The report (Comprendre et Guerir) published by the Congregation of the Brothers of Saint John states (p. 513) that “Further research into Father M.-D. Philippe’s work has already brought to light some clear points of departure from the Church’s tradition”. A little further on, the report stresses: “We are led to question the place of Church tradition in the theological teaching of Father M.-D. Philippe”. This includes the reproach of neglecting the study of the Church Fathers, the Magisterium and spiritual developments subsequent to Saint Thomas.
For the authors of the report, the foundation of such a deadlock is, on the one hand, “the large place given to philosophy”, and on the other, “the insufficient consideration of becoming”, with history consequently “not honored as it should be” (p. 515).
Stating unequivocally that there is a “structural fragility in Father M.-D. Philippe’s theological work”, the report claims to detect an “extension” of this fragility to the philosophical doctrine itself, for two reasons:
On the one hand, “for a Catholic, philosophy cannot abstract itself from the tradition and teaching of the Church. In the words of Pius IX, this teaching constitutes the very ‘star’ of philosophy”. But what does Pius IX mean by “the star of philosophy”? The report does not ask this question, contenting itself with a partial argument of authority, cut off from any context or any historical situation1… In any case, such an expression certainly does not mean that philosophy would be subject in its content to the Tradition and teaching of the Church! For the authors of the report, Father Marie-Dominique Philippe’s alleged ignorance of, if not disdain for, the Church’s Magisterium would have the effect of confusing his philosophical thinking. Yet, as we shall see, not only does Father Marie-Dominique Philippe neither ignore nor disdain Tradition and the magisterial teaching of the Catholic Church, but he also carefully distinguishes the specificity of philosophical wisdom and its autonomy in the search for truth, from the subalternity of theological wisdom to Revelation2.
1 Pius IX’s pontificate, from 1846 to 1878, was marked by the publication of the Syllabus and the encyclical Quanta cura. Is it not astonishing to refer to the pope of anti-modernism and accuse Father Marie- Dominique Philippe of being dependent on a Thomistic approach dating back to the 19th century (Appendix D to the report, p. 618), while at the same time describing his doctrine as postmodern (ibid., p. 617-619)?
2 Cf. S. THOMAS AQUINAS, Summa Theologica (ST), I, q. 1, a. 2 and a. 8: “The Church does not propose her own philosophy or canonize any particular philosophy to the detriment of others (cf. PIE XII, Encyclical Letter Humani generis). The profound reason for this reservation lies in the fact that philosophy, even when it enters into a relationship with theology, must proceed according to its methods and rules; otherwise, there would be no guarantee that it would remain oriented towards the truth and that it would tend towards it through a rationally verifiable approach. A philosophy that did not proceed in the light of reason according to its own principles and specific methods would be of little help. Ultimately, the source of the autonomy enjoyed by philosophy is to be found in the fact that reason is, by its very nature, oriented towards truth, and that, moreover, it possesses within itself the means to achieve it. A philosophy conscious of its ‘constitutive status’ cannot fail to respect the requirements and evidence proper to revealed truth” (S. JOHN PAUL II, Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio, no. 49).
On the other hand, the report’s editors criticize Father Marie-Dominique Philippe for ignoring “respectful confrontation with other philosophers”, replacing it with a polemic centered on a few scapegoats. Thus, in their view, if Father Marie-Dominique Philippe’s books “includes the study of many philosophers”, “there is hardly any dialogue with them” (p. 516). How can we treat Father Marie-Dominique Philippe’s relentless reading and study as a negligible quantity? As anyone who has assiduously followed his courses will know, his works published give testimony to it and his many intellectual friendships with philosophers whose orientations are very different from his own philosophical itinerary demonstrate the contrary.
To respond to these assertions, we will divide our presentation into three successive sections. First, we will recall the context and the main stages of Father Marie-Dominique Philippe’s intellectual and spiritual journey.
In this light, we will take up the main charges in the report of the Brothers of St. John, and show that they do not hold up to the teaching and writings of Father Philippe himself.
Finally, we’ll take a closer look at some of the highlights of his thought, articulating them in such a way as to better grasp the fruitfulness of his itinerary and the dedication of his life to the sapiential search for truth.
A singular itinerary
Attempting to evaluate the content of a teaching requires establishing its configurations, extension and richness, while still taking into account the person who authored it, his background and the historical context in which his thinking developed. The aim of this section is not to develop a biography of Father Marie- Dominique Philippe. Marie-Christine Lafon, in particular, did this some years ago, consulting numerous archives and interviewing many witnesses. You can refer to her work1 to find the essential aspects and chronology of events in Father Philippe’s life. We will only recall here some important elements for understanding the itinerary and developments of Father M.-D. Philippe’s thought. He himself often explained the origin of his research and the intention with which he undertook it.
