Oxford Scholarship Online: Ressourcement: A Movement For Renewal in Twentieth-Century Catholic Theology

Gilson and the Ressourcement
University Press Scholarship Online

Oxford Scholarship Online
Ressourcement: A Movement for Renewal in

Twentieth-Century Catholic Theology
Gabriel Flynn and Paul D. Murray
Print publication date: 2011

Print ISBN-13: 9780199552870
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2012
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199552870.001.0001

Francesca Aran Murphy
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199552870.003.0004
Abstract and Keywords
Gilson belongs to an older generation than the ressourcement

writers. He differs from the ressourcement thinkers in being
more of a Thomist than an Augustinian, and he understood
this distinction to mean that metaphysical truth is the ground
of the ethical good (and not vice versa). But simultaneously,
Gilson contributed to the ressourcement by the concrete and
vital conception of truth which he claimed to find in St.
Thomas. His promulgation of ‘Christian philosophy’ also
enabled him to highlight the Augustinian, theologically biased,
elements in Thomas's thought. Gilson's proximity to what is
best in the ressourcement is indicated by what he has in
common with Newman: a preference for the real and the
concrete over notional and merely grammatical truth.
Keywords: Gilson, Newman, Thomism, ressourcement, Augustine, truth, formal,

notional, real assent, Christian philosophy
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Introduction: Did Gilson Belong to the

Ressourcement?
Clio, the muse of historians, would remind us that the dates
tell against it. Étienne Gilson (1884–1978) fought in the Great
War: of the ressourcement figures, only Henri de Lubac (1896–
1991) shares this distinction. Gilson was closer to the
generation of Réginald Garrigou‐Lagrange, OP (1877–1964).
When de Lubac entered the Jesuit scholasticate on Jersey,
Gilson was an ‘old master’, the 2nd edition of Le Thomisme
(1922) locked in a ‘bookcase…under the category marked
“Modern Philosophy” ’.1 The political turmoils culminating in
the Second World War and the problems of post‐war
Catholicism shaped the appreciation of the need for
ressourcement in Yves Marie‐Joseph Congar (1904–95), Jean
Daniélou (1905–74), Henri Bouillard (1908–81), and Hans Urs
von Balthasar (1905–88). Steering close to the post‐war
French winds in his 1956 Habilitationsschrift on Bonaventure,
late arrivals like Joseph Ratzinger (1927–) could take Gilson's
pioneering expansion of the range of medieval thought for
granted.2 But not even Gilson's friend Marie‐Dominique
Chenu, OP (1895–1990) had witnessed the Modernist drama at
first hand as Gilson had; only Garrigou‐Lagrange shares this
distinction. A ‘medievalist of the first rank’ by 1913,3 Gilson
wrote Le Thomisme (1914/1919) during the ‘Loisy crisis’.
The recovery of the Greek Fathers informed the change which

the Jesuit theologians desired. For Gilson, patristics meant
Augustine. In the 1930s he refused ‘to engage in a new
crusade for the Défence de l'Occident’ ‘because I am (p.52) a
Thomist’ and in the 1960s he denied that there is anything
‘ “Western” about Saint Thomas’s writings. Not only are they
packed with the Eastern Fathers, but their spiritual home is
Jesus Christ, born in “Bethlehem”.’4
Though Gilson recognized that the church was in trouble after

World War II, and though his writings have a theological
stamp, no book of his carries an imprimatur. Though he
argued from 1914 until 1978 that Thomas Aquinas was a
theologian, Gilson did so as a historian and philosopher.
Though he told a dying soldier in 1916 that Albert the Great
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argued that laymen can hear confession in extremis,5 Gilson

had a modest conception of the role of lay people in theology.
He compared the act of transfiguring ‘philosophy into
theology’ to ‘chang[ing] water into wine’.6 It sounds like a gift
an office‐holder would exercise. Contrary to the
ressourcement clerics, Gilson was not driven by a need to alter
the practice of theology.
Most sharply, the divergence between the Jesuit and

Dominican ressourcement leaders and Gilson lay in their
respective evaluations of action. Daniélou claimed in 1946 that
the time for ‘theoretical speculation separated from action and
disengaged from life’ is over.7 Having objected to the
separation between theology and ‘pastoral practice’ since the
1930s, having been prevented from exercising medieval
scholarship by Garrigou‐Lagrange and helping the worker‐
priests instead in the 1950s, Chenu observed in 1965 that, ‘to
be a theologian really means not to be cut off from the daily,
concrete life of the Church’.8 Two years later, Gilson stated
that the ‘disorder’ which ‘invades Christianity…today…will not
cease until Dogmatics retrieves its natural primacy over the
practical’.9
For his part, Garrigou‐Lagrange had reacted to Daniélou's

