rigorous interpreters of Saint Thomas, Cornelio Fabro was a child of Friuli, a Stigmatine religious, and an unusually precocious student whose intellectual vocation was formed very early around one question: being.

A Child Healed at Our Lady of Graces

Cornelio Fabro was born on 24 August 1911 in Flumignano, a hamlet of the municipality of Talmassons, in the Friulian countryside of the province of Udine^[6]. His family was modest and deeply Catholic. In his early childhood he suffered from a motor impairment; according to the family tradition reported by his biographers, his healing was linked to a pilgrimage to the Marian shrine of the Madonna delle Grazie in Udine^[7]. A brilliant pupil — first in his class from elementary school in Talmassons onward — he showed very early the studious temperament that would determine his whole life.

Among the Stigmatines: Verona, Rome and the Pontifical Athenaeums

On 27 October 1922, at the age of eleven, he entered the “Bertoni” apostolic school of the Stigmatines in Verona^[8]. The Congregation of the Sacred Stigmata of Our Lord Jesus Christ, founded in Verona by Saint Gaspare Bertoni at the beginning of the nineteenth century, is dedicated to teaching and formation. Fabro entered its novitiate on 1 November 1927 and made his religious vows on 2 November 1928^[9].

Sent to continue higher studies in the pontifical athenaeums of Rome, he displayed unusual precocity. As early as 1931, at twenty, he obtained a doctorate in philosophy with the highest marks, on a thesis devoted to the objectivity of the principle of causality and David Hume's critique of it^[10] — already announcing his lifelong struggle against modern skepticism and immanentism. This work earned him, on 20 December 1934, the first prize of the Pontifical Academy of Saint Thomas Aquinas^[11].

Priesthood and the Double Doctorate

Fabro was ordained a priest on 20 April 1935 in the Basilica of Saint John Lateran, and celebrated his first solemn Mass in Flumignano on 29 June of the same year^[12]. On 7 July 1935 he obtained his licentiate in theology summa cum laude. Remarkably for a future metaphysician, from 1935 to 1938 he also studied natural sciences at the universities of Padua and Rome^[13]. This scientific formation — rare among theologians of his time — marked his way of arguing: Fabro never despised science, but he refused its materialist absolutization.

On 30 October 1937, he defended summa cum laude his doctoral thesis on participation in Thomistic metaphysics^[14]. Published two years later as La nozione metafisica di partecipazione secondo San Tommaso d'Aquino (Milan, Vita e Pensiero, 1939), it would become one of the major Catholic philosophical books of the century^[15].

The Phenomenological Detour (1941)

Before his thought settled definitively on participation and esse, the young Fabro passed through a lesser-known moment: phenomenology and the theory of knowledge. In 1941 he published La fenomenologia della percezione and Percezione e pensiero, two studies on the relation between sense perception and the act of thinking, while he taught metaphysics at the Pontifical Urbaniana University in Rome^[16][17]. The Perugian teaching came much later: it was only in 1965 that Fabro became professor at the University of Perugia, where he held theoretical philosophy until 1981^[18]. This detour was not a parenthesis: by examining closely how consciousness reaches reality, Fabro sharpened the critical tools he would later turn against the Cartesian starting point of modern philosophy and against Rahner's transcendental “pre-apprehension.”

Key Dates

Fabro's decisive contribution turns on a word that manual scholasticism had almost forgotten: participation (partecipazione, participatio). His 1939 thesis, then his great synthesis Partecipazione e causalità (1960), demonstrate that this concept is not a marginal Platonic ornament in Saint Thomas's work, but its central metaphysical architecture^[19].

What Is “Participation”?

To grasp the point, take a simple image. Consider several hot objects: an ember, a stone in the sun, water in a pot. None of them is heat itself; each has heat by receiving it from a source. Heat is common to them, but none possesses it fully or from itself. That is the philosophical meaning of participating: to have partially, and through another, what another possesses totally and through itself.

Applied to being, the idea becomes dizzying. All things in the world have existence, but none of them is existence: they receive it. At the summit, therefore, there must be a being that does not receive existence but is existing itself — what Saint Thomas calls Ipsum Esse Subsistens, Subsistent Being itself. Everything else exists only by participating in him. Participation is thus the metaphysical bridge between creature and Creator: it expresses both their resemblance (the creature has being) and their abyssal difference (it has being only as received)^[20].

Predicamental and Transcendental Participation

Fabro does not stop at the image. His distinctive genius was to distinguish precisely the levels of participation in Saint Thomas, where his predecessors had confused them^[21].

• Predicamental participation operates inside a genus: several individuals “participate” in the same form (several men participate in humanity). It belongs to logic and univocal predication.
• Transcendental participation, by contrast, crosses all genera: it concerns being itself, which is not a genus but what makes every genus possible. It is an analogical participation — beings resemble one another only in that they are, each according to its own measure.

This apparently technical distinction saves metaphysics from two dead ends: pantheism (if everything were God, there would be identity, not participation) and pure extrinsicism (if God were merely an external cause, the creature would not owe him its very being). Transcendental participation holds both truths together: the creature depends on God down to the root of its existing, without being confused with him.

