Search Results

This chapter examines the historical dilemmas concerning John Duns Scotus's philosophy and the dilemma of the earliest modern studies in medieval philosophy, which did not acknowledge the phenomenon of medieval philosophy. It discusses the emergence of the so-called historiens croyants, and analyses the relevant views and works of Étienne Henri Gilson and Lambertus Marie de Rijk. The chapter argues that Scotus's work can be considered as the culmination point of a general development in the specific new semantic and logical key of synchronic contingency, which is not the driving force or central inspiration of his work, but the tool the whole of the Christian faith is asking for.

This paper critically examines the ‘Orthodox construction of the West’ to be found in the thought of Vladimir Lossky (1903-1958), and argues that it can only be properly understood against the backcloth of the simultaneous currents of reform in French Catholic thought of the time. What Lossky rejects in the ‘West’ is ironically what these movements for reform also critique; and a key figure in this negotiation is Étienne Gilson (1884–1978), Lossky's thesis advisor. Henri de Lubac, SJ (1896-1991), leader of la nouvelle théologie, then provides the main focus for comparison with Lossky; and their contrastive reception of Dionysius's ‘apophatic’ theology emerges as the lynchpin conjoining, as well as disjoining, the exponents for reform. The thesis is proposed that the respective assessments of ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ theology in Lossky are mutually entangled via his rendition of the Dionysian corpus; but they are also directly connected – more covertly – to his own ‘Western’ location. Lossky's ‘Orthodox construction of the West’, in sum, is a thoroughly ‘Western’ invention, but no less creative for that.

This chapter intends to contribute to the project of facilitating a renewed appreciation of St. Thomas Aquinas's profound teaching on the character of the relation between the natural and the supernatural. First, it surveys the general speculative dimensions of the controversy about the character of the natural desire for God, so closely related to the question of the natural end. Second, it explores in particular the contours of what is believed to be the common error of Henri de Lubac and Etienne Gilson respecting the obediential potency for grace and glory. Third, it argues that de Lubac's account of the natural desire for God, despite its doctrinal deficiency, is rooted in a genuinely profound theological need to overcome the loss of natural order as a theonomic principle. The chapter concludes by observing the protean implications of these issues for the effort to understand, and to transcend, an invertebrate postmodern theological pluralism that itself presupposes the loss of natural order as a theonomic principle.

Thomas Aquinas is the main focus of the next three chapters. This chapter explores how Lacan’s atheism can be read as a response to the challenge of French Thomists such as Étienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, and Henri de Lubac. It analyses Thomas’s understanding of the enigma of the relationship between spirit and matter in the context of the body/soul duality of the human species, and it relates this to his Aristotelian epistemology by way of which he seeks to explain how humans learn to interpret the world in terms of the role of the bodily senses in the formation of the soul, and the participation of all beings in the being of God. It explores the relationship between reason and revelation, grace and nature, and it refers briefly to Thomas’s five ways for explaining the existence of God. It considers the structure of the Summa Theologiae, and in engagement with François Regnault it points to the privileged place of authoritative texts in medieval universities, which would later be challenged by Descartes.

This chapter focuses on Lacan’s Seminar XX, which explores the meaning of being, monotheism, and the soul from the perspective of Étienne Gilson’s Thomism. It explores Lacan’s claim that Christianity is the ‘true religion’ because creation ex nihilo eliminates the sexual copula of Greek ontology, positing the perfect simplicity of the divine creative unity over and against all qualitative or cumulative concepts of the Platonic One. This entails a reappraisal of lack, beyond Aristotelianism, to recognize it as the primordial condition of any being coming to be as other than God. The sexual relationship ceases to be a futile quest for union, and a new possibility of love opens up in the acceptance of mutual lack. The chapter considers Lacan’s account of female mysticism and hysteria as a language of bodily otherness associated with the desire for an unknowable Other associated with God and the mother.

Chapter 2 starts by setting up two oppositions: 1) ontologies vs Ontology, and 2) semantics vs syntax. It surveys different notions of ontologies and objects in computation as well as in philosophy, through the work of Tom Gruber, Barry Smith, Brian Cantwell Smith, Etienne Gilson, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger.

This general editorial introduction to the volume attempts to answer why another book on Christian philosophy is even needed today. J. Aaron Simmons argues that in light of continued debates regarding the relationship between philosophy and theology, it is important to think carefully about the different ways of making sense of philosophical subcategories defined by the particular commitments of the various participants in the debates. In this way, Simmons suggests that the idea of Christian philosophy needs careful historical analysis and hermeneutic evaluation. The introduction then offers a brief history of recent Christian philosophy as a distinct philosophical approach and anticipates the various criticisms that might be leveled against it.