The Writings of Charles De Koninck

Volume 2

Charles De Koninck, Ralph McInerny, Ralph McInerny

• Verlag: University of Notre Dame Press
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780268077921
• Thema: Philosophie
• Thema: Métaphysique philosophique

Volume 2 of The Writings of Charles De Koninck carries on the project begun by volume 1 of presenting the first English edition of the collected works of the Catholic Thomist philosopher Charles De Koninck (1906–1965). Ralph McInerny (1929–2010) was the project editor and prepared the excellent translations.

This volume begins with two works published in 1943: Ego Sapientia: The Wisdom That Is Mary, De Koninck's first study in Mariology, and The Primacy of the Common Good Against the Personalists (with The Principle of the New Order ), which generated a strong critical reaction. Included in this volume are two reviews of The Primacy of the Common Good, by Yves R. Simon and I. Thomas Eschmann, O.P., and De Koninck's substantial response to Eschmann in his lengthy "In Defence of St. Thomas." The volume concludes with a group of short essays: "The Dialectic of Limits as Critique of Reason, " "Notes on Marxism, " "This Is a Hard Saying, " "[Review of] Between Heaven and Earth, " and "Concept, Process, and Reality."

IN DEFENCE OF ST. THOMAS

A Reply to Father Eschmann’s Attack on
The Primacy of the Common Good

1945

Table of Contents

I. On “Convenient Anonymity”

II. St. Thomas on Part and Whole

III. A Thomistic Proof of a “Revolting” Statement

IV. Why Did God Make Things Many?

V. Quis ut Deus?

VI. Bonum universale in essendo and bonum universale in causando

VII. “The Chief ‘Personalist’ Text”

VIII. Beatitude, “the” Common Good

IX. “Fidelissimus discipulus ejus”

X. “Unusquisque seipsum in Deum ordinat sicut pars ordinatur ad bonum commune”

XI. “Civitas homini, non homo Civitati existit”

XII. The Private Law of the Holy Ghost

XIII. “The Term ‘Personalism’ (in Itself, No Doubt, a Bad One)”

XIV. The Devil and the Common Good

. . . in eligendis opinionibus vel repudiandis, non debet duci homo amore vel odio introducentis opinionem, sed magis ex certitudine veritatis.

—St. Thomas1

I. On “Convenient Anonymity”

Professor Yves Simon2 seems to agree with the doctrine contained in my brief essay on the primacy of the common good:3

. . . De Koninck has outlined, with unusual profundity and accuracy, the main aspects of a theory of the common good. It would be unfair to blame such a brief treatment for what we do not find in it. We do find in it a most valuable contribution to the definition of the common good and to the vindication of its primacy.4

The doctrine I outlined

calls for many specifications and further developments, but it constitutes a very sound foundation for any further development of the theory of the common good.5 . . . Insofar as De Koninck’s essay vindicates the primacy of the common good and carries out the criticism of definite positions, it is entirely praiseworthy.6

The positions and their necessary consequences which I consider representative of personalism and which I attack, he rightly qualifies as “vicious stupidities”7 and “monstrosities.”8 When it comes to determining who are the personalists, Professor Simon has some understanding words to say:

Turning to the polemical side of the essay, we realize at once that the writer was confronted by a great difficulty. De Koninck’s purpose is to vindicate the primacy of the common good against the personalists. It is a hard job, for the obvious reason that the term personalism covers a great variety of ill-defined doctrines and attitudes.9

While admitting there is some difficulty in identifying the personalists, Professor Simon is yet dissatisfied that my book should have named only those whose position was well defined. And here is the reason for his dissatisfaction:

On account of the very important part played by the concept of person in the work of Maritain, there is no reason why he [the reader] should not believe that the expression “the personalists” stands for Jacques Maritain.10