The Synthesis of Plato and Aristotle

Fabro's most original point is historical as much as speculative. The tradition often opposed Plato, philosopher of participation (things imitate transcendent Ideas), and Aristotle, philosopher of act and causality (nothing becomes real without a cause that actualizes it). Saint Thomas was frequently treated as a pure Aristotelian.

Fabro shows that this is not so: Saint Thomas fused the two traditions. From Aristotle he takes the notion of act — what makes a thing real and not merely possible — and he unites it with the Platonic schema of participation in a single source. The result is new: being is no longer an abstract form that things imitate from afar, but an act that the First Cause truly communicates, by degrees, to every creature. Plato provides the descending structure; Aristotle provides the energy of act; Thomas unites them in esse^[22]. Fabro would reprise and extend this demonstration for North American university readers in the English-language article “Platonism, Neo-Platonism and Thomism: Convergencies and Divergencies,” where he stresses the properly Thomistic originality of the synthesis: neither pure Platonism nor pure Aristotelianism, but a surpassing of both in the act of being^[23].

From this synthesis springs Fabro's most personal thesis: esse, the act of being, must be understood intensively, not as the flat mere fact of existing, but as the deepest and richest energy of everything that is.

Against the Forgetting of Existing

Fabro reproaches centuries of scholasticism for having flattened esse: “to exist” had gradually come to mean little more than a fact without depth, the Aristotelian esse in actu (being-in-act), a box checked once and for all. Against this forgetting, he restores the density of esse: far from being the poorest of notions, the act of being is the richest, the one that contains all perfections eminently.

“Being is the actuality of all acts and, for this reason, the perfection of all perfections.” — Saint Thomas Aquinas, De potentia, q. 7, a. 2, ad 9; formula made his own by Fabro as the motto of his intensive Thomism, which reads in it esse in its “intensive” sense, emerging above all other acts, formalities and perfections^[24]

In other words: what is most admirable in a rose is not only that it is red, fragrant or alive — it is that it is at all, because without that fundamental act all its other qualities would be nothing. Existence is not the floor of metaphysics; it is its summit.

“Essential” or “Intensive” Thomism

Fabro gives a name to his reading: essential or intensive Thomism. It differs sharply from two other schools which, in his time, also claimed Saint Thomas^[25]:

Neither fixed essentialism nor subjectivist turn: Fabro wants to return to what Saint Thomas really thought, participated esse as the living center of metaphysics.

Gilson and Fabro: Two Paths Toward the Same Esse

Fabro is rightly associated with Étienne Gilson, the other great architect of the Thomism of the act of being. The two men converge on the essential point: against modern idealism, esse is the deepest act of reality, and God is Ipsum Esse Subsistens. But their paths differ. Gilson, the historian, recovers the act of being by rereading medieval texts and the “metaphysics of Exodus”; Fabro, the speculative thinker, reconstructs its conceptual genesis from Platonic participation and Aristotelian causality. One reads, the other demonstrates — and from their convergence comes the existential Thomism of the twentieth century. For the historical side and the “metaphysics of Exodus,” the reader may consult the article on Gilson.

Fabro was not merely an armchair metaphysician. He produced one of the broadest Catholic investigations into the modern denial of God. His Introduzione all'ateismo moderno (1964), in two volumes and translated into English under the telling title God in Exile in 1968, seeks the philosophical root of contemporary atheism^[26].

The Principle of Immanence

For Fabro, modern atheism is not first a scientific or moral conclusion: it is the consequence of a methodological decision taken at the threshold of modern philosophy. He calls this decision the principle of immanence, and attributes its paternity to Descartes. By making the absolutely certain starting point the cogito — thought grasping itself — Descartes reverses the natural order: it is no longer being that grounds thought; thought now becomes the measure of being^[27].

Once this reversal is admitted, God is condemned, sooner or later, to become a mere product of human consciousness. If nothing is real except through the subject, then God himself will eventually be only an idea of the subject — and atheism becomes only a matter of time. Fabro follows this implacable logic from Descartes to Spinoza, then to German idealism in Hegel, and finally to its materialist fallout in Feuerbach and Marx, for whom God is only the projection of man. Contemporary atheism is not a victory of reason over faith: it is the poisonous fruit of an erroneous philosophical principle.

The Institute for the History of Atheism

This inquiry was not merely bookish. As early as 1959, Fabro founded at the Pontifical Urbaniana University in Rome the first Institute for the History of Atheism, later broadened into an institute for research on unbelief and cultures^[28]. Convinced that one refutes well only what one understands from within, he insisted on studying the great atheists in their own texts, without caricature — in order then to show more precisely where the fault line lay. His seriousness in listening to the adversary gives his refutation its strength.

Little known in France, Cornelio Fabro was also one of the great Kierkegaard scholars of his time, and one of the few who read the Danish philosopher in the original text.