At the end of his life he wrote to Father Bruno Cadoré, OP, then his Prior Provincial:
Reflecting on the itinerary of my life, from the point of view of intellectual work, it seems to me that what I’ve been trying to do since the starting point, especially thanks to Father Dehau, and then with what I received from Father Chenu at the Saulchoir, is to discover a sapiential reading of Saint Thomas, in the light of the three wisdoms. That’s really what I’ve been striving for in the Order, seeking to return to the source and always deepening, continuing and renewing the work of Saint Thomas from within. And this has always seemed to me to be one of the great expectations, one of the great needs of today’s world2.
And he adds:
I wasn’t able to teach this explicitly, making things clearer and more profound, until the Community of Saint John came into being and the Lord, through the Church, asked me to look after them and stay with them.
We shall see that Father Philippe’s research, far from neglecting the historical dimension and dialogue, is, on the contrary, rooted in a secular heritage. At the heart of the twentieth century,, it seeks to renew a long-standing intellectual and sapiential tradition of the Dominican Order, in a spirit of authentic apostolic concern and service. No one can be reproached for neglecting an aspect when he has explicitly and consistently affirmed his intention in the clearest terms, and faithfully pursued the precise service that God has asked of him and that he has agreed to carry out for the Church3.
1 MARIE-CHRISTINE LAFON, Marie-Dominique Philippe, Au cœur de l’Église du XXe siècle, Paris, DDB, 2015.
2 M.-D. PHILIPPE, letter dated January 14, 2005, quoted by Father Bruno Cadoré in a letter to the Prior General of the Brothers of St. John dated September 1er 2006 (in: M.-C. LAFON, Marie-Dominique Philippe, p. 696). In the same spirit, see in particular Retour à la source, I, Pour une philosophie sapientiale, Foreword: “In the face of classical Thomism, which is unconsciously unfaithful to Saint Thomas and has turned him into a school, we seek to rediscover Saint Thomas not in his conclusions but in his source, thanks to a philosophy taken from Aristotle himself. A philosophy that is true wisdom, and that enables theology itself to be true wisdom, at the service of the mystery of God’s word. In fact, it is wisdom that has been disfigured and whose meaning has been lost today” (cf. op. cit., Paris, Fayard, 2005, pp. 9-14).
3 “Among the various services [the Church] has to offer humanity, there is one which involves her responsibility in a very special way: the diakonia of truth” (S. JOHN PAUL II, Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio, no. 2).
1. Mathematics or the search for wisdom ?
Father Marie-Dominique Philippe often said that, in his youth, he only loved mathematics1. Marked by one of his teachers at the Jesuit college in Lille, he remembered this saying, which he recalled regularly to the end of his life: “Corruption of the heart is no laughing matter; but corruption of the intelligence is worse”2. These memorable words, and the philosophical questions they raised for him, undoubtedly marked him to such an extent that, over time, they became one of the main thrusts of his philosophical and theological research: to understand the tragedy of contemporary atheistic ideologies and their origins in the corruption of Christian culture3. In this sense, he would join the research of Henri de Lubac4 , Michel Carrouges5 and Etienne Borne6 , all three of whom he knew, but on a much more philosophical and theological level.
On the other hand, spiritually linked to his Dominican uncle, Father Thomas Dehau, he discovered early on the works of Saint Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort, a Dominican tertiary, which he had read in their entirety before joining the Order in 1930. As for Father Dehau’s influence, he always considered it that of a mystic and an apostle7 , a friar preacher totally dedicated to Mary8, inhabited by an intense life of prayer and a contemplative knowledge of Saint Thomas acquired before his own entry into the Order. Father Dehau was not a philosopher, nor did he know the thought of Aristotle, and was above all a fatherly environment and encouragement for his nephew9.
1 “Before I joined the Order of Saint Dominic, the only thing I liked was mathematics. I didn’t know what philosophy was. I suspected that one day I would enter the Order of Saint Dominic, so I wanted to do Maths Elem… and I would have loved to continue. My teacher said to me: “You must continue!”… and I entered the Order…” (Les Trois Sagesses, “The Three Wisdoms”, p. 45).
2 Quoted in M.-C. LAFON, Marie-Dominique Philippe, p. 73.
3 “As the ancients said, corruptio optimi pessima, the corruption of the best is the worst corruption. I always apply these words to atheistic ideologies: they could only have been born on Christian soil, they wouldn’t have been born in India. A Nietzsche can only exist on Christian soil. And the corruption of Christian culture that we are witnessing today takes humanity much further down than the corruption of the Roman Empire. [The Church has made alliances] with efficiency, with power – in short, all the confusions we see within the Church. It’s less violent today because the Church has less power. “It’s better that way,” you might say. “Because if the Church had power, what would it be like? (Les Trois Sagesses, The Three Wisdoms, p. 313; see ibid., pp. 347-350, 421-422).