1946 shot across the Thomist bows by describing the
‘substitution’ of action for theory as a redefinition ‘of truth, no
longer adaequatio rei et intellectus but conformitatis mentis et
vitae’. He traced the source of the idea that truth is ‘the
conformity of the judgement with the exigencies of action’ to
Maurice Blondel's writings of 1906.10 Similarly, Gilson's
objection went back to the turn of the century too, when
Charles Maurras put the ‘action’ into Action française. Unlike
Garrigou‐Lagrange, Gilson extended his objections to ‘Action’
even to politics, noting how peculiar it was that ‘a master in
theology belonging to the order of Saint (p.53) Dominic…was
able in conscience to sustain the notion that the “best political
regime” defended by Charles Maurras was the same as that
taught by saint Thomas’.11 Encouraged by observation of the
prioritizing of action over theory in European fascism, Gilson's
commitment to theory marked his preference for Thomas over
Augustine. He begins his book on Augustine by defining him as
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a thinker who ‘regarded philosophy as something…different

from the speculative pursuit of a knowledge of nature’:
Augustine's ‘metaphysics’, he says, ‘rests on an ethics’.12 So
far as the ressourcement foregrounded doing over being,
Gilson thought they were mistaken.
At the same time, this difference precisely marks where Gilson

made his contribution to the ressourcement, the point where
their confluence enabled the ressourcement to be a theology
which endures. For Gilson, it is not the abstract logic of the
method for demonstrating and accumulating truths which
counts, it is the seizure, in judgement, of the res, the thing.
For Garrigou‐Lagrange, what matters in Thomas’s definition of
truth as the adequation of thing and intellect is the formal
principle: the logic of the method is precisely what is at stake
in his defence of truth. He used Thomas’s definition of truth as
a formal methodological principle, developing a metaphysics
of essences, which left him ill‐placed to influence the
Blondelians other than by the traditional methods of the Index,
barring from teaching, and so on. In contrast, Gilson used
Thomist theology as a way of knowing and speaking about
existent realities. He reacted fiercely to those scholastics who
imposed a formalist bias on Thomas’s thought, noting, for
instance, that Thomas never used the term ‘principle of non‐
contradiction’, central to the Thomism of Sanseverino and
Garrigou‐Lagrange.13 Gilson's aversion to the Thomism of the
commentators expressed well the sentiment of many
ressourcement theologians:14 but he was more than one of a
chorus proclaiming that the commentators have served ‘to
emasculate’ Thomas’s ‘doctrine and to make of his theology a
brew of watered‐down philosophia aristotelico‐thomistica’.15
Distinguishing Gilson's approach was an aesthetic decision to
present Thomism as an artistic theology, anchored in sensory
appreciation of existence.
When he first banged his head on Descartes’s Meditations, in

1903, the most ‘obstinate’ of efforts left Gilson without
‘illumination’: ‘Without my knowing it, I already suffered that
incurable metaphysical malady which is “chosisme”.’ The
disease of ‘chosisme’ or thingism renders the victim ‘incapable
of comprehending that anyone could speak of an object which
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is neither an object nor (p.54) conceived in relation to an

16
object’. Because he could not write about Thomas Aquinas
without knowing him to be an ‘object’ in space and time, a
historical personality, Gilson endeavoured to present Thomism
as true without presenting it as a timeless perennial wisdom
with only a contingent connection to the revelation of Christ
and historical ecclesial tradition. By disassociating Thomas
from scholastic formalism, Gilson enabled a generation with
different intellectual appetites to his own to harbour a certain
Thomism within their Augustinianism or Blondelianism. Gilson
led the ressourcement leaders back to the factual, historical
Thomas. He thereby enabled men like Chenu and de Lubac to
incline their interest in a philosophy of ‘action’ towards
Thomas’s ‘theorism’ and so ensured that they would not suffer
the fate of being required to subscribe to a Thomism
committed to a formalist conception of ‘truth’, resistant to
being and reality.
Thomism and The Modernist Drama

On his own testimony, Alfred Loisy learned in his seminary to
understand truth in a logical rather than realistic manner, that
is, in a way which excluded contingency and temporality.17
This was a drawback when, as a scholar of historical‐biblical
criticism, he had to account for temporally indexed changes
within the Old Testament, and when he surveyed the
developments which seemed to him to separate Jesus’
preaching from the doctrines of the church. How are Jesus’
Gospel and church doctrine related if each is timelessly
complete in its truth, but non‐identical? Landed with the
problem of the temporal ‘relativity’ of Christian doctrine, Loisy
solved it by equating tradition with an evolution, by claiming
that doctrines evolve, from germ to seed to perpetually
growing tree. In 1895, when ‘important exegetical work’ had
‘already…brought him problems’, his reading of Newman led
him to articulate the ‘idea [of doctrinal development] which…
enabled him to reconcile this relativism with his faith’.
Though Loisy imagined that his adaptation of Newman's

theory ‘preserved history from theological control and
theology from the danger of history’,18 Pius X thought
otherwise, and rightly, since Loisy inadmissibly made dogma a
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product of historical change. However inadvertently, Loisy

promoted the historicism which remained Garrigou‐Lagrange's
bugbear for the next sixty years. Loisy had a real dilemma: if,
as the scholasticism he had assimilated indicated, truth is only
a principle of judgement, there is no way doctrine can (p.55)
‘evolve’ without its truth evolving too. If truth is not conceived