Now it is glaringly obvious to Professor Simon that the ideas I describe as personalist are, with few exceptions and perhaps without any exception, just as odious to M. Maritain as they are to myself; that what I maintain concerning the primacy of the common good is just as dear to the latter as it is to myself. Hence, he does not hesitate to declare that, insofar as the reader might be left to believe that Jacques Maritain would disagree with any of the fundamental positions involved,

[t]he net effect of the essay, insofar as Maritain is concerned, resembles that which could have been brought about—perhaps not so successfully—by plain calumny.11

Yves Simon is indeed a friend. He does not mince words. As one of M. Maritain’s most esteemed and faithful disciples, he is sure the doctrines I condemn are not those of M. Maritain; and accordingly he gives me plainly to understand, that if I intended my readers to believe otherwise, I would be committing a simple calumny.

A second critic of my little work takes an astonishingly different view. For Father I. Th. Eschmann12 it is just as obvious that the most fundamental position of the personalism I attack is beyond a doubt that of M. Maritain. As for my own position, it is “manifest error.” He does not

in the least hesitate to say, that from the point of view of the littera Sancti Thomae this book is a danger to every reader who has neither the time nor the sufficient training to discover for himself, in a problem of extreme subtlety, the genuine Thomistic truth. (DM, 204)

If that were true, my case would be sad enough. But there is much worse than that.

If they [Professor De K.’s doctrine and arguments] were true, then the personalists, and with them all the Christian Fathers and theologians and philosophers, should close their shops, go home and do penance, in cinere et cilicio, for having grossly erred and misled the Christian world throughout almost two thousand years. (DM, 189)

Let the reader be reminded of the sixth and seventh loci theologici to realize the predicament Father Eschmann has placed me in. And if such is indeed the case, the unshakable assurance and uninhibited violence of his article13 are quite understandable. Indeed one might even understand its sneering and irony if I actually used the facile device and the absurd or dishonest methods which Father Eschmann lays to my charge:

Will it be granted that it is inadmissible to read St. Thomas with scissors and paste, by cutting the texts out of their literary and historical context and just quoting what, in a particular instance, seems to be suitable? Will it be granted that, if St. Thomas has explicitly stated and solved a given problem, a Thomist worthy of that name is obliged to take account of this fact and can not afford to refer to some other texts which either have nothing to do with the problem or, at best, refer to it in a distant and mediate fashion? (DM, 189–90)

My Opponent is not just making rash statements. The criterion he uses to defend the manifest truth of the position I attack is, as he frequently repeats, the littera Sancti Thomae.

On page 187, my Opponent has inserted a note of a personal character, which should add to the weight of his denunciation.

. . . I have the privilege to regard both Jacques Maritain and Charles De Koninck as dear friends. The job, therefore, of examining and determining the truth of their respective positions is very painful to me. (n. 9)

Since in spite of this protestation he discharges himself of his obligation with unconcealable gusto, it must be that Father Eschmann—who was for several years a professor in the Collegio Angelico, Rome, who taught at Laval University, Quebec, who is engaged at the Institut d’Etudes médiévales Albert-le-Grand of the University of Montreal, and is now a member of the staff of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto—is entirely confident the position I attack is very definitely that of Jacques Maritain, that this position is true, and that my own is a very dangerous one indeed.

Why did I not name M. Maritain? Father Eschmann has a very simple explanation. “The” personalists is

an all too convenient anonymity which permits every attack, and leaves every avenue of retreat wide open. . . . (DM, 184)

Compare now Professor Simon’s judgment of my essay with that of Father Eschmann. Presumably both my critics are especially qualified to judge whether or not my own position concurs with that of Maritain. Professor Simon holds that my doctrine is true, that the personalist positions I attack are vicious stupidities and monstrosities and that the net effect of letting the reader believe my essay is aimed at Maritain resembles that which could have been brought about by plain calumny. Father Eschmann feels “obliged totally and categorically to reject De K.’s thesis” (DM, 187, n. 9) which, at one point, he claims is opposed to all the Christian Fathers, theologians, and philosophers; he emphatically maintains that the doctrine I attack and he defends is that of Maritain; that “the personalists” is but a cowardly device “which permits every attack, and leaves every avenue of retreat wide open.”