4 H. DE LUBAC, Le drame de l’humanisme athée, Spes, 1944; republished in: Œuvres complètes, II, Paris, Cerf, 1998.
5 M. CARROUGES, La mystique du surhomme, Paris, Gallimard, 1948.
6 E. BORNE, Dieu n’est pas mort, Essai sur l’athéisme contemporain, Paris, Librairie Arthème Fayard (coll. “Je sais, je crois”, no. 90), 1956.
7 It was Father Marie-Dominique Philippe who wrote and prepared for publication his uncle’s major work, L’Apostolat de Jésus,”The Apostolate of Jesus”, republished in 1996 by Editions Saint-Paul.
8 “Father Dehau […] was very attached to the Blessed Virgin, and he was very fond of this consecration by Grignion de Montfort. So much so that it was always said: ‘Father Dehau is prayer and Mary’. And it’s true, it was prayer and Mary” (M.- D. PHILIPPE, Les trois sagesses, p. 500).
9 “Father Dehau formed me intellectually, he made me understand the greatness of metaphysics, he made me understand the place of art, but he was also a mystic, and a very silent mystic. It was Father Dehau’s presence that put you in silence; and he made you understand that the great encounters we have with God are silent encounters. I never felt the need, after seeing Father Dehau, to write down in a little notebook what he told me: I kept it in my heart, like the “good soil”; I tried to be the “good soil”. Even if you forget certain things, it doesn’t matter, the essential thing was to live with him” (Les trois sagesses, p. 491-492).
10 The Three Wisdoms, p. 199.
Seized by the call of Christ, Henri, then aged 18, entered the Order in November 1930 and made his simple novitiate at the convent in Amiens. Later, he would reflect: “I’ve never loved anyone but the Dominicans10 “. Father Marie-Dominique summed up his novitiate as follows: “To heaven or to work”, following the motto given to him by Father Dehau.
This Novitiate period was also marked by an important discovery: that of St. John’s Apocalypse. He recounts the importance of this reading:
Revelation is not to be read historically: it is a revelation. This very word (with which the book begins) shows us that it is an eternal light on what we are living. (…) I’ve been reading it for a very long time. When I was in the novitiate, it was the Apocalypse that enabled me to get over feeling down. During the novitiate, in fact, there are always moments that are a little difficult, a little rough, especially when you’re a young novice… You’re very alone. So I immersed myself in the Apocalypse, and it gave me astonishing strength. I didn’t understand anything about it, but it gave me astonishing strength. It’s a “heady wine” (Ct 7:10), the strongest thing in the whole of Revelation! And it strengthens our hope. The three great Johannine writings are the three books that must ultimately illuminate our entire theological life: the Gospel sheds light on contemplative faith; Revelation, on hope; and the First Epistle, on charity. And our hope, when it is very shaken as it is now, needs very strong nourishment.1
This search continued throughout his life, leading him to be constantly attentive to the wisdom of the divine economy, one of the major recommendations of the Second Vatican Council. It was during the theological renewal that preceded the Council that Father Marie-Dominique Philippe understood the importance of looking at the Church “in the light of the times”, considering it through the issues of wisdom that characterize it.
2. Foundational events
The studies of the young Brother Marie-Dominique, begun at the Saulchoir in Kain (Belgium) in 1931, were marked by a number of events that he often recounted, and which help us to understand the main points which quite early on, mark his itinerary in the search for the truth.
Dedication to the search for truth
Physically exhausted by the asceticism and demands of the novitiate, Brother Marie- Dominique was invited, after an initial period of study, to spend a few weeks resting with his family2. Returning to Father Dehau, he shared with him what he had begun to discover in his study of Saint Thomas, and was struck by his uncle’s questioning astonishment: “Is this what they teach at the Saulchoir? That’s not really what St. Thomas thought!” Reflection followed by this advice: “Consecrate your intelligence to the Virgin Mary. She will be there to help you seek the truth”. From then on, he devoted himself to reading Saint Thomas more than to the scholastic commentaries he had been taught, notably by his brother, Thomas Philippe. It was also at this point that he began to distance himself from the theological thinking of his elder brother.
Father Philippe summed up this radical orientation at the end of his life when he replied to a publisher who asked him what he wanted to put on the back cover of his last published work: “He devoted his whole life to the search for truth”. Back in the thirties, this was already a vital and utterly personal discovery. It led to his philosopher’s assertion that it is the search for truth that structures the human person.3
1 The Three Wisdoms, p. 414-416.
2 “After two years of study, I became very tired, and Father Chenu, who was Regent of Studies, pleaded my case: “He must go and rest at all costs!” So I went to rest with Father Dehau. I resumed reading. This time, it was philosophy and theology. (…) At that point, Father Dehau said to me: “You have to go deep into metaphysics, because metaphysics allows us to talk about the Virgin Mary. You have to do metaphysics to be able to talk about the Virgin Mary and be able to communicate her to others.” Father Dehau pushed me enormously to study – religious life, contemplative life, silent prayer, the mystery of Mary, that’s for sure, but also studies” (Les trois sagesses, p. 205-206).
