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The Transcendental Thomist Movement
- Fordham University Press
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The Transcendental Thomist Movement In this quiet renewal of Thomistic thought, one of the movements that has attracted the most interest and shown the most creative power in synthesizing old with new goes by the loose general title of ‘‘Transcendental Thomism.’’2 It was initiated by the Belgian Jesuit philosopher Joseph Maréchal, in the late 1920s and 1930s at Louvain, in his famous five-volume work Point de départ de la métaphysique. In his work, Maréchal went in the door of the Kantian method of transcendental analysis to discover the existence of God as the necessary a priori condition of the dynamism of human intelligence. This approach ran into considerable opposition from the contemporary Thomist establishment because of its supposedly dangerous affinities with German idealist thought in taking over the Kantian transcendental method—which, rather than moving directly outward to examine the objective 3 4 The Philosophical Approach to God contents of man’s knowledge about the world, turns inward to search out the necessary a priori conditions of possibility of the inner life of the human spirit in its activities of thinking and willing, and which studies the dynamic structure, the form rather than the content, of human thinking. Nonetheless, the essentials of Maréchal’s method and its results have since been taken up by many contemporary disciples in various countries, each of whom tends to put his own unique and original stamp on it. Thus we have Karl Rahner and Johannes Lotz in Germany; Emerich Coreth in Austria;3 in France, André Marc (my own first professor of metaphysics, now deceased) and Joseph de Finance (preceded a quarter of a century before by Maurice Blondel, who in his famous first edition of L’Action in 1893, prior even to Maréchal , applied the transcendental method to the dynamism of the will); Bernard Lonergan in Canada and then the United States, with his own quite original development of the same basic orientation;4 and Joseph Donceel,5 originally a student of Maréchal’s in Belgium but for many years Professor at Fordham University in the United States—all the above, of course, with their various groups of less well-known disciples . I might add that, though not considered a fully orthodox card-carrying member of the school, I am still a deeply sympathetic fellow-traveler. It is a remarkable fact that all of the above—though not their disciples—are Jesuit thinkers, either philosophers or theologians or both, so that Transcendental Thomism might well be said to be the most characteristic movement among Jesuit Thomists in the last half of the twentieth century. [3.145.196.87] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 07:10 GMT) The Transcendental Thomist Movement 5 How do I differ from the strict Transcendental Thomist position? I accept the ascent to God through the dynamism of intellect and will, but not the roundabout way of grounding the validity of human knowledge by first going up through God as final cause, then back to our ordinary knowledge of the finite world of our experience. I have been told, by those who have studied the later correspondence of Maréchal , that he himself admitted he had done that only because he wanted to go in the Kantian door to bring his readers out the Thomistic door. Otherwise a more direct Thomistic path was quite valid. The movement is by no means accepted as an authentic development of Thomism by all Thomists today, however. Many thinkers among the Dominican order, and especially the descendants of the older Maritain and Gilson schools, are quite critical and suspicious that it leans too much toward idealism or overstresses the subjective dimensions of human thought, underplaying the objective causal metaphysics that has always been the hallmark of Thomism.6 Nonetheless , the movement has shown itself to be remarkably creative and dynamic, forming a basis for the immensely rich and influential philosophical-theological synthesis of Karl Rahner and his school.7 Hence I think it is well worth presenting to you here, though I have no intention of surveying the positions of these various authors in detail. What I intend to do is rather to extract what seems to me the essential core common to the whole school and present it in a way that I myself can accept and use in constructing a viable philosophical approach to God—one that is quite free, it seems to me, of any leanings toward idealism or of...