Background
Gilson, Étienne Henri was born on June 13, 1884 in Paris.
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Étienne Henri Gilson
Edit ProfileEducation
University of Paris.
Career
1921-1932, University of Sorbonne. 1932-1951, Collège de France. 1929-1978, Institute of Medieval Studies, University of Toronto.
Views
Gilson was the most influential historian of medieval philosophy in the twentieth century. His historical studies led him to adopt the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas as his own, and to expound a metaphysics and a theory of knowledge which, despite his claim that they were simply the views of Aquinas himself, disturbed, or at least irritated, many advocates of orthodox Thomism. His studies of the medieval period began by a kind of accident, when it was suggested to him that he should examine the medieval provenance of Descartes’s thought. He quickly came to the conclusion not only that Descartes had deep roots in medieval philosophy, but also that Cartesian philosophy was in some ways inferior to it. Thenceforward he immersed himself in medieval philosophy, and argued constantly that the great medieval thinkers attained a level of sophistication and insight superior to any philosophy before or after. One of the first shocks that Gilson administered to conventional Thomists was to show that medieval philosophy was not a simple homogeneous body of thought, still less a mere reworking of Aristotle. In a number of brilliant studies of Aquinas (1919), Bonaventure (1924), Augustine (1929), St Bernard (1934) and Duns Scotus ( 1952), as well as shorter pieces on Abelard and Albertus Magnus, and other works on medieval philosophy as a whole, he demonstrated that there were radical differences amongst its greatest figures. He thus permanently changed the map of medieval philosophy, and also indirectly challenged the very conception of a homogeneous ‘Scholastic Philosophy', whether conceived of as a medieval phenomenon or as a single tradition surviving intact to the present day. The only incontestable constant in medieval philosophy, according to Gilson, was that it was practised within the context of a belief in God and an acceptance of Christian revelation. This is why he described it as ‘Christian’ philosophy. By this he meant, not that philosophy and theology, or reason and faith, were confused with one another, but that faith provided insights and data for philosophy to examine and exploit. Christian revelation was, as he put it, ‘an indispensable auxiliary to reason’. Gilson’s view that medieval philosophy was Christian philosophy was vigorously contested by several of his scholastic contemporaries, most notably by Fernand Van Steenberghen. One of the most decisive insights borrowed by philosophy from Christian faith, according to Gilson, was found in Exodus 3:14, in the Vulgate ego sum qui sum, ‘I am who am’. In neo-Platonic thought, the creative source of the universe was regarded as something beyond being, therefore something unknowable and unnameable except as non-being. Augustine was inspired by Exodus. Gilson argued, to transform this creative source from non-being into being, and to identify it with the Christian God. Thus, from Augustine onwards the concept of being came to occupy a central role in metaphysics. For Augustine, however, heavily influenced as he still was by Platonic thought, God's being was an immutable essence, from which created being flowed and in which it participated. Knowledge, for instance, was an illumination by the divine intellect, since there could be no other source of its being than the divine being himself. Aquinas, whose classical mentor was Aristotle, transformed the concept of being again, according to Gilson, this time into the idea of an activity: being as analogous to kicking or throwing. Being in this sense, Gilson argues, refers primarily to existence, not to essence. For Augustine, God had been an immutable essence; for Aquinas, God was the pure act of existence. He whose entire nature it is to exist. His essence is existence. Furthermore, God is not so much the source as the cause of finite existents. He communicates existence to them: and in them, too, existence is an act-of-being, although one which is limited and determined by the essence whose existence it is. Gilson’s theory of knowledge flows from his Metaphysics of existence, although, as Georges Van Riet has shown, it underwent various changes and perhaps was never wholly satisfactory. The problem of knowledge, for Gilson, was the problem of explaining our knowledge of an external reality, which is in large part a world of objects. Finite objects possess both essence and existence. The intellect enables us to know the essence of things, but their existence is not conceptualizable. Neither is their existence a sensible quality. How, then, can really existing objects be known? Gilson’s answer is that they can be known in a judgement of existence. This kind of Judgement differs from the judgement of attribul|on, which is the judgement studied in logic. In Jhejudgement of existence, the verb 'to be’ is not a copula: it is used, not to affirm a predicate of a subject, but rather to affirm its reality. In his later years Gilson turned his hand to aesthetics; or rather, to the philosophy of art. The foots of art, he argued, lie in the fecundity and dynamism of being, in being-as-act. In humankind, this dynamism generates the order of •activity, of making as opposed to knowing. There is an infinite variety in human making. Much of it for utilitarian ends or else for the sake °f knowledge or desire. The fine arts, however, have as their end the production of beautiful objects, that is, objects of which the sensuous apprehension is pleasing. Objects of this kind Possess the properties of wholeness, proportion and clarity. The production of beautiful objects is the only Purpose of art. Art is not knowledge, nor intuition, nor expression; nor is it symbolical. Works of art may, of course, contain other dements: dramatic, expressive, cognitive, cona- •|ve; but in so far as they are works of art, they are siMply objects of beauty. Similarly, our experiences of art may have a cognitive element, and in •he case of a poet such as Dante this may be Powerful and significant. But in so far as we experience Dante’s poetry as a work of art, we Sensuously perceive it just as a beautiful object Made out of language. For Gilson, the order of knowing and the order of making might be Mingled in artistic realities, but they were conCePtually distinct, and were the product and the object of different mental activities.