3 Cf. Retour à la source, I, p. 374-390. See in particular: “A man who, all his life, has sought the truth, is a man who is a true person. It is not the ultimate discovery that structures the person, but the fact of being docile to reality, of being ‘led’ by reality and of understanding that our intelligence is dependent on what is” (ibid., p. 386); “If we say that the search for truth is the structure of the human person, we mean that it holds a capital, essential place for the person, as a fundamental determination within the order towards the end. Structure is the intelligibility of a part of the person that is necessarily finalized. Because the human person requires wisdom, the search for truth is a fundamental part of it. To say that it is its structure makes it inseparable from the order of the person to wisdom. If there is no longer this search for truth, the human person no longer develops, but remains fixed on what he has already achieved. But we cannot stop the search for truth; it is a constant process. This constant progress and deepening is part of the structure of the person. The initial content is always there, because we’re getting closer and closer to the end, it gains in importance or, on the contrary, diminishes and is relativized. Structure, then, is the determination of a finalized organic part. If truth is an act for our intelligence, the desire for truth structures our person. This is fully realized in the search for philosophical truth, which leads us to wisdom. Before reaching wisdom, we can ask ourselves what place the search for truth has in our human person. It is a fundamental structure, and we cannot separate it from the very development of our person” (ibid., pp. 389-390).
If certain orientations in Dominican studies at the beginning of the thirties raised questions in Father Dehau’s mind, it was because this period was in a way putting the seal on a trend that he and others had already noticed at the beginning of the twentieth century: the move towards scientific specialization by subject1, with the influence of the Jesuit Fathers encouraging the establishment of a ratio studiorum along these lines. While such a choice may have stemmed from a desire to enter into dialogue with the pressing demands of the modern world, in the knowledge that an old repetitive scholasticism was powerless to undertake it, was it to be made at the expense of forgetting the sapiential dimension of training and intellectual life, the only one capable of ordering and situating all the developments of human knowledge? We all know how keenly this question animated the intellectual debates of the first half of the twentieth century2. In order to remain alive and capable of philosophical, theological and apostolic dialogue with the modern world and its developments, it called for a renewal and new developments, to which the intellectual and spiritual ferment at Le Saulchoir bore witness in the 1930s, and of which the “Chenu Affair” was a particularly significant event3. For the Order, the challenge was to integrate the intellectual, spiritual and pastoral issues of the modern world, without losing the specificity of a formation, intellectual orientation and government marked by the sapiential, contemplative dimension inherited above all from Saint Thomas Aquinas. In short: knowledge and wisdom, a key question that marked Father Marie-Dominique Philippe’s intellectual itinerary and research within the Dominican Order right from the start.
In this respect, it’s worth recalling one of the great statements made by Father Marie- Dominique Chenu, who, as a historian of the Middle Ages, insisted on the importance of the transition from the feudal age to the age of the communes, from monastic schools to universities. Thomas Aquinas experienced this transition when he joined the young Order founded by Saint Dominic. For his part, Father Marie-Dominique Philippe does not advocate a return to a feudal conception of monastic life for the Brothers of St. John, nor a rejection of university research, but stresses that in today’s world, marked by atheistic ideologies born of a corruption of Christianity, particularly theology, the contemplative search for wisdom requires a specific vital environment. It was in this sense that he insisted on “monastic” studies and constantly affirmed the importance of the École Saint- Jean (School of Saint John) as an internal work proper to the Community he founded4. On the contrary, this did not entail any overcautious closure or withdrawal into a dogmatic bastion: witness the constant sending of Brothers of Saint-John to State Universities, rather than to Catholic Institutes, so as to deepen their philosophical research and confront it with other perspectives. The many doctoral theses in philosophy, particularly at the Sorbonne, bear eloquent witness to this. The vital environment of the École Saint-Jean was thus characterized not by a confinement to a single way of thinking, but by vigilant attention to the quality and depth of the search for truth.
1 “Before 1914, the convent of studies was marked by the magnanimity and intellectual vigor of its regent, Father Ambroise Gardeil (1859-1931), who, while remaining attached to tradition, diversified disciplines to the point of introducing lay people: ‘A decision of considerable scope, committing all future advances and splits'” (M.-C. LAFON, Marie-Dominique Philippe, p. 158, citing J.-P. JOSSUA, “Le Saulchoir: une formation théologique replacée dans son histoire (1956-1965)”, p. 102).