The Translator from Danish

Fabro learned Danish in order to translate Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) directly, without relying on German or French intermediaries that often distorted the thought of the “Christian Socrates” of Copenhagen. His Italian translations, accompanied by ample and precise commentaries, long held authority. In 1987, he founded the Italian Center for Kierkegaard Studies in Potenza^[29]. Already in 1952, his essay Tra Kierkegaard e Marx (“Between Kierkegaard and Marx”) had set out the two poles of modernity he would never cease to oppose: on one side believing and free subjectivity, on the other collective materialism.

Against Idealism: Subjectivity and Freedom

Why did this metaphysician of objective being attach such importance to Kierkegaard, thinker of subjectivity? Because Fabro saw in him the strongest antidote to idealism. Against Hegel, who dissolved the individual into the impersonal movement of Spirit, Kierkegaard recalled that to exist, for a human being, is to stand before God as an irreplaceable individual, called to a choice and to a leap of faith. Kierkegaardian subjectivity is not a subjectivism that locks one inside the self: it is the interiority of the person before the Absolute. Fabro thus connected his metaphysics of esse to a philosophy of freedom: being received from God culminates, in man, in the freedom that can give itself or refuse itself.

After the Second Vatican Council, whose preparation he had known, Fabro became one of the firmest critics of theologies that, under cover of renewal, abandoned the metaphysics of being. His most famous target was the Jesuit Karl Rahner, one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century.

“La svolta antropologica”

In 1974, Fabro published La svolta antropologica di Karl Rahner (“The Anthropological Turn of Karl Rahner”) with Rusconi^[30]. His thesis is direct: Rahner's transcendental Thomism is not a legitimate development of Saint Thomas, but an inversion of his metaphysics. By taking as its starting point the human subject and its “pre-apprehension” of being, Rahner, according to Fabro, reintroduces the critical path of Kant and the existential analytic of Heidegger — his acknowledged master — into the heart of Catholic theology. The result is that the metaphysics of objective being dissolves into transcendental anthropology, and Thomistic realism is turned into a subjectivism Fabro considers unprecedented since the modernist crisis.

Fabro's central argument, summarized here in paraphrase (no verbatim excerpt is quoted), is as follows: Rahner would not proceed to an analysis of Thomistic doctrine according to its historical origin and development; he would reverse its meaning by bending Saint Thomas's texts to a foreign framework, that of transcendental subjectivity^[31].

The accusation is serious and technical; it is neither invective nor easy suspicion, but a line-by-line confrontation between Saint Thomas's texts and Rahner's use of them. Fabro does not question Rahner's piety: he questions his philosophical fidelity to the master he invokes.

Thomistic Fidelity After the Council

It would be false to rank Fabro among opponents of the Council. Like Gilson, he remained a faithful, obedient, filial Catholic. But, like Gilson, he feared that by abandoning the metaphysics of being one would also lose the rigor that protects faith from modernist dissolution^[32]. His critique of Rahner was not a quarrel among schools: in his eyes, it was a defense of reason's very capacity to reach God — these praeambula fidei, these truths prior to faith, without which faith floats without rational support. The debate he opened remains, half a century later, one of the liveliest in contemporary Catholic theology.

Cornelio Fabro died in Rome on 4 May 1995, at the age of eighty-three^[33]. He left an intimidating body of work: thousands of pages of metaphysics, history of philosophy, Thomistic exegesis, Kierkegaard studies and doctrinal polemic.

The Systematic Edition of the Opere Complete

Already honored during his lifetime — Aquinas Medal of the American Catholic Philosophical Association in 1974, first elected president of the International Thomas Aquinas Society (S.I.T.A.) from 1985 to 1991^[34] — he is now the object of a systematic edition of his complete works (Opere Complete), undertaken from 2005 by the publishing house of the Institute of the Incarnate Word (EDIVI), which republishes his entire corpus volume by volume^[35]. Few Catholic philosophers of the twentieth century have received such an editorial monument.

Fabro Today

Fabro's legacy is measured by the vitality of the metaphysics of participation, which he rescued from oblivion. His intensive Thomism counts among the resources of the contemporary renewal of the metaphysics of esse, which many Thomists today oppose to contemporary materialism. A sign of this continuing reception in the Anglophone world: in 2015, Selected Works of Cornelio Fabro appeared, an anthology of his articles on metaphysics and participation, prefaced by the Thomist Msgr John F. Wippel (1933-2023) of the Catholic University of America, one of the finest contemporary specialists in the metaphysics of Saint Thomas^[36]. By restoring the density of the act of being and the central place of participation, Cornelio Fabro recalled a truth modern philosophy had tried to forget: to exist is not nothing — it is the deepest gift, and it comes from Another.

• Étienne Gilson (1884-1978) — the other great master of the Thomism of the act of being; the historical counterpart to Fabro's speculative work.
• Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) — the third great name of the Thomistic renewal, a systematic philosopher of knowledge and politics.
• Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange (1877-1964) — representative of classical Thomism, from which Fabro differs on the question of esse.
• Saint Thomas Aquinas — the Common Doctor whose metaphysics of participation Fabro rediscovered.
• Maurice Blondel (1861-1949) — a figure of modern Catholic philosophy and debates on immanence.
• Edward Feser — a contemporary philosopher who prolongs classical Thomistic metaphysics.