as creative or active in the judging event, and if the discovery
of doctrinal change tarnishes doctrines’ ‘timelessness’, truth
will be taken to be created by the flow of time. Historicism is
an inevitable outcome of combining a passive, essentialist idea
of truth with the actual historicity of doctrine.
Prior to the First World War, the young Gilson inhabited ‘peri‐
modernist’ circles.19 He felt a sympathy for Loisy right down
until reading an essay by Henri Gouhier in 1963 contrasting
Bergson and Loisy.20 Gouhier observes that for Loisy, Christ's
message is mobile, moving in time, whereas, if Bergson had
written L'Évangile et l'église, he would have described Christ's
teaching as mobilizing,21 that is, driving time creatively before
it, absorbing and changing it, bringing the times into
‘adequation’ with its truth. Just as for Gouhier a Bergsonian
rather than ‘scholastic’ Loisy would have enabled revealed
truth to mobilize the development of doctrines, so, in Gilson's
conception of the relation of philosophy to theology,
philosophy is the (relatively) relative and temporally indexed
partner, and theology creatively regenerating it, into timeless
truth. In the first edition of Le Thomisme, Gilson maintained
that ‘One can isolate the philosophy from the theology in Saint
Thomas’ system dogmatically, but one cannot isolate them
historically. This system of the world is born in and of
theology; its plan and its content never allows us completely to
forget its origin.’ Thomas’s ‘philosophical demonstrations’ are
given their aim by ‘a theological plan and…theological ends’.22
‘Christian Philosophy’
These early formulations of Gilson's are moving towards
claiming that a Christian's philosophy is mobilized by theology,
but they have yet to arrive there. The ‘theological ends’ are
not yet given a very productive role. In his early books on
Thomas and Bonaventure, Gilson describes their systems as
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the philosophies of Christians, not as Christian philosophies.

When he states that no one had thought about Christian
Philosophy during the Modernist crisis, Gilson includes himself
in this oversight. He had started his career intending to
undermine the prevalent conception in French universities
that no philosophical advances occurred between the ancient
Greeks and Descartes. He thought he had (p.56) shown in his
doctoral dissertation (‘La liberté chez Descartes et la
théologie’, 1913) that Descartes did not invent his conception
of God as a free, all‐powerful Creator, or take it from Aristotle.
Descartes drew his idea of God from philosophers who were
Christians, and hence, Gilson believed he could prove, a
philosophy lived amongst the medieval schoolmen. He
proceeded to write books detailing the philosophies of Aquinas
and Bonaventure. He was taken aback when a Dominican
reviewer, Gabriel Théry, pointed out that Aquinas’ work was
as much a theology as Bonaventure's: Gilson realized that, as a
‘young professor’, he had been one of those ‘historians,
philosophers and theologians’ who are ‘deterred’ from ‘calling
theology what they prefer to name philosophy’ by imagining
that ‘the notion of theology excludes that of philosophy’.23
It was in the controversy over Christian philosophy, in 1929–

33, conducted on public platforms in Paris and Aberdeen, that
his professional personae, and his faith and spirituality first
evidently chanted in unison. Marie‐Dominique Chenu called
The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy Gilson's ‘most beautiful
book’.24 In depicting the Spirit, or life‐giving force, of all
medieval philosophy, from Athenagoras to Duns Scotus, Gilson
aims to show that, in each of the Christian thinkers,
‘revelation generates reason’.25 Faith mobilizes reason, not
extrinsically, but from within. As a historian, against those
who denied that faith can influence reason, Gilson argued that
the ‘reality’ of medieval Christian philosophies, substantially
different from their non‐Christian precursors and
contemporaries, disproves their theory.26 His own account
gives the credit to the historian's Muse: ‘We owe the
rediscovery of the notion’ of Christian philosophy to ‘Clio’, he
claimed, that is, to his having been inspired to use the Gifford
Lectures of 1931–2 to show that what Anselm, Aquinas, and
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Bonaventure have in common is the Christian spirit of their

thinking.27
The scholars stimulated by Aeterni Patris had tended to

present ‘Medieval Men’ as participating in a single,
undifferentiated ‘Medieval Thought’. It was Gilson's great
contribution to show that that the idea of a ‘common
Scholastic doctrinal synthesis’ was an ahistorical myth.28 With
this, the genius of The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy is its
inclusiveness.
Maritain defended a more limited notion of Christian

philosophy in these debates, backing up behind only a moral
impact of faith upon reason. For (p.57) Maritain, as de Lubac
put it, ‘it is in the men who philosophize that something has
changed, not in the philosophy’.29 For Gilson, the change is
ontological. Faith, as he saw it, stimulated all of the Christian
philosophers to philosophical realism, including simple
empiricism. For Maritain, Bergson's weakness lay in
remaining at the level of ‘integral empiricism’, whereas Gilson
‘found empiricism in Saint Thomas’ and ‘recognized in
authentic Augustinism “a consistent psychological
empiricism”.’30 For Gilson, Augustine uses revelation, not only
as a theological premise, but also ‘as a source of light for his
reason’, as a ‘Christian philosopher’.31
For his contemporary Thomists, proud of their epistemological

realism, the drawback to Augustine's epistemology was its
apparent ‘Platonism’. Gilson endeavoured both to exempt
Augustine from the aura of non‐realist illuminationism which
Descartes and the nineteenth‐century Ontologists had
attached to him, and to show that Augustine deployed
metaphysical realism in exploring his congenial territory of the
soul, individual persons, and history. The presentation of
Augustine, Anselm, and Bonaventure in The Spirit of
Mediaeval Philosophy is not just a debater's ploy. It is based in
a carefully prepared interpretation of realism as the bond
uniting the Christian philosophers as a whole, sufficiently
elastic to include a realism of the historical individual (the
Augustinians) and a realism of the universal (the Thomists).
This rehabilitation of the ‘Augustinian family’ as realists
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enabled the ressourcement leaders of the 1950s to exercise

their preference for Augustine, whilst excising any tendency
they may have had to interpret Augustine in an unduly
‘spiritualising’ way. More generally, Gilson's work, pre‐
eminently so in his masterpiece, The Spirit of Christian
Philosophy, set the stage for how Chenu, de Lubac, and
Daniélou conceived of the unity of faith and philosophy.32
Gilson and the Nouvelle Théologie Crisis (1950)

