[Another facebook post…]
[This is going to be a bit rambling and ranty…. I hope most of the latter tone was taken out, at least….! I have had thoughts about this affair for going on ten years now. This is all written in a spirit of fraternal brotherhood and _always with a willingness to be called to account in charity._ I was perhaps too flippant at first—who isn’t on social media?...—but the remark was based on thoughts that I have had for years and also somewhat emotionally on the basis of the utter lunacy of claiming that Garrigou is a personalist. Interestingly, too, if people push too much on this, you’ll see that on the application of the somewhat-troublesome person /individual distinction, Garrigou is almost the same as Maritain. I have deep respect for Dr. O’Neill, but I think on this issue that if he performs a “rapprochement” between RGL and CDK he will find, against his liking , that he will drag JM in tow.]
So…. Perhaps… I’ll gladly acknowledge, at least, that I am tougher on De Koninck than perhaps I should be. The whole affair, however, is quite unfortunate in the lineaments of how it unfolded. First and foremost he actually never directly addresses Maritain himself. It’s all by way of insinuation in the original volume, and the very lengthy follow up article (longer than the original book, actually), is a response to Fr. Ignatius Eschmann, whose defense of Maritain is deserving of critique. De Koninck rightly notes the problem concerning how Maritan is basically interpreted two different ways: by Yves Simon as being in substantive agreement with De Koninck (and I think Simon is correct, and ultimately knows Maritain’s thought / writings much better than Eschmann); but by Eschmann as being in disagreement with De Koninck. If nothing else it bears witness to the need for deeper reflection by Maritain.
Now, there were two levels on which I tend to move regarding this affair. First and foremost I think that, completely based upon the text themselves, that one can say that De Koninck never directly addresses _Maritain_ or his own thought. Moreover, he is claimed to have said to Simon privately (as reported in records one can find at the Josais) never to have read Maritain. That’s fine, but then all of his epigones should not act as though he ever wrote against Maritain or Maritain’s articulations. At best, he wrote against one of Maritain’s followers, and not his ablest. I remain unconvinced that there actually is any substantive difference between the Maritain and De Koninck, even if there are (important) nuances of difference. Maritain regularly avers to the primacy of the common good. He relativizes (whether too much or too little, the _general_ point is correct, though I’m more than happy to concede the vestiges of liberalism in him) the political order and the political common good, along the same lines as Aristotle. While one might claim that he denies that the vision of God is a common good, what he actually says is that in this case there no longer is a distinction between the “private” good _as orderable_ to beatitude and the separate common good, which is here no longer separate or distinct in any way but, in fact, actuates the intellect and the will immediately—for in patria the act in question is the divine act elicited in the immediate vision of God, subjectively elevated by the light of glory. Such knowledge and love is the Godhead itself. In another sense, however, as he does note there is a distinction here, insofar as comprehensive knowledge of God (and supernatural love equal to that) is God’s alone.
I will concede that one might wish to push him on aspects of this argument, for fear of a liberal reading of the distinction between the “private” good (an expression itself not without problems) and the “common good.” But a facebook posting is not the best place to try to decide the exact meaning of an author. I would in any case, council that it’s not so simple as to say Maritain = Mounier let alone even more radically personalist folks.
So, the point of this first level is that there never was actual substantive engagement between De Koninck and Maritain. Whatever might be said about the former writing against Eschmann, it is not equivalent to saying that this was an affair that they settled _concerning Maritain himself_. Whoever was at fault for that, it does in any case make the story more complex.
Second, on the issue of the person / individual distinction, I myself have always found this to be a ham-handed way of handling the (very real and important) fact that the _political_ common good does not exhaust the whole good of the human person, even in the natural order – at least according to an Aristotelian conception of things, in which contemplation (granted, of the “separate Common Good”) has primacy. (One could add more here about the relationship between such natural contemplation and, for example, the political order’s own need for religious acts. But, that gets into a different territory.) I thought I had a copy of Fr. Guilbeau’s thesis. (I swore someone gave me a copy of it once upon a time… Not sure if my sleep-deprived mind burped up that thought from nothing…. I wanted to see how deeply he engages with the theme in those upon whom Maritain depends.) In any case, a full and fair study of the topic would require not merely an exact reading of Marie-Benoît Schwalm, OP (from whom it was first taken), but also the many places where Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange himself deploys the distinction, himself actually inspired on the level of what we could call (for lack of better terms…) the theological metaphysics of the Incarnation: in Christ, the individuation of human nature and the Divine Personality of the Word are really distinct. Garrigou discusses it in this register in the following places:
Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Thomistic Common Sense, trans. Matthew K. Minerd (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2020), 288–270, 308
Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, The Trinity and God the Creator, trans. Frederic C. Eckhoff (St. Louis: Herder, 1952), 155-156.
Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Christ: The Savior, trans. Bede Rose (St. Louis: Herder, 1950), 119ff.
Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, De beatitudine (Turin: R. Berruti, 1951), 85-87 and 372.
He makes the exact same political usage as Maritain (again, not lacking the weaknesses that come with this usage, though also not with a denial of the primacy of the common good) in:
Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, “La subordination de l’état à la perfection de la personne humaine selon S. Thomas," Doctor Communis 2-3 (1949): 146-159; in Philosophizing on Faith, ed. and trans. Matthew Minerd (Providence, RI: Cluny Media, 2019), 183–204.
And, if I might add a third level, the attribution of “personalist” to Maritain, though used even by him in the relevant essays, is not at all the same as the personalism of 20th century France. This is somewhat the same tone as one finds in Existence and the Existent, trying to say: we Thomists really have the true existentialism. The labels “personalist Thomist” and “existential Thomist” do more to confuse than illuminate the nature of the approach to Thomism which was that of Maritain. (The latter, for example, would put him and Gilson in the same camp. They most definitely were not......)
So… If nothing else, that is where my frustrations come from.