2 Suffice it here to cite the questions raised by Edmund Husserl in his Cartesian Meditations; or, in the context of Thomistic scholasticism, to evoke Jacques Maritain’s Distinguer pour unir, les degrés du savoir.
3 Le Saulchoir “is characterized by a highly speculative Thomism, very firm in the face of the anti-intellectualist drifts of modernism, but not without a real concern for interior renewal, by a deepening of biblical and historical foundations and a lively demand for academic rigor” (H. DONNEAUD, “Le Saulchoir, une école, des théologies?”, p. 443, quoted in: M.-C. LAFON, Marie-Dominique Philippe, p. 159; on the various orientations of Le Saulchoir at the time, see ibid, p. 166-170).
4 “The teaching that is given here must not be an academic teaching, it’s a family and monastic teaching. We must never forget this. […] In the 14th century, the pinnacle of university teaching was still philosophy and theology, which are wisdoms and not sciences in the modern sense of the term, and gradually the ‘cult’ of science took precedence. (…) We maintain what Saint Thomas gave, which is capital and which the Church has recognized through I don’t know how many popes, and especially John Paul II in Fides et ratio…”. (M.-D. PHILIPPE, Session sur les trois sagesses, 2003, quoted in: M.-C. LAFON, op. cit., p. 691).
It belongs to the wise person to order
Father Marie-Dominique Philippe often quoted Aristotle’s remark, echoed by St. Thomas Aquinas: “It belongs to the wise to order1 “. Not that wisdom consists in putting things in order: it is a contemplative activity. But when it discovers a first, or firsts, it can then – and this is what belongs to it in its own right – order everything in the light of this first. This is how Father M.-D. Philippe appeared very early on: as a seeker of sources! Not only in the search for the origin of a question or a problem (which is important from the point of view of becoming), but also in the search for what is first according to various orders2.
Let’s recall here two experiences that were in some way foundational for him, and which can be said to have profoundly shaped his search for truth and the service he felt he had to perform for God and his brothers.
The Gospel of St John, a work of wisdom
The first experience, and a particularly significant one, relates to the Gospel according to Saint John. He himself relates it thus:
My professor of exegesis, when he presented the Gospel of St. John to us – and it went by very quickly, we saw it very quickly – said that we shouldn’t look for an order in it; that each page was very interesting, but that we shouldn’t look for an order in it. And he gave this comparison: “I’ve just received a student’s dissertation, and now they’re calling me on the phone. My windows are open and there’s a strong wind. I quickly leave the room; when I come back, the sheets have flown in all directions. The student had forgotten to number his sheets. Not having the time to find the order, I read each page: each one is clever, but I can’t see the order… This is the Gospel of John. This good Father had forgotten that the breath of the wind and the breath of the Holy Spirit are not the same thing. It’s true that each page of John’s Gospel brings something new to the table, and you won’t find Descartes-style order or Port-Royal logic. But if we pay attention, we discover a much deeper order, which is an order of life. Because this professor had said this, I was very attentive to discovering in John’s Gospel, progressively, a kind of order that would enable us to understand it better. According to the old adage, “the characteristic of the wise is to order”. If the principal author of John’s Gospel is the Holy Spirit, there must be an order of wisdom; and John is sufficiently docile to the Holy Spirit not to suppress this order of wisdom. It must therefore be discovered3.
The unenlightened conviction of his teacher could have prompted him to skip over John’s Gospel and continue his study of St. Paul’s theology, as was the custom at the time. But the opposite was true: it served as the stimulus for a lifelong quest. Not only out of personal interest, but as a significant orientation for theology and, more broadly, for the life of the Church. A reflection by Marthe Robin4 bears witness to this, as does, much later, the founding of the Community St. John: living in the Church the spirit of the Apostle St. John, responding to Christ’s desire for the beloved disciple: “If I want him to stay until I come5 “.
1 ARISTOTE, Metaphysics, A, 2, 982 a 16-19; 982 b 4-7. S. THOMAS D’AQUIN, ST, I, q. 1, a. 6; Summa Contra Gentiles
(CG), I, 1.
2 Aristotelian heritage if ever there was one.
3 The Three Wisdoms, p. 433-434.
4 “So I started preaching on St. John (four one-hour lectures each day). And lo and behold, at the end of the retreat, Father Finet, who always gave a little talk to the retreatants (and the preacher) after the festive meal on the last evening, in which he told them about Marthe, said this thing that I received in my heart in a very special way: “When I told Marthe that Father Philippe was going to preach to the priests on the Gospel of Saint John, Marthe simply said: ‘At last!'”. In fact, when I had seen her during the retreat, Marthe had told me how happy she was that I was preaching on Saint John, especially on the Prologue. And when Father Finet said that, I understood how much Marthe was Johannine, in the strongest sense” (Les trois sagesses, p. 497-498; see ibid., p. 571).