Daniélou spoke of the ‘masterpiece’ in an article
simultaneously congratulating Gilson upon his 1947 reception
into the Académie française and canvassing him for the
ressourcement cause: in addition to influencing historians of
(p.58) philosophy, ‘Gilson has also exercised a seminal
influence on theological thought’ by showing ‘that mediaeval
philosophy comprehends diverse systems which are equally
orthodox’. The editor of Sources chrétiennes was using the
inclusivism of The Spirit to argue that, far from being
restricted to a narrow Thomist orthodoxy, Christian
philosophy ‘consists in a collection of specific positions which
taken together as a whole system can call itself Christian’.33
Gilson did not, however, welcome being publically press‐
ganged into serving Daniélou's ends.
In 1950, Humani Generis brought the conflict between

Thomists and the nouvelle théologie to a head. The idea is
abroad, the encyclical notes, ‘that the history of dogmas
consists in the reporting of the various forms in which
revealed truth has been clothed, forms that have succeeded
one another in accordance with the different teachings and
opinions that have arisen over the course of the centuries’ (HG
§ 15). People surmised that Garrigou‐Lagrange was behind
this. The encyclical's analysis of current theological trends
reflects his assertion of 1946 that the nouvelle théologie was
speeding ‘toward modernism’. Taking issue with Henri
Bouillard's efforts to extract Thomas’s theology of grace from
the ancient ‘Aristotelian notions’, such as form and formal
causality, in which is cast, Garrigou‐Lagrange argued that,
though Trent ‘did not canonise the Aristotelian notion of
form…it approved it as a stable, human idea’.34
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In the summer of 1950, Gilson discussed the problem in letters

to M.‐Michel Labourdette, OP, editor of the Revue thomiste.
Labourdette had also been suborned into the conflict (in this
case, by Garrigou‐Lagrange), and like Gilson had refused to
play ball. For Gilson, the problem was that using philosophy
does indeed invite historical ‘contingency’ into theology; the
solution was a ‘sort of symbiosis’ between the two, enabling
their mutual illumination. The way in which we explain a
doctrine makes it believable to us, and, simultaneously, we are
enabled to give it some cogency by dint of our belief in it. It is
neither an unchangeable ‘foundation’ (Garrigou‐Lagrange) for
doctrine nor its changeable ‘husk’ (Bouillard).
Garrigou‐Lagrange did not attempt to dragoon Gilson as an

ally. Instead, at the close of the first Scotist Congress, he
accused Gilson of reducing metaphysics to an ‘adventure, a
story told for fun’ and threatened to criticize his heresies from
the podium at the Thomist Congress.35 Gilson responded so
resiliently that the bully backed off.36
(p.59) Gilson and Garrigou‐Lagrange had one thing in

common: both interpreted the current ‘crisis’ in relation to the
Modernist drama. Gilson's thinking had continued to live and
grow since 1905. His paper for the Thomist Congress is about
the relation between what is time‐bound in Christian thinking,
and what is eternal. He accepts that all scholastic thought is
defined by philosophical ‘master theses’, like ‘[a]ct and
potency, form and matter’, the four Aristotelian ‘causes’: ‘But
if this were the whole truth’, Gilson claimed, ‘the Christian
Middle Ages remained philosophically sterile and…did no
more than repeat ad nauseam a more or less deformed
Aristotle.’ In fact though, the ‘master theses’ of scholastic
reasoning, its philosophical ideas, become consubstantial with
the light that illuminates them.
Viewing the positions of Garrigou‐Lagrange and Bouillard as

two sides of the same coin, Gilson rejects their shared anxiety
that someone must act to shore up theology in either an
ancient or an updated foundation. ‘To those who request a
new Scholastic theology, founded on modern philosophy’, like
Bouillard, ‘there are others’, Gilson affirmed, ‘who reply that
there is only one true philosophy, which is that of Aristotle,
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and that it is because Scholastic theology is founded on this

true philosophy that it is itself true.’ But theology is not
founded on any philosophical practice. Philosophically an
unswerving Thomist, Gilson follows out the logic of his anti‐
foundationalism to the extent of claiming that a plurality of
philosophies can be engendered by faith: ‘neither Duns Scotus
nor St. Thomas Aquinas founded their theologies on any
philosophy…As theologians, they have made use of philosophy
within the light of faith; and it is from this usage that
philosophy has come forth transformed.37 The formulas are
Aristotle's; the philosophical notions are new, created by the
truth of doctrine.
Gilson and Newman

