Etienne Gilson (1884-1978)

When Etienne Gilson began his studies at the Sorbonne at the turn of the twentieth century, French university philosophy lived under the rule of idealism, especially that of Leon Brunschvicg, for whom the history of thought culminated in Descartes, Kant, and modern science. The medieval millennium, by contrast, was considered sterile: a long night between Greek light and Cartesian light. To study "scholastic philosophy" looked like an antiquarian curiosity, not a serious philosophical task^[5].

Gilson would make that reputation into a historical falsehood. His whole work consists in proving, texts in hand, that medieval men thought, and thought greatly.

A Catholic in the French Third Republic

Born in Paris on 13 June 1884, Etienne Gilson grew up in a France torn by the religious and political conflicts of the anticlerical Third Republic^[6]. His family was Catholic; the child would remain, without apparent rupture or crisis, a faithful believer until death. The point deserves to be made at once: unlike so many figures of his age, whether Pascal in the century of libertinage or the great figures of the English Catholic revival such as Christopher Dawson, Chesterton, and Belloc, Gilson did not have to return to the faith. He had to discover, as a philosopher, that his faith was intelligent.

A brilliant student, he obtained the agregation in philosophy in 1907, after following Victor Delbos at the Sorbonne and Henri Bergson and Lucien Levy-Bruhl at the College de France^[7]. Levy-Bruhl, a positivist and unbeliever, nevertheless suggested the subject that would decide Gilson's whole life.

In a few dates

One of the most fruitful paradoxes in the history of thought is that the greatest medievalist of the twentieth century came to the Middle Ages through Descartes. Gilson was not looking for Saint Thomas; he met him at the end of an inquiry into the founding father of modern philosophy.

The enigma of Cartesian vocabulary

On Levy-Bruhl's advice, the young agrege undertook a thesis on theology and freedom in Descartes. While working through the Meditations and the Principles, he made a discovery that astonished him: Descartes's technical vocabulary, including substance, cause, idea, objective reality, and eminence, was not a creation of the seventeenth century. It was the very vocabulary of scholasticism, inherited by Descartes from his Jesuit teachers at the college of La Fleche, themselves dependent on Saint Thomas and Duns Scotus^[8].

His two theses of 1913, Freedom in Descartes and Theology and the Scholastico-Cartesian Index, established the fact that philosophical modernity did not arise ex nihilo. Behind Descartes stood the whole Middle Ages. Gilson then understood that one cannot understand modern philosophy without knowing the philosophy it claimed to have replaced. He became a medievalist, and remained one forever.

The captivity of 1916: Verdun, Germany, and Saint Bonaventure

The Great War interrupted this rising career. Mobilized, Gilson fought as a second lieutenant at the Battle of Verdun, where he earned the Croix de guerre. In February 1916, he was taken prisoner; he spent nearly two years in German camps^[9].

Captivity, a dead time for many, became for him a time of work. He learned Russian there; above all, with little access to books, he meditated from memory on Saint Bonaventure, the great Franciscan theologian. From that confinement would emerge a few years later The Philosophy of Saint Bonaventure (1924)^[10], one of the masterpieces in which Gilson shows that a medieval thinker possesses his own coherence, irreducible to that of another doctor. Bonaventure cannot be understood by applying Thomas's categories to him; each great scholastic is a world.

The medievalist: Strasbourg, the Sorbonne, the College de France

After the war, his career unfolded with striking speed. Professor at Lille from 1913, Gilson moved to Strasbourg in 1919, then to the Sorbonne, where from 1921 to 1932 he held the chair of history of medieval philosophy^[11]. In 1932 he was elected to the College de France, the highest French scholarly institution, to a chair of history of medieval philosophy that he kept until 1951, when he yielded it to Martial Gueroult in order to devote himself more fully to his Canadian institute^[12].

Meanwhile he had built a monumental body of work: Introduction to the Study of Saint Augustine (1929)^[13], The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy (1932)^[14], Heloise and Abelard (1938)^[15], then, after the war, Being and Essence (1948) and John Duns Scotus (1952)^[16]. His History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (1955) remained a reference work half a century later^[17].

The Gilsonian revolution was not only doctrinal; it was methodological. Before him, the Middle Ages were judged by the standard of modernity and, inevitably, found backward. Gilson reversed the perspective: each medieval thinker must be read from within, in his own terms and from his own texts.

