Person and Common Good - Or, Why I am Frustrated about the Whole Affair with De Koninck

[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.

Moral Knowledge—Prudential and Philosophical (Yves Simon)

This is a favorite theme for me—one on which I intend to write at length some day.  Maritain has some very similar things to say, and, to be honest, a fair understanding of this matter would help to clarify MUCH in currently controverted discussions of moral matters.  What holds primacy in moral matters is prudence's command—hence, too, the virtues that rectify prudence with regard to the ends to be pursued.  However, we cannot address this here—as well as the important role played by our insight into first moral principles (i.e. synderesis).

In any case, Thomists tend to overlook the fact that moral philosophy is a kind of reflective science—not in the sense that logic is reflective (upon the relationes rationis that are called "second intentions") but in the sense (truly reflective) that moral philosophy reflects upon the scientific ordering found in the warp and woof of MORAL ACTION—its principles and properties.  Speculative knowledge (e.g. natural philosophy, chemistry, biology, pure mathematics, metaphysics, etc.) looks to an order that is independent of the human will (essentially, though perhaps accidentally dependent upon it, as in the case of new molecules created by our technical skills).  Moral philosophy reflects on THE ORDER FOUND IN HUMAN FREEDOM—i.e. the order that has been ordered by prudence (or, alas, imprudence) in the will's elicited and imperated acts.

Okay, now the quotes from Simon, which are very important:

Yves R. Simon, Freedom and Community, ed. Charles P. O’Donnell (New York: Fordham University Press, 1968), 144n13:

As far as action is concerned, what matters primarily is fulfillment, not explanation, and it is within an adherence firm enough to insure fulfillment that the search for explanation must be pursued... The man of practical wisdom well knows that what matters is to do what is right rather than to understand why it is right.  He also knows that what ought to be done is not really done unless it is brought into existence according to the mode proper to a rational agent...  Practical wisdom [i.e. prudence] itself requires that the science of ethics enlightens the minds of men.

On this topic, one should also consult the following in Simon's Practical Knowledge:

• Fulfillment and Explanation (p.26-38)
• Comments on Aristotle's remarks at the beginning of Nicomachean Ethics (p.44-47)
• Comments on prudence and moral science as practical knowledge; but be sure to see remarks noted later on p.70 (p.50-51)
• A very important brief point on p.51: "But moral philosophy does something that no purely theoretical science does.  It is concerned with problems of right and wrong use."  He then goes on in p.52-55 to describe the ways that moral philosophy retains the synthetic character of practical knowledge.
• The sections on p.57-68 carry this forward in a very interesting way, in particular in his discussions on the role of judgment and concept in practical discourse
• On p.69-70, after noting that a right prudential judgment can be speculatively wrong (a theme he uses often but one that can be found in Garrigou-Lagrange, for instance), he notes that moral philosophy is different.  In this, he almost stresses matters to the opposite point of what he has said heretofore: "In moral philosophy, a proposition that fails to agree with the real state of affairs is irretrievably false and bad; there is no redeeming feature in it.  Either it is true or it is false that some acts are wrong by essence and can never be justified.  Either moral virtues are interdependent or they are not.  If they are not, the proposition that they are is philosophically false, bad, misleading, obnoxious in every possible respect.  The truth of moral philosophy is, primarily and purely and simply, a theoretical truth.  It is a relation of conformity between what the intellect asserts or denies and what is really united or separated in the world of things.  [However, here is an important qualification:] But, as already suggested, the theoretical truth of moral philosophy, far from excluding its being true by conformity with right desire, strictly demands that it should enjoy such conformity, which is practical truth.  Consider, again, the proposition that some actions, like jealousy, admit of no just mean because they are wrong by essence.  Such a proposition certainly agrees with right desire, and a man of good character, no matter how ignorant he may be of moral philosophy, will keep away from such actions, and never dream of a moderate does of jealousy which would be the proper mean between excess and defect.  Any proposition of moral philosophy that would not agree with right desire would be immoral and false.  But, within moral philosophy, this truth by agreement with right desire is a pure consequence of theoretical or unqualified truth.  It is not characteristic of moral philosophy; it does not belong to it in strict appropriateness.  Insofar as truth by conformity to the real state of affairs is described as the truth of the theoretical intellect, and truth by conformity to right desire as the truth of the practical intellect, moral philosophy is the work of the theoretical intellect.”  [The claim is pretty strong.  I continually think that speculatively practical truth has its own unique constitution.]
• He continues on p.70 with some good remarks about the hazy status of most arguments that claim to be moral philosophical; this continues on into the next section as well