Gilson terrified the philosophers with his commanding finale:
‘Scholastic philosophy must return to theology!’38 The
injunction is impossibly restrictive, if one imagines that Gilson
was speaking as a philosopher, as he was best known for
doing.39
A different interpretation appears in the light of Gilson's 1954

introduction to Newman's ‘epoch‐making contribution to the
history of Christian thought’, (p.60) Grammar of Assent.40
Gilson first wrote about Newman as the debate about the
ressourcement played itself out. Though he notes the
objections generated by Newman's distinction between ‘the
notional assent given by the mind to theology’, that is, to the
science of faith, ‘and the real assent which the same mind
gives to the truth of religion’, that is to its dogmatic articles,
Gilson does not dissent from it.41 The articles of faith and the
science of faith are distinct: the ‘symbiosis’ which exists
between them in the mind of the Christian philosopher and
theologian can generate a plurality of philosophies and
theologies, indeed, must do so, for Gilson, since as Being and
Some Philosophers argues, every existent entity is individual,
including those entities we call Christian philosophers.42
Whereas the genius of the Spirit is to harmonize the Christian
philosophers, the lonelier genius of L'être et l'essence is to
point out their individuality and variegation. From opposite
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angles, both are necessary to a genuine ressourcement of

Christian thought.
This clarifies the meaning of Gilson's imperative. He does not

mean that scholastic philosophy should be theology, a science
of faith, but that it should take its life from theology, from the
articles of faith. As ‘Newman conceives it…theology exercises
a necessary…function, but this function is different from that
of religion’.43 In Gilson's understanding, the Grammar is not
about theology—the ‘notional’ explication of the articles of
faith—but about the articles themselves, the ever ‘real’ and
‘particular’ dogmas of Christian religion.
Gilson describes Newman, born an Anglican, as bringing to

the Catholic Church ‘a more purely patristic intellectual
formation than would have been the case’ if he had received a
scholastic training like Loisy's: ‘owing to him, the great
theological style of the Fathers has been worthily revived in
the nineteenth century’.44 So, on the one hand, Gilson's
injunction to scholastic philosophers to ‘return to theology!’
meant to return to the sources, the biblical dogmas. But on the
other hand, he saw it as advantageous that Newman's
philosophical theology had a ‘theological formation’ which
‘owed little to the scholastics’.45
For Newman and Gilson alike, dogma and its truth is not an
abstract principle by which theology regulates itself but a
concrete and active event. It acts as the sacraments of the
church act. As Schmitz points out, Gilson's ‘early and
continuing experience of sacramental realities helped him to
shape his sense of the concrete…Through the sacraments [he]
entered into the presence of a spiritual reality in which the
drama of the very life of the divine (p.61) persons is made
manifest by the bodies which signify their grace.’46 At his first
communion, the child knows nothing of the theological theory
of ‘transubstantiation…but his piety toward the eucharist does
not mistake its object’: the real ontological event precedes our
intellectual appropriations of it.47 Just as the Parisian cradle‐
Catholic illustrates the electrifying force of dogma from the
child's religious initiation, so the English adult convert puts
before us the rituals of Christmas, Epiphany, and, especially,
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Corpus Christi to show how Dogma acts: ‘Are’ these festivals,

each of them a living commentary on the words, ‘The Son is
God’ ‘addressed to the pure intellect, or to the imagination?’
Newman asks, ‘[Do] they interest our logical faculty, or excite
our devotion? Why is it that personally we find ourselves so ill‐
fitted to take part in them, except that…in our case the dogma
is far too much a theological notion, far too little an image
living within us?’48
A sacramental perception of created reality as radiating

electricity from an uncreated source runs through Gilson's
existential Thomism. Whatever its theoretical truth, any
philosophical notion created to explicate the articles of faith is
only a human reflection of their energy. The basic example of
a sacrament is baptism: ‘held in the baptismal font, the baby
passively receives a sacrament which decides his future for
him in time and in eternity’ and is none the less ‘engagé’.49
Anti‐Pelagianism lies behind Gilson's conviction that dogma
acts before we think about it.
As Gilson notes, the ‘assent’ of which Newman speaks ‘is the

one which faith gives to religious truth, that is, such an assent
whose nature is so absolute that its own certitude…is far
stronger than that of all the motives of credibility by which it
may have been prepared’.50 Whether as a child, an adult, or a
‘professional’, anyone who adheres to the articles of faith
performs the primary act from which theology flows by being
enabled, by God, to participate in him. The ‘articles of faith’,
as believed by us, do not exhibit the truth of our judgements,
but of the ‘Judge’, whose Truth measures ours: ‘I know
through my reason that there is a God, but this certitude is not
for me that of my own knowledge. In telling me himself that he
exists and in inviting me to believe his word, God offers me to
partake in the knowledge which he himself has of his own
existence. This is not just information, it is an invitation.’
Thus, the 1885 Catechism of Meaux, which begins, ‘The first

truth we must believe is that there is a God and that He is
one’, goes on, ‘I believe that there is a God because he has
revealed his existence to us’; and only then states that reason
tells us there is a God, for otherwise, heaven and earth would
not exist. By contrast, the 1923 Paris Catechism begins by
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asking whether we can ‘know (p.62) God in a certain manner’.