Against the legend of the Dark Ages

The expression "Dark Ages" is, for Gilson, an optical error inherited from Renaissance humanists and amplified by the Enlightenment. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw the birth of universities, the most refined logic, a metaphysics of being of unmatched depth, and a lucid encounter with Aristotle, Avicenna, and Averroes. To reduce all of this to "disguised theology" is simply to have failed to open the texts.

To describe the originality of these thinkers, Gilson coined a debated concept: theologism. Among the great medievals, philosophy and theology are not separated as two watertight disciplines; Revelation acts as a ferment that pushes reason to discover truths that, in principle, it could have reached by itself, but that in fact it had never clearly drawn out. This is what he would soon call Christian philosophy.

The Archives and the school of medievalists

Gilson was not a solitary erudite; he was the head of a school. In 1926, with the Dominican Gabriel Thery, he founded the Archives d'histoire doctrinale et litteraire du Moyen Age, a scholarly journal still in existence, and directed the Etudes de philosophie medievale series^[18]. Around him formed a generation of researchers who, with critical editions and lexicons in hand, brought forgotten scholastic texts back to light. The study of the Middle Ages ceased to be an opinion and became a science.

The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto

In 1929, invited to Canada, Gilson agreed to found, in connection with St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto, an institute devoted exclusively to the study of medieval sources. The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (PIMS) became one of the three or four great world centers of the discipline, with an exceptional library and school of palaeography^[19]. Gilson was its soul until 1968, crossing the Atlantic twice a year for decades. The institute still honors his memory today through an annual Etienne Gilson Lecture.

On 21 March 1931, at the French Society of Philosophy, a famous session took place: The Notion of Christian Philosophy. Gilson presented his thesis; Emile Brehier, Leon Brunschvicg, Edouard Le Roy, Raymond Lenoir, and Jacques Maritain discussed it^[20]. The question seemed technical; in reality it involved the entire relation between faith and reason.

Brehier's objection

The historian of philosophy Emile Brehier defended a sharp thesis: the expression "Christian philosophy" makes no more sense than "Christian mathematics" or "Christian physics." A rational truth is true for everyone, believers and unbelievers alike; as soon as a thought depends on Revelation, it is no longer philosophy but theology. There would therefore have been, in the Middle Ages, only theologians, and no philosophy at all^[21].

The objection is strong, and it echoes the dominant prejudice of the University. The following table summarizes the positions:

Gilson's answer: revelation as an "auxiliary of reason"

Gilson did not answer as a theologian but as a historian. His method was empirical: let us look at the facts. Greek philosophy, the highest of its kind, never clearly brought out the idea of creation from nothing, nor that of a personal God whose proper name is Being, nor the notion of the human person created in the image of God. These philosophically decisive ideas appeared after biblical Revelation, among Christian thinkers who, seeking to understand their faith, enriched reason itself^[22].

"I call Christian philosophy every philosophy which, although it formally distinguishes the two orders, considers Christian revelation as an indispensable auxiliary of reason." — Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen^[23]

"Christian philosophy" is therefore not a philosophy that would prove its theses by the authority of Scripture, which would be theology. It is reason which, historically, saw farther and more truly because faith oriented it. Revelation did not replace reason; it made it fruitful.

Maritain, Blondel, and the other voices

The debate reached beyond the single session of 1931. Jacques Maritain provided a more systematic distinction: philosophy remains rational by its nature, but it is aided by faith in its concrete state of exercise, an aid that strengthens it without distorting it. Maurice Blondel, for his part, argued for a more intimate interpenetration of philosophy and faith^[24]. These nuances reveal the richness of a Thomism which, far from being a frozen block, thought in common and in tension.

At the heart of Gilson's work lies a single metaphysical thesis, which he continued to deepen from 1919 until his death: Saint Thomas's true discovery is not this or that conclusion, but the act of being itself.

Essence and existence: the forgetting of esse

To understand what is at stake, take a simple image. Consider any thing at all, a tree or a human being. In it one can distinguish two aspects: what it is (its essence, its nature: "to be a tree," "to be a human being") and the fact that it is (its existence, the brute fact that it stands in reality rather than remaining a merely possible idea). Most philosophies, Gilson observes, have been fascinated by essence, the what, and have treated existence as a mere fact, metaphysically uninteresting, one more property.

