Gilson

February 21, 2022

The van wouldn’t start after it sat in the driveway for three cold days. Not even a click. In 45 minutes the roadside assistance guy showed up and attached his power box to the battery. I turned the key, the engine chugged to life. “Is that it?” I asked. “That’s it,” he said. “Let it run for a few minutes. Get it checked at Auto Zone,” he said with a wave and drove off.

This held me up from my trip to the Urgent Care to have three staples removed from my head that a nurse inserted last week to close a cut after a fall. Not a hard fall, it could have been worse. Head wounds bleed. I held a damp cloth against it but the blood wouldn’t stop, so I went in to have it looked at. The staples worked and I moved on.

While the cut ached, I sat on the sofa and thought about driving the van last week to a remote mountain park 40 miles from home and outside cell-signal coverage. An orange warning light popped on, I ignored it. The battery could have died out there, in a deserted field, in below-freezing temperatures.

 I massaged my head, recalling the warning light, stunned at my carelessness, my narrow escape. Eventually I excused myself, distracted around 5:30 by the evening sky, which still glowed pale blue beyond the bare branches of the woods at the end of the street. The lawns are still brown, but daylight is arriving earlier and staying later. February is slouching by. Dawn is chilly but the chill fades and by noon the sun is warm.

Gentle afternoons prompt cosmic thoughts, or pretentious ones. Last week Storyworth, the online interview program, asked, “Who inspires you?” Lots of people inspire me, beginning with authentic heroes, those who sacrifice for the welfare of others. So many, some I know, many I don’t know, parents, teachers, healthcare givers, first responders, military personnel, who lay their comfort and safety on the line for the innocent, the weak, those who now are suffering. The suffering are everywhere, coughing and choking in hospitals and nursing homes. Then too, Ukrainians are facing Russian tanks across three borders.

But then: inspiration grows from truth in the world around us. As I wrote for Storyworth, I’m inspired by Etienne Gilson (Gee-SOHN), the French philosopher, born 1884, died 1978, who probed the dense, argumentative thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, as the saint, in his Summa Theologica, confronted the profound problems of human life. His calling was truth.

Gilson was a historian and a philosopher, inevitably the two disciplines merge. Through his inconspicuous but brilliant career he wrote dozens of works of history and philosophy, in prose both simple and beautiful. He taught at the great French universities, Lille, Strasbourg, Paris, the Sorbonne, and at Harvard, Oxford, Toronto, Aberdeen. He explained gently, again and again, that Aquinas (1225-1274) was not just another name on a roster of the big names of Catholicism.

Gilson is there to lead as we stumble over the questions we all eventually ask ourselves: What is truth, what is the meaning of existence? Does God exist? Ultimately, for all of us in early 2022, on the brink of cynicism, disillusionment, depression, the question is: what is the point? Is there a point? Aquinas, through Gilson, has an answer.

Although ordained a humble Dominican priest, Aquinas was driven to study the great crises of history—not the “Catholic” ones, but the crises of humanity that endure to fascinate and torment mankind over 3,000 years or more. He looked to the thought of the giants of Greek philosophy, Aristotle and Plato, whose teachings, in the face of centuries of intellectual assault and indifference still define, more profoundly than any other, our civilization.

I started reading Gilson in 1979 when I picked up The Gilson Reader. My copy now is dogeared and ragged, held together by tape, nearly every line underlined or highlighted, filled with decades-old scribbles. Then in The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, published in 1956, Gilson attacks our cynicism with logic that is both excruciating and relentless. He shows us an end to doubt and ambiguity, as he draws us cordially and patiently into the misty intellectual world of classical metaphysics.

In the first sentences of his first chapter (entitled “Existence and Reality”) of Part I (entitled simply “God”), he asks: “how do we come to grips with the problem of the existence of God? The problem …  presupposes some understanding of what is meant by the verbs ‘to be,’ or ‘to exist.’ … [Aquinas’] concept of the real and of being dominates his metaphysics.”

Aquinas uses the Latin word esse, designating “act-of-being.” In English, esse is translated as “being,” which “comes to us in sense experience.” He then explains that any concept of God must begin with sense understanding, what we perceive in the physical world.

For Gilson, meaning for Aquinas, God is not an abstract concept or an idea, a glib notion of preachers quoting Scripture and promising miracles. He writes, “it is hard to conceive a [philosophy] more fully and more consciously existential than that of St. Thomas Aquinas.” He reminds that esse, like every verb, designates an act, not a state. “Thus understood, the act of existing lies at the very heart of the real. … it is what we shall later call God.” He escorts us through the razor-sharp discipline of Aquinas’ thought, always anchored in existence, a philosophy of optimism and beauty.

I recall digging out my copy of the Reader in grad school, my five years of night classes with kids (actually very smart people) one-third my age. I read and underlined and made it through the M.A. oral exam. Then I moved to other things.

The sun had fallen beneath the woods. For a moment I looked out the front window at the brown grass, already pocked with clumps of weeds. I remembered the next chore, spreading crabgrass killer on the lawn. Then I went out and started the van and let it run for a couple of minutes, just to be sure.