By the time the 1949 Catechism of Tours was circulated, the
first article has been reduced to, ‘I believe in God because
nothing can create itself by itself.’ Pastorally disastrous, since
the child will eventually realize its faith is based on a ‘pseudo‐
philosophy’, the development is equally inauspicious
theologically. ‘The God of rational certitude…comes before
that of revelation.’51 In a pointed study of the first article of
the first question of the Summa Theologiæ, in 1953, Gilson
observed that Thomas maintains that God revealed even the
truths about himself which reason can, in principle, attain, and
he revealed those truths because ‘it was necessary to human
salvation’. Since God ‘wanted to save’ the ‘human species’, not
just a tiny elite of intellectuals, God acted, in history ‘to make
human salvation possible’.52
Gilson insists that Newman was no ‘fideist’, despite his Essay's

concentrating ‘exclusively’ on truths ‘accepted on the strength
of the word of God alone’.53 Gilson complains of being labelled
a ‘fideist’ and barricaded with Vatican I and Sacrorum
Anistitum on occasions when he stated that ‘I believe in the
existence of God.’54 Gilson emphasizes that the assent of faith
draws its ‘unconditionality’ from its object, from the Truth
which activates it.55 Those rationalists ‘who reproach him with
a leaning to fideism or with an ingrained mistrust in the
validity of theological demonstrations’ are ‘irrelevant’
because, for Newman, real assent ‘is an assent to realities’,
‘that is, assent to res’.56 Gilson notes Newman's debt to
‘British empiricism’: ‘apprehension’, the empirically‐minded
Augustinian said, ‘is real in the experimentalist’, because his
‘language expresses things external to us’, not, as with the
‘grammarian’, ‘our own thoughts’, or what is ‘notional’.57
For Gilson, the ‘Patristic and mediaeval thinkers differ from

the ancient Greek philosophers’ because they were different
as persons, and they differed as persons because they had
been made so by the acts of a personal God: ‘the transforming
agency in the history of thought is not’ the evolution of its
notions about God, ‘but a divine event’. All of the Thomists of
his generation were formally or notionally realists, but Gilson's
‘defence of the sensible’ was ‘in the service…of a philosophy of
Page 14 of 21
the concrete, i.e., of the concrete make up of individual beings,

some of which include spiritual reality in their make‐up’.58
The metaphysical image governing this existential philosophy
is the individuality of the personal act. It calls for a
‘phenomenology’ like that of Newman.59 Our notional acts, our
abstract thinking, that apparent exercise of our own
minds, Newman says, are what we have in common with
(p.63) others, whereas our ‘real’ thinking, which submits us to
forcible external impressions, ‘by bringing facts home’ to us

‘as their motive causes’, ‘are of a personal character, each
individual having his own’.60 Moreover, ‘the images in which…
[r]eal assent…[or] [b]elief…lives…have the power of the
concrete upon the affections and passions, and by means of
these indirectly become operative’ and thus ‘lead to action’.61
‘Theology’, Newman affirmed, ‘deals with notional

apprehension, religion with imagination.’ The ‘theology of a
religious imagination’ holds the ‘key’ to ‘that maze of
complicated disorder’ it meets in our world: ‘and thus it gains
a more and more consistent and luminous vision of God from
the most unpromising materials’. Gliding from a priori truth to
truth, the Anglican scholasticism of Samuel Clarke found it
easy to deduce that God's being implies his perfect knowledge,
which implies his Eternity, which entails his Justice, and so on.
‘Ordinarily speaking’, though, Newman suggested, ‘such
deductions do not flow forth, except according as the Image,
presented to us through conscience, on which they depend, is
cherished within us.’ The chain of entailments will not hold
together unless harnessed to the ‘living hold on truths’62
which real assent delivers. ‘Instead of leading us simply to God
as to a terminus’, an authentic Christian philosopher like
Augustine ‘makes use of digression in order to refer us
constantly to him as to a center to which we must return’.63
Gilson thus recalled Thomas’s proposal that theology is to the

‘philosophical disciplines’ as the sensus communis is to the
five senses: ‘The common sense knows….Here is thus a sense
which…can consider a mass of information…which it does not
produce itself, but which it can apprehend, distinguish, and
judge.’64 It is the Image, the total Gestalt supplied by theology,
which gives life and coherence to the philosophies of
Page 15 of 21
Christians. Though both Newman and Gilson distinguished

between notional and real assent, both asserted that the
distinction is not a ‘demarcation’. Both recognized that, in
their time, the splitting asunder of notional and real assent
had been to the detriment of the real. Newman set out to
combat the abstract, Bible ‘religion’ of English Protestantism
he knew, and, Gilson says, the ‘lack of real assent…does not
seem to have grown less common in our own days.…countless
baptized men and women not wholly ignorant of their religion
seem to live, to behave, and to think as though they were
wholly foreign to the truth of Christian dogma. This is the
precise evil which Newman has attempted to define and for
which he has sought a cure in the notion of assent.’65
Gilson not only enabled Augustinians to acknowledge their
kinship with Thomists, he also enabled Thomists (p.64) to be
Augustinians, and hence for the ressourcement to live on in
Thomism until the present day.
Conclusion
Drawing on a submerged baptismal analogy, Gilson compared
scholastic philosophers to submarine creatures: ‘There are
certain fish that live only in warm water. To say that they will
die in cold water is not to deny that they are fish. As for the
fish that, as some insist…, must be made to live in cold water
in order to maintain the purity of their essences, they do not
become true fish, but dead fish.’66 Two generations on from
Gilson, a Bonaventurian theologian, the last living partisan of
the pre‐Vatican II ressourcement, observed that, ‘just as we
cannot learn to swim without water, so we cannot learn
theology without the spiritual praxis in which it lives’.67 What
was at stake in the crises of 1905 and 1950, and of many
spiritual dramas, even in our own time, was not the truth of
deduction, but the truth of real assent.
Notes:
(1) Henri de Lubac (ed.), Letters of Étienne Gilson to Henri de
Lubac, trans. Mary Emily Hamilton (San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 1988), 7–8.
Page 16 of 21
(2) See Ratzinger, Milestones: Memoirs 1927–1977, trans.