Saint Thomas's intuition, recovered by Gilson, reverses that order. Existence is not secondary: it is the first and deepest act, the most "actual" act of all that is. An unactualized essence is nothing. It is esse, the act of being, that makes a nature pass from nothingness to reality and that maintains it in existence at every moment^[25]. Gilson speaks of the act of being (actus essendi) to mark that "to exist" is a verb, an energy, not an inert state.

"Where Descartes finds being in thought, Saint Thomas finds thought in being." — Etienne Gilson, Methodical Realism^[26]

This reading, which came to be called existential Thomism, made Gilson the first and greatest representative of a current that restored all its freshness to the metaphysics of being. The Italian philosopher Cornelio Fabro, who reached similar conclusions by studying participation, would be its other major artisan.

The metaphysics of Exodus: "I am who I am"

Where did Saint Thomas draw this intuition of being as act? Gilson answered: from a verse of Scripture. At the burning bush, Moses asks God his name. The answer is not an attribute, nor a title, but Being itself:

"I am who I am. [...] Say this to the Israelites: I AM has sent me to you." — Book of Exodus, chapter 3, verse 14

Gilson called this verse the metaphysics of Exodus. The God of the Bible does not say "I am the Almighty" or "I am the Good"; he says "I am." His proper name is the act of being in its pure state. In the light of this revelation, and of the dogma of creation, Saint Thomas conceives God as Subsistent Being Itself, Ipsum Esse Subsistens: not one being among others, however great, but Being in person, in whom all else merely participates^[27].

This is precisely the point that Paul VI praised in Gilson in his letter of 1975:

"You have been able to bring out the originality of Thomism by showing how the Angelic Doctor, enlightened by Christian revelation, especially by the dogma of creation and by what you call 'the metaphysics of Exodus,' arrived at the brilliant and truly innovative notion of the 'act of being,' ipsum esse." — Paul VI, Letter to Professor Etienne Gilson, 8 August 1975^[28]

Here philosophy touches prayer. The God of the philosophers, first cause and unmoved mover, is also revealed to be the God of Abraham and Moses, the "I AM" who speaks to his creature. This convergence between the highest metaphysics and the heart of biblical faith is perhaps the most properly spiritual contribution of Gilson's work.

God, the Ipsum Esse Subsistens

From this identification of God with the act of being, Gilson draws a staggering consequence. If God is being itself, then he has no essence distinct from his existing: in him, essence and existence coincide absolutely. Everything else, angels, human beings, stars, possesses existence only as a received gift, held at every moment by the Creator. The world does not simply "be"; it receives being. This radical dependence of the creature on Ipsum Esse grounds both the metaphysics of creation and a spirituality of abandonment: we exist only by leaning, at every instant, on the Being who gives us being.

If Gilson defended the metaphysics of being so ardently, it is because he saw in it the only bulwark against the error he judged foundational for modern philosophy: idealism, the conviction that we never know anything but our own ideas, and never things themselves.

"Descartes finds being in thought"

For Gilson, the original fault has a name: Descartes. By deciding that the certain starting point of all philosophy was the cogito, thought grasping itself, Descartes locked the mind inside its representations and thereby made the external world problematic. From there run Kant and all German idealism in a straight line:

"Indeed, all idealism derives from Descartes, or from Kant, or from both together." — Etienne Gilson, Methodical Realism^[29]

Against this impasse, Gilson set methodical realism: thought does not ground being; being grounds thought. One does not start from the idea and painfully rejoin things; one starts from things, already given in sense knowledge, and the mind finds truth there as food. "Every given reality implies the thought which apprehends it. Therefore being is the condition of knowing; knowing is not the condition of being."^[30] For Gilson, this is common sense itself, the common sense of Saint Thomas and of every person before philosophy misleads him.

