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DeKoninck’s Cosmos

Charles De Koninck was born in Belgium in July of 1906, and died in Rome inFebruary of 1965 - he was 58.DeKoninck taught Mr. Berquist, Mr. McArthur, and Mr. Neumayr.Mr. McArthur and Mr. Berquist both said that they entered philosophy because of hearing Dr. DeKoninck lecture.So I think it is fair to say that we would not be here, tonight, without De Koninck.I met De Koninck in some old mimeographs the tutors were reading during mysenior year, and later I found more old class notes in an file cabinet at Notre Dame.When I asked Dr. McInerny where the photocopied class notes came from, he toldme about the Charles DeKoninck archive at the University of Laval. Next thing Iknew, we had decided that I should fly up there and photocopy the whole thing. SoI did, enjoying the hospitality of Thomas DeKoninck, son of Charles, a philosopherhimself who has continued his father’s work, and a very kind gentleman. I spent, Ithink, six 10-hour days, photocopying non-stop, manually, about 10,000 pages of mostly unpublished notes and article drafts. The archive has now been scanned, andis readily available to anyone interested.Dr. Ralph McInerny was another Thomist who studied with De Koninck. And hedevoted himself in the last years of his life to a strenuous effort at producing anEnglish edition of De Koninck’s collected works. Dr. McInerny told us this projectwas motivated by piety, by the strong realization, as he neared the end of his owndays, of what an extraordinary blessing it had been to be a student of De Koninck.In a memoir written several years ago, McInerny recalled his time with De Koninckmore than 50 years before. I want to start by reading a bit from that:"De Koninck once wrote that his ambition was simply to be a faithful student of hismaster Thomas Aquinas. Discipleship seems to have either of two results. Thedisciple never emerges from what the master had accomplished and is content toretail it. Or, and this was the case with De Koninck and other giants of the ThomisticRevival, Thomas was followed because his starting points were the inevitable ones,and by acknowledging and seeing where they led, one could go far beyond the textof the master while at the same time claiming that what one said was simply anorganic extension. It is only in this second way that a tradition can live. AndCharles De Koninck was the liveliest Thomist I have ever known."13

I mention these things, before turning to a sketch of De Koninck’s account of theworld, because I feel a similar duty of piety to De Koninck and to this community.So, for what it is worth, I offer to you my own view that De Koninck is in every wayat the heart of what enables this College to stand in the tradition of living Thomism,and of the intellectual tradition of the Catholic Church. As a College, we should turnto him in gratitude - to his thought, and to the faith and spirit that inform it.What I will principally sketch for you tonight is De Koninck’s account of an adequatephilosophy of the cosmos, as he thought such an account was available to thephilosopher of the 20th century. But first, some more general remarks about thesignificance of that account.While still quite a young man, in his first years at Laval, he wrote a book called“Cosmos.” Let’s notice first what a remarkable thing it was for a man to compose abook with such a title before he was 30 years old. Some might see presumptionhere. I see a confirmation that philosophy must arise from a great and daring loveof wisdom, the kind of love characteristic of the energy of youth.During these same years, in the mid-30’s, DeKoninck taught a class on Nietzsche, inwhich he heaped contempt on those distressed by the force of Nietzsche’saffirmation of will. De Koninck saw in Nietzsche a kind of providential sign of therevolt of nature against the diminished desires of modern man.Nietzsche wanted it all, but didn’t know what that meant. DeKoninck thought thatthe Catholic philosopher ought also to want it all, to want to know the meaning of the whole world, and its goodness. The difference, he believed, was that theCatholic philosopher knew, as a fruit of faith, that the Good itself wants to give itself to us, and that the world we seek to know has something to do with this. TheCatholic philosopher has reason to expect the whole cosmos to be a sign for him, ameans of knowing and loving God.This is the first, and governing, point to make about natural philosophy as DeKoninckunderstood it - to philosophize is to ask about the whole of things, about reality,about the entire world and what it means.DeKoninck loved and mastered the formalities of philosophy, and the distinctionsbetween disciplines, but he never forgot that the divisions of philosophy aresubordinate to the pursuit of Wisdom. The philosopher studies the natural world,from its astonishing details to its mysterious totality, in order that from suchknowledge might arise a wisdom of the source. Natural philosophy, precisely in13

remaining true to itself, seeks to be surpassed by metaphysics, by a knowledge of the immaterial.Inevitably then, the philosopher asks about the cosmos, including the human. Heattends to it in all its dimensions of time and space, the very small and the verylarge, the simple and the complex. Above all, he asks what to make of the wholething, as one thing. Aristotle did so, and Charles De Koninck thought that there wasno good reason for a Catholic philosopher in the 20th century to shy away fromdoing so as well.But while Aristotle could, perhaps, trust hopefully that gazing at the night sky wouldreveal fundamental signs of the causal unity of the cosmos, and trust as well that theordinary experiences of common substances would reveal the unchanging nature of the first material principles, things were a bit more complicated for a philosopher inthe 20th century. Reality had become a rather ungainly, and moving, target forspeculation.In recent centuries, we have become aware that the material cosmos is billions of years old, and of a size that threatens, in my case quite successfully, to overwhelmour capacity to imagine, even to understand; We have discovered that the periodicelements themselves did not exist for hundreds of millions of years, that they wereborn at particular times in the cores of stars, and that those very particles are morelike dances of mathematical energy than Newton’s inert bits of stuff.We have learned as well that life began relatively recently, after billions of years of alifeless cosmos, that the various species of living beings have shown up in a bizarreand glorious pageant, roughly in order from the imperfect to the perfect, over thepast 3 billion years. In what Aristotle thought he saw as a permanent, ordered andcomplete set of living kinds, we now know that we see only the latest living edge of life on earth. Perhaps most startling, we now know that the vast, overwhelmingmajority of kinds of living things that ever existed, are extinct. We wonder whatAristotle could not – whether they lived in vain?The very structures of living things have, in the past century, been revealed to becomplicated and wonderful in ways that compete quite well with more cosmicstunners like 100 billion galaxies. There are new infinites in every direction, withinand without.And man himself, we now see, is embedded organically, mysteriously, in thisamazing world.13

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