Erasmo Leiva‐Merikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998),
108.
(3) Gerald A. McCool, From Unity To Pluralism: The Internal

Evolution of Thomism (New York: Fordham University Press,
1989), 164.
(4) Étienne Gilson, Les tribulations de Sophie (Paris: Vrin,

1967), 47–8.
(5) Laurence K. Shook, Étienne Gilson (Toronto: Pontifical

Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, 1984) 382–3, 66–7,
76: Gilson heard the dying man's confession.
(6) Gilson, Le philosophe et la théologie (Paris: Fayard, 1960),

112.
(7) Daniélou, ‘Les orientations présentes de la pensée

religieuse’, Études, 251 (1946), 5–21 (7).
(8) ‘A conversation with Père Chenu’, Dominicana, 50 (1965),

141; cited in Marcellino D'Ambrosio, ‘Ressourcement theology,
aggiornamento and the hermeneutics of tradition’, Communio,
18 (1991), 530–55 (535).
(9) Gilson, Tribulations, 13.
(10) Garrigou‐Lagrange, ‘La nouvelle théologie où va‐t‐elle?’

Ang, 23 (1946), 126–46 (130, 127), referring to Blondel,
L'Action.
(11) Gilson, Le philosophe, 67.
(12) Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine, trans.

L. E. M. Lynch (London: Golancz, 1961), 3, 24.
(13) Gilson, ‘Les principes et les causes’, RTh 52 (1952), 39–

63.
(14) D'Ambrosio, ‘Ressourcement theology’, 537.
(15) Gilson to de Lubac, July 8, 1956, in Letters, 24.
(16) Gilson, Le philosophe, 23–4.
Page 17 of 21
(17) Alfred Loisy, My Duel with the Vatican: The

Autobiography of a Catholic Modernist, trans. Richard Wilson
Boynton (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968 [French original
1913]), 78.
(18) Henri Gouhier, Études sur l'histoire des idées en France

depuis le XVIIe siècle (Paris: Vrin, 1980), 141–2.
(19) Henry Bars, ‘Gilson et Maritain’, RTh, 7 (1979), 237–71

(260).
(20) Gilson to Gouhier, 19 July 1963, in Géry Prouvost, ‘Lettres

d'Étienne Gilson à Henri Gouhier’, RTh, 94 (1994), 460–78
(473–4).
(21) Gouhier, Études sur l'histoire des idées, 155.
(22) Gilson, Introduction au système de S. Thomas d'Aquin

(Strasbourg: Vix, 1919), 15 and 24–5, citing ST 1a.1. ad2: ‘the
theology of holy teaching differs in kind from that theology
which is ranked as a part of philosophy’. Blackfriars, i.8–9.
(23) Gilson, Le philosophe, 192–3, 97–102, 105–7.
(24) Chenu, ‘L'interprète de Saint Thomas d'Aquin’, in

Monique Couratier (ed.), Étienne Gilson et nous: la philosophie
et son histoire, Bibliothèque d'histoire de la philosophie (Paris:
Vrin, 1980), 43–8 (44–5).
(25) Gilson, in Maurice Blondel et al., ‘La notion de philosophie

chrétienne’, Bulletin de la société française de la philosophie,
31 (1931), 37–93 (39).
(26) Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, The Gifford

Lectures 1931–1932, trans. A. H. C. Downes (London: Sheed &
Ward, 1936), 41.
(28) McCool, From Unity to Pluralism, 170–5.
(29) De Lubac, ‘Sur la philosophie chrétienne: Réflexions à la

suite d'un débat’, NRT, 42 (1936), 225–53 (227); also Maritain,
‘La notion de philosophie chrétienne’, 63.
Page 18 of 21
(30) Bars, ‘Gilson et Maritain’, 257, citing Maritain, De

Bergson à Thomas d'Aquin: essais de métaphysique et de
morale (Paris: Hartmann, 1947), 16; Gilson, ‘L'avenir de la
métaphysique augustinienne’, Revue de Philosophie, 1 (1930),
690–714. The latter appeared in English as ‘The Future of
Augustinian Metaphysics’, trans. Edward Bullough, in A
Monument to St. Augustine (New York: Meridian Books, 1957
(1930)), 289–315.
(31) Gilson, Christian Philosophy of Augustine, 242.
(32) Daniélou, ‘Étienne Gilson à l'Académie’, Études, 251

(1946), 263–4 (264).
(33) Daniélou, ‘Gilson à l'Académie’, 264.
(34) Garrigou‐Lagrange, ‘La nouvelle théologie’, 143, 127–8.
(35) Gilson to Labourdette, 26 September 1950, in Henry

Donneaud (ed.), ‘Correspondance Étienne Gilson–Michel
Labourdette’, RTh, 94 (1994), 479–529 (512).
(36) Fernand van Steenberghen, ‘Un incident révelateur au

congrès thomiste de 1950’, Revue philosophique de Louvain,
86 (1988), 379–90, 381–2.
(37) Gilson, ‘Historical Research and the Future of