"Philosophy always buries its undertakers"

From his long familiarity with the history of systems, Gilson drew "laws of philosophical experience," set out in The Unity of Philosophical Experience (1937), the fruit of his Harvard lectures. The first and most famous sounds like a warning to all who claim to have finished with metaphysics:

"Philosophy always buries its undertakers." — Etienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience^[31]

Every age announces the death of metaphysics; every age sees it reborn, because the human mind cannot avoid asking the question of being. Great philosophical errors are not accidents: they repeat themselves according to laws whenever the realism of being is abandoned. Gilson thus reads the whole history of philosophy as a long preparation for Saint Thomas, followed by a long decline away from him.

Gilson never separated the scholar from the believer. His deepest conviction was that faith, far from humiliating intelligence, makes it bolder, a thesis he shared with the magisterium of his time.

Leo XIII and Aeterni Patris

The Thomist renewal of which Gilson is a hero did not come from nowhere. It was willed by a pope. In 1879, Leo XIII published the encyclical Aeterni Patris, inviting the whole Church to recover in Saint Thomas Aquinas the master of a thought capable of confronting the modern world^[32]. Gilson, who considered Leo XIII one of the greatest philosophical minds of his century, later edited and prefaced a selection of his encyclicals^[33]. For him Thomism was not nostalgia; it was an instrument of truth for the present.

The letter from Paul VI (1975)

Three years before Gilson's death, Paul VI addressed him a personal letter, a rare honor for a layman. The pope saluted not only the scholar but the witness to a decisive idea: that faith is a source of light for intelligence.

"A great idea emerges, one especially dear to us: faith is not, for thought and for human culture, a hindrance or an extinguisher, but a light and a stimulus." — Paul VI, Letter to Professor Etienne Gilson, 8 August 1975^[34]

The pope added that Gilson had "loyally worked" for the Church and kept toward her a filial trust, "as toward a mother"^[35]. Few twentieth-century philosophers received from the authority they served so direct a tribute.

The anxieties of the late Gilson

It would nevertheless be false to make Gilson into a man without inner trial. The aging medievalist lived through the cultural and religious crisis after the Council with real anxiety. His correspondence with Father Henri de Lubac, published in 1986, reveals a man sometimes distressed by certain drifts: the dissolution of metaphysics, the abandonment of Thomism in seminaries, the confusion of minds^[36]. Gilson was neither sedevacantist nor a rebel; he remained faithful, filial, obedient. But he feared that by throwing Saint Thomas overboard, one would also lose the rigor that protects the faith^[37]. On this point, time has largely vindicated him.

Etienne Gilson died on 19 September 1978 at Cravant, in the Yonne, at ninety-four, dean by age of the French Academy^[38]. He left an immense body of work, more than six hundred titles, and a way of doing the history of philosophy that changed the discipline.

Maritain, the other master of the Thomist renewal

Gilson is often associated with Jacques Maritain: the two men together received, in 1930, the first honorary doctorates of the Angelicum in Rome^[39], and they were the two faces of the Thomist awakening. Their temperaments differed, however. Maritain was a systematic philosopher: from Saint Thomas he built a doctrine of knowledge, art, politics, and mysticism. Gilson was a historian: he refused to "make a system" and wanted first to establish what authors had really thought. Where Maritain builds, Gilson reads. The two methods complement each other more than they oppose each other, and from their conjunction came the living Thomism of the twentieth century.

The Gilsonian school today

Gilson's legacy can be measured by the vitality of those who continue it. The Toronto institute still trains medievalists; his major books continue to be reprinted and translated; and the Thomism of the act of being continues to inspire contemporary philosophers, from Remi Brague to Edward Feser, who show that classical metaphysics has lost none of its force. The International Etienne Gilson Society, founded in 2009, and the journal Studia Gilsoniana maintain the study of his work^[40]. Gilson was right: philosophy always buries its undertakers, and the question of being, which some thought dead, remains the most living question of all.

• Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) — the other great master of the Thomist renewal, a systematic philosopher and Gilson's companion.
• Saint Thomas Aquinas — the Common Doctor whose metaphysics of the act of being Gilson rediscovered.
• Saint Bonaventure — the Franciscan theologian whom Gilson meditated on in captivity and to whom he devoted a masterpiece.
• Henri de Lubac — the Jesuit theologian whose correspondence with Gilson illuminates the anxieties of the postconciliar period.
• Cornelio Fabro — the other great artisan of the Thomism of participation and esse.
• Christopher Dawson, G. K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc — figures of the Catholic intellectual renewal of which Gilson was the scholarly side.