5 Jn 21,22. “The whole purpose of our religious life as Brothers of Saint John, and therefore the whole purpose of our formation, is to live as beloved disciples of Christ; to be, in today’s Church, what Saint John was for Christ, receiving for ourselves these words of Christ: “If I want him to remain until I come…”. (Jn 21:22). It is by entering ever more into this spirit, by receiving more and more of Saint John’s paternity over our community, that we can respond to the Holy Spirit’s call upon us. Indeed, fidelity can only be found in constant divine renewal: following the Lamb wherever he goes (Jn 1:37; Rev 14:4). What gives our whole life its deepest meaning is to live, in full divine realism, the mystery of Jesus (cf. Rule of Life, § 10), as St John lived it, following Mary, and thus to be, in the spirit of poverty, a witness to this mystery: ‘Master, where do you dwell?’; ‘He who has seen bears witness’ (Jn 1:38-39; 19:35)” (Formation Charter of the Brothers of St John).
From the outset of his research, Father Marie-Dominique Philippe was seen not as an intellectual who lived by haphazard hypotheses (quickly rendered obsolete) and dry criticism, but as a contemplative apostle, a lover of the Word of God, eager to give people a taste of its full flavor and reveal its order of wisdom, seeing this as an essential need of the Church2.
This focus on the Word of God at its most profound, at its summit, placed Father Marie- Dominique Philippe at the heart of the theological renewal that the Church still needs. Indeed, he has always maintained that it is by constantly returning to its principal source, namely the Word of God, that theology renews itself, deepens itself and relativizes its conclusions. On the other hand, it is by renewing a living philosophical effort that takes the demands of human intelligence in search of truth to their logical conclusion. This is demonstrated, for example, by these statements in one of the last articles he wrote:
Today, if we want to move beyond academic quarrels, we need to return to a true theology, delving deeper into both the revealed fact and a primary philosophy of being. Isn’t this what’s needed today? To take up the problem at its source, going back to St. John’s Gospel in particular, and using a realistic philosophy that takes human intelligence’s demands for truth to their logical conclusion. So let’s try to understand how a true philosophy of what is, a philosophy that integrates the study of the human person into the metaphysical endeavor – something that Scholasticism failed to do – allows us to take up the problem in a new and deeper way3.
And specifying that the theologian cannot stop at conclusions but must always return to the Word of God to remain dependent on the mystery revealed by faith, he affirms:
Only the theologian who returns to the Word of God is acting wisely. The theologian who sticks to his conclusions is being scientific, forgetting that it is a science subordinate to the science of the saints (ST, I, q. 1, a. 2), which is also wisdom (ibid., a. 6). We must understand this crucial distinction between wisdom and theological science. Alas, theologians are often more interested in their conclusions than in the Word of God, which is the source of them, and which is a living word, united to its source. The theological conclusion must serve us to return to the word of Christ to discover an intelligibility; this is marvellous, no doubt, but never exhaustive. It’s the spirit that needs to be grasped first and foremost: the theological conclusion is certainly interesting, but it comes from the word of God and must return to it. It must return to its source, which is a profound source, God himself; and this is the source that interests us, that sustains us and to which we constantly return4.
2 A case in point is the French translation of Thomas Aquinas’ Commentary on the Gospel of St. John, undertaken under his direction and published by Editions du Cerf. This translation has benefited from the corrections of the “Leonine” critical edition, even though the Latin text of this edition has not yet been published by the Dominican Order.
3 “Nature, person and grace”, in: Aletheia, n° 19 (June 2001), Rimont, p. 9.
4 Ibid. p. 14.
This orientation corresponds profoundly to a demand of the Holy Spirit on the Church. This return to the Word of God is not simply a matter of paying attention to scientific exegesis, which was necessary in the first place to respond to the modernist crisis, but above all of deepening a contemplative judgment of faith and theological wisdom. It is in this sense that Father Philippe has repeatedly expressed his view of scientific exegesis from an epistemological point of view. For example, in response to a question posed by a student:
Today’s exegesis was born out of modernism (…). It [sought] first of all to show that what the modernists were saying was not true. It was born of an attitude of defending the word of God. And I do mean the word of God and the text. It’s very true that the exegete is attached to the text. And there’s a different focus for the theologian and the exegete. The exegete looks at the text. The theologian is interested in the text in view of the revelation of the mystery; so it’s different. The theologian is much closer to the faith. That’s for sure! Theology makes no sense apart from faith. Exegesis develops by looking at the text: the text as we have it, how was it transmitted? Are there any mistakes? What are the manuscripts and sources? In what language was it written and transmitted? Who is the author, the human instrument God used? What is its historical and literary context? (…) Scientific exegesis was therefore born in response to modernism, which claimed that there was nothing historical about the Old Testament (…) that, basically, Scripture was always symbolic, and that there was no direct teaching from God. (…) So, the exegete is there to serve the theologian. That’s what Father André Feuillet always said to me: “You’re a theologian, I’m the theologian’s servant, and I know that my exegesis needs to be completed in a theology”. It’s a true attitude!1
Such an orientation, at the heart of the Order’s contemplative and theological tradition, called for a renewed reading of Saint Thomas Aquinas, free from the heaviness of a certain scholasticism, in particular that of “philosophical Thomism”2 . As he often recounted, this was to mark his formation from the outset.