Scholasticism’, Modern Schoolman, 29 (1951), 1–10 (7–8).
(38) Gilson, ‘Future’, 8–9.
(39) Serge‐Thomas Bonino, OP, ‘Historiographie de l'école

thomiste: le cas Gilson’, in Serge‐Thomas Bonino (ed.), Saint
Thomas aux XXe siècle, Actes du colloque du Centenaire de la
Revue Thomiste (Paris: Centre National de Livre‐Saint Paul,
1994), 299–313 (310).
(40) Étienne Gilson, ‘Introduction’, in John Henry Newman, An

Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Image Books/Doubleday:
New York, 1955), 9–21 (20).
(41) Gilson, ‘Introduction’, 13.
Page 19 of 21
(42) Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers (Toronto: Pontifical

Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1952 [1949]), 50.
(46) Kenneth L. Schmitz, What has Clio to do with Athena?:

Étienne Gilson, historian and philosopher (Toronto: Pontifical
Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1987), 2.
(48) Newman, Grammar, 122.
(51) Gilson, Le philosophe, 15, 13, 76–8.
(52) Gilson, ‘Note sur le revelabile selon Cajetan’, Medieval

Studies, 15 (1953), 199–206 (200).
(55) Gilson, ‘Introduction’, 12, citing Newman's Grammar, 51–

2.
(57) Newman, Grammar, 37.
(58) Schmitz, Clio, 9, 11.
(60) Newman, Grammar, 31, 82.
(61) Newman, Grammar, 86–7.
(62) Newman, Grammar, 108, 106, 249.
Page 20 of 21
(63) Gilson, Christian Philosophy of Augustine, 236.
(66) Gilson, ‘Future’, 10.
(67) Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology: Building

Stones for a Fundamental Theology, trans. Mary Frances
McCarthy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 322.
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Oxford Scholarship Online: Ressourcement: A Movement For Renewal in Twentieth-Century Catholic Theology

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Gilson and the Ressourcement

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Ressourcement: A Movement for Renewal in

Print publication date: 2011

Gilson and the Ressourcement

Abstract and Keywords

Gilson belongs to an older generation than the ressourcement

Keywords: Gilson, Newman, Thomism, ressourcement, Augustine, truth, formal,

Introduction: Did Gilson Belong to the

The recovery of the Greek Fathers informed the change which

Though Gilson recognized that the church was in trouble after

argued that laymen can hear confession in extremis,5 Gilson

Most sharply, the divergence between the Jesuit and

For his part, Garrigou‐Lagrange had reacted to Daniélou's

a thinker who ‘regarded philosophy as something…different

At the same time, this difference precisely marks where Gilson

When he first banged his head on Descartes’s Meditations, in

is neither an object nor (p.54) conceived in relation to an

Thomism and The Modernist Drama

Though Loisy imagined that his adaptation of Newman's

product of historical change. However inadvertently, Loisy

‘evolve’ without its truth evolving too. If truth is not conceived

the philosophies of Christians, not as Christian philosophies.

It was in the controversy over Christian philosophy, in 1929–

Bonaventure have in common is the Christian spirit of their

The scholars stimulated by Aeterni Patris had tended to

Maritain defended a more limited notion of Christian

For his contemporary Thomists, proud of their epistemological

enabled the ressourcement leaders of the 1950s to exercise

Gilson and the Nouvelle Théologie Crisis (1950)

In 1950, Humani Generis brought the conflict between

In the summer of 1950, Gilson discussed the problem in letters

Garrigou‐Lagrange did not attempt to dragoon Gilson as an

(p.59) Gilson and Garrigou‐Lagrange had one thing in

Viewing the positions of Garrigou‐Lagrange and Bouillard as

and that it is because Scholastic theology is founded on this

Gilson and Newman

A different interpretation appears in the light of Gilson's 1954

angles, both are necessary to a genuine ressourcement of

This clarifies the meaning of Gilson's imperative. He does not

Gilson describes Newman, born an Anglican, as bringing to

Corpus Christi to show how Dogma acts: ‘Are’ these festivals,

A sacramental perception of created reality as radiating

As Gilson notes, the ‘assent’ of which Newman speaks ‘is the

Thus, the 1885 Catechism of Meaux, which begins, ‘The first

asking whether we can ‘know (p.62) God in a certain manner’.

Gilson insists that Newman was no ‘fideist’, despite his Essay's

For Gilson, the ‘Patristic and mediaeval thinkers differ from

the concrete, i.e., of the concrete make up of individual beings,

forcible external impressions, ‘by bringing facts home’ to us

‘Theology’, Newman affirmed, ‘deals with notional

Gilson thus recalled Thomas’s proposal that theology is to the

Christians. Though both Newman and Gilson distinguished

(2) See Ratzinger, Milestones: Memoirs 1927–1977, trans.

(3) Gerald A. McCool, From Unity To Pluralism: The Internal

(4) Étienne Gilson, Les tribulations de Sophie (Paris: Vrin,

(5) Laurence K. Shook, Étienne Gilson (Toronto: Pontifical

(6) Gilson, Le philosophe et la théologie (Paris: Fayard, 1960),

(7) Daniélou, ‘Les orientations présentes de la pensée

(8) ‘A conversation with Père Chenu’, Dominicana, 50 (1965),

(9) Gilson, Tribulations, 13.

(10) Garrigou‐Lagrange, ‘La nouvelle théologie où va‐t‐elle?’

(11) Gilson, Le philosophe, 67.