How is it then, that of these two critics, both especially qualified and presumably well acquainted with the writings of Jacques Maritain, the one can feel utterly confident that the latter is, while the other can feel quite as confident he definitely is not the true adversary at whom was directed La primauté du bien commun contre les personnalistes? Who is to blame for these contradictory judgments?

Has it occurred to anyone that I may have foreseen this very situation including the criticisms that would be heaped upon me? Or has it occurred to anyone that if

[t]he problem of Person and Society in the philosophy of St. Thomas, for many years past a favorite topic among European Thomists, has recently become an acute question on the continent of North America, owing, in no small measure, to the publication by the Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at Laval University, Quebec, Professor Charles De Koninck, of a book entitled De la primauté du bien commun contre les personnalistes. Le principe de I’ordre nouveau. (DM, 183);

and if Jacques Maritain is so very obviously implicated in this debate, that Jacques Maritain is still among the living and may be presumed able to speak for himself?

But let us suppose that Jacques Maritain has spoken clearly and consistently on this subject (a supposition hardly reconcilable with the contradictory judgments of Father Eschmann and of Professor Simon), that he has treated it in philosophical fashion, and that he really is the main target of my essay against the personalists. Could I have no justifiable reason for that failure to name my adversary which Father Eschmann calls “anonymity”? My Opponent cannot imagine any but this: “The” personalists is “an all too convenient anonymity which permits every attack, and leaves every avenue of retreat wide open” and this notwithstanding that in the same moment he finds the personalism I attack so very plainly and inescapably that “represented most prominently by Jacques Maritain” as to deprive my guilty anonymity of any sensible motive whatever (DM, 184).

The reader is acquainted with certain polemical Opuscula, such as the De Aeternitate mundi contra murmurantes, or the De Unitate intellectus contra averroistas parisienses. Of these works we may surely say that they too

comprise more than their objective, abstract content, more than the mere words in which they are written. They embrace all the circumstances of time, place, and occasion with which their publication is surrounded. (DM, 184)

Yet who are these anonymous Murmurantes who lay claim to such subtlety in perceiving contradictions, “as if they alone were men and wisdom born with them?”14 Did St. Thomas resort to “the” Parisian Averroists as to a convenient anonymity which permits every attack, and leaves every avenue of retreat wide open? Who speaks “in angulis and before young people who cannot judge of such difficult matters”?15 That he intended to attack Siger of Brabant is susceptible of strict proof.

Indeed the circumstances of writing and publication are contingent. More than that, they are the very own circumstances of the writer himself, the contingentia, variabilia, inenarrabilia of human actions. That is why they should be left to the inalienable prudential judgment of the individual person. Has it occurred to my Opponent that there are circumstances, even of my public action, which he does not know and which are most certainly none of his concern? Can he conceive of no circumstances in which he might be right in attacking an anonymous adversary, or in which he might even do so anonymously? If, in some given instance, Father Eschmann might say what he thinks I should have done, he cannot tyrannically impose his judgment of what I should do as the ultimate norm of my own. But it has pleased him to grant me only one motive. Qualis unusquisque est, talis ei finis videtur.

We have all heard the story of the thief who in order to distract the attention of the people about him, cried Thief! Thief! Everyone looked the other way, and so forth. But there is also the saying that “you can’t fool all the people all the time.” It will soon be clear that the Thief! Thief! device, quite unconsciously, I believe, is the keynote to my Opponent’s whole article In Defense of Maritain.

Who would suspect Father Eschmann of himself exemplifying that very subterfuge of “convenient anonymity” which he lays to my charge, and in the very section of his article in which he brands anonymity as permitting every attack and leaving every avenue of retreat wide open? Is it possible that the person he names is at the same time made the target for an adversary unnamed? That he also has in min...