The order of the Summa Theologica
Indeed, another foundational event in his intellectual youth during his formative years in the Order had a decisive influence. He recounts it in The Three Wisdoms:
I’ll give you a “flash” that was very powerful for me. I was a theology student. In the first year of theology, we saw the treatise De Deo uno by Saint Thomas, and the famous question of the problem of God, of the ways to discover his existence: how can human intelligence discover the existence of God? (…) I then went to see the young professor who was teaching me at the time, and I said to him: “I don’t understand anything you’ve said or what Saint Thomas is saying; because if I look carefully, I see that in a purely logical way, it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t make sense. Saint Thomas gives his way in a rather negative mode and concludes positively. Now, Saint Thomas knows Aristotle’s Analytics perfectly well, and he knows that you can’t conclude positively from negative premises. So what does this mean? What’s behind it? Explain to me.” Then he raised his arms to heaven (I can still see him): “Father, I give you Saint Thomas, I can give you no more!” – “Yes, but you must understand it, so that, if someone has objections, you can answer.” – “Oh yes! I should do that, but what do you want me to do, the ways of Saint Thomas are difficult.” Then I said: “I can see it’s difficult! I don’t understand a thing.” And at that moment, I said to myself: you don’t have the right to do that. (…) When I found myself in front of this professor, I asked myself: “What am I going to do?” So I said to myself: there’s only one way, and that’s to go back to the source of Saint Thomas. It was said often enough at the Saulchoir that the source of St Thomas was Aristotle. But at the time, Aristotle wasn’t being taught. Knowledge of the Greek philosophers was reduced to very little, and Aristotle himself in an attempt to understand him was not taught. Father Chenu, as a historian, used to talk to us all the time about the “three feet” of Saint Thomas, the tripod of Saint Thomas that you had to know: Aristotle, Augustine, Denys; but you yourself had to go back to Aristotle, back to Augustine, back to Denys. That’s what I tried to do. Father Chenu did me a great service when he said this forcefully, as a historian. So I went back to Aristotle – with difficulty, because it wasn’t easy to read Aristotle, especially in those days when there weren’t many translations. There was the old Latin translation, which allowed you to have at least one Latin text alongside the Greek. This gradually forced me to really get into Aristotle. Fortunately, I had learned Greek (…). And I immersed myself in Aristotle’s works throughout my theology, without having any qualms about it. I knew that by doing so, I would be able to understand Saint Thomas much better. And I did my lectorate on “Wisdom according to Aristotle”. The lectorate was the final exam for the Dominicans, an examination on Saint Thomas. We presented a kind of dissertation, but it wasn’t the license. So I did my lectorate examination on wisdom according to Aristotle1.
It was a long, solitary labor, a personal, innovative exploration pursued throughout his studies in theology, then at the University of Fribourg, that marked and guided his philosophical search for truth and his person as a philosopher for the rest of his life. The result is the discovery of his profound originality, both innovative and deeply rooted. Conservare et renovare.
