Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Étienne Gilson by Francesca Aran Murphy (review)

484 BOOK REVIEWS Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Etienne Gilson. By FRANCESCA ARAN MURPHY. Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2004. Pp. 363. $49.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-8262-1536-X. Francesca Aran Murphy's Art and Intellect in the Philosopby of Etienne Gilson is a provocative, richly documented, and highly original intellectual biography of a twentieth-century intellectual giant. It substantially captures the complexity of Gilson the man, historian, and Christian philosopher. Anyone seriously interested in Gilson studies should read this work. The book consists of an introduction (entitled "Time and Eternity"), fifteen chapters, an afterwo•d, bibliography, and index of persons. The tides of the fifteen chapters are: (1) "Draper's Son," (2) "Beginning with Descartes," (3) "Ad Fontes: Gilson's Ernsmian Method," (4) '"Under the Ensign of St. Francis and St. Dominic,"' (5) "Reason and the Supernatural,"' (6) "Christian Philosophy," (7) "Newspapers and Utopias," (8) "Humanist Realism," (9) "World War II History and Eternity," (10) "Gilson's Theological Existentialism: The Metaphysics of the Exodus," (11) "'Ecdesial Cold War," (12) Between the Temporal and Eternal Cities,"' (13) '"Facts are for Cretins,"' (14) "A Pictorial Approach to Philosophy," and (15) "Gilson's Grumpy Years." Murphy conceives this book to be about "Gilson the living philosopher," not "Gilson the medieval historian" (6). Quite fittingly for a study of the intellectual life of a philosopher, Murphy studies Gilson as "a man of many parts" (290). Her approach to this intellectual. biography is highly original for at least four reasons. First, before examining different major parts of Gilson's intellectual history and the intellectual principles he called upon to resolve problems he faced throughout his life, Murphy attempts to situate him intellectually by interpreting his thought as the life-long reaction of a loyal French Catholic to the French modernist crisis, with which he had some sympathy in his youth and throughout his life. While many thinkers have studied the work of Jacques Maritain against a similar religious and political background, Murphy, to my knowledge, is one of the first people to do so regarding Gilson. She maintains that the modernist crisis was one ofthe generating forces of four great issues that concerned Gilson throughout his life: the relation of the Catholic faith to different political orders, the problem of the relation of faith and reason, theology as a source of philosophical realism, and time (especially history) and eternity. Second, Murphy places special emphasis on the influence of aesthetics, especially music, on Gilson. Hence, she refers to Gilson's "musical, existential Thomism" (5). She attributes this interest, partly, to Henri Bergson's life-long influence on him. She goes so far as to maintain that Bergson was "[t]he philosopher who most influenced Gilson" and that "Gilson got it into his head that Bergson was an Aristotelian" (6). Third, she also makes special note of Gilsonian humanism, which, at times, she refers to as his Erasmian method (48) BOOK REVIEWS 485 and his Pascalian heritage (4). Fourth, Murphy attempts to elevate the extent and status of the Bonaventurean and Franciscan influence on Gilson. Hence, for example, of the many parts that comprised Gilson the philosopher, she says: "There were always two sides to Gilson's mind. Aesthetically, he was a •Franciscan,' vastly preferring non-figurative art to classical realism.... But Gilson was also a 'choisiste,' dedicated to the fact and the thing" (86). Murphy's novel approach to understanding Gilson is refreshing and enriching. I think it is also a main reason her work is likely to be controversial. By initially contextualizing Gilson's intellectual development against the modernist background, Murphy sees different battles that Gilson waged throughout his life and different approaches he took to resolving them as having deeper, sometimes more long-standing and personal, motives than Gilson scholars often attribute to them. Hence, for example, she sees clerical mistreatment of Alfred Loisy in its poorly orchestrated reaction to the modernist crisis as a contributing reason for Gilson's dislike of manual Thomism and for specific attacks he later launched against proponents of "Roman Thomism" and the Thomistic commentary tradition. Moreover, she maintains that Gilson's "offensive against his Thomist contemporaries took a roundabout turn through Baroque scholasticism...