1 Answer to a question. See also “Exegesis and theology”, Metaxu internal bulletin, Rimont.
2 Cf. The Three Wisdoms, p. 45-48.
Aristotle: a master and a friend
This personal research into the philosophical study of Aristotle’s work led to a fundamental work in his itinerary: Initiation à la philosophie d’Aristote, published in 1956, and reissued in 1991 as Introduction à la philosophie d’Aristote with numerous corrections and substantial new developments2. This expertise, acquired through hard personal work and a lifetime of teaching, notably at the University of Fribourg, where he commented on many of Aristotle’s works, and later for the Brothers of St. John, prompts us to make two important observations:
On the one hand, to highlight a personal reflection by Father Marie-Dominique Philippe in a lecture given during the colloquium organized in his honour at the end of his teaching at the University of Fribourg:
When you’ve worked with a master for over forty years – forty-six years – you still consider him a master, but you also consider him a friend. A philosophical friendship gradually develops between master and disciple, and this friendship is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful and profound forms of friendship – even if the philosopher lived in a time and environment very different from our own. And this is all the more true when this philosopher himself has a very great sense of friendship, and has treated the subject with such depth and intelligence! Aristotle, in fact, is certainly one of the philosophers who spoke most intelligently and profoundly about friendship; he is one of those who best grasped how friendship can give human life a profound meaning, the friend being the good of his friend, another himself who enables him to discover and surpass himself. At the same time, Aristotle did not hesitate to proclaim that the search for truth was even more fundamental to him. When he sets out, at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, to examine what the good is, he notes that such a search “is made difficult by the fact that it was friends who introduced the doctrine of the Ideas”; and he adds: “But it is better, and even necessary when it is truth that is to be saved, to sacrifice even that which is dearest to our hearts, especially when one is a philosopher [friend of wisdom]: it is then between two friends that one has to choose, and, of these two friends, it is a sacred duty to prefer truth” (op. cit, I, 4, 1096 a 14-16). This famous statement reveals much about Aristotle’s heart and mind: while he loved his teacher of twenty years, he loved truth even more. This love of truth, moreover, was well known to his master, who had lived it before him and communicated it to him. By loving truth more than Plato, Aristotle remained faithful to his master. Isn’t the greatest joy of a master, if he is a philosopher, to see that his disciples pass him by, that they go further than he did in the search for truth? In talking to you about Aristotle’s view of philosophy as theology and wisdom, I won’t be embarking on a discussion of well-known texts. Instead, I shall speak of Aristotle as his friend who seeks truth with him, who seeks it after him, since this was the search of his whole life3.
If this text, chosen as a testament to his academic career, reveals, in Father Philippe’s eyes, “the heart and mind of Aristotle”, it also reveals his own personality as a philosopher, and the originality and spirit of his search for truth.
1 Op. cit. p. 49-52.
2 Complemented by numerous articles on Aristotle’s philosophy published throughout his life.
3 M.-D. PHILIPPE, “Philosophie première, théologie et sagesse selon Aristote” in: Paradigmes de théologie philosophique, vol. edited by O. Höffe and R. Imbach in homage to Marie-Dominique Philippe, OP, Fribourg (Switzerland), Ed. universitaires, 1983, pp. 21-22.
On the other hand, the desire expressed by numerous university professors, of very different orientations and specializations, in France, Switzerland and Germany alike, for in-depth collaboration around Aristotle’s philosophy, a meeting point and point of dialogue in the search for truth, is indicative of the real fruitfulness of Father Marie-Dominique Philippe’s research. We can also choose to go deeper and develop what is really important in the search for truth for the human person, knowing that it is this that, in the end, really bears fruit. In the same text, Father Marie-Dominique Philippe puts it this way:
Should the philosopher be the one who follows, who reflects the climate in which he elaborates his philosophy, or should he be sufficiently independent to tell everyone what man is and what he should be, what his happiness can be, what his purpose as an intelligent being is? Is the philosopher the friend of wisdom, or is he the one who justifies what the men of his time think and say? We’d like to recall how Péguy defined the philosopher… There’s an option here, a choice to be made. Should we take up the first sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “All men have, by nature, the desire to know” and ultimately to know what is true, or should we claim that intelligence cannot attain truth, and that there is therefore no natural appetite in man for truth?1
The respect and friendship he enjoyed over many years with a number of renowned academics are in themselves testimony to the validity of his personal choice. We are reminded here of Hegel’s comment on Aristotle: “Aristotle must be considered, if there is such a thing, as one of the masters of the human race”2. The search for truth in Aristotle’s footsteps, patiently pursued without being determined by fashions, and begun many years before Aristotle’s work was even rediscovered in French universities, was indeed fruitful. Shortly before his death, he wrote: “I understand very well now why I stayed with Aristotle philosophically: to form the intelligence and put it at the service of the Word of God3“.
3. Cooperating philosophically in the renewal of the Church
Father Marie-Dominique Philippe’s involvement in the intellectual, spiritual and apostolic ferment of the thirties, forties and fifties, and his prophetic cooperation in the quest for aggiornamento thatthe Second Vatican Council was later to indicate to the whole Church, should be seen in the light of these early, profound and original directions of his research. This is not the place to develop this aspect in full. Let’s just recall a few of the main thrusts of this extraordinary flowering of the Church, especially in France. This led, on the one hand, to the growth and development of exegetical research, notably with Father Lagrange and the founding of the École Biblique de Jérusalem; and, on the other, to research into the meanings of Scripture, notably by Henri de Lubac4 , who was later one of the main writers of the dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum of the Second Vatican Council. There was also a revival of patristic studies, notably with the founding in France of the Sources chrétiennes collection. Then there was the revival of historical studies, which had repercussions on theology, particularly with Father Chenu and his studies on the history of dogmas, on the one hand, and on medieval theology, on the other. The period was also marked by apostolic renewal and missionary concern, in particular towards the world of laborers. This effort also included new developments in ecclesiology, in particular by Father Congar. Finally, a new emphasis on spirituality, so as to root it more firmly in the Word of God and theology.
1 Ibid. p. 26-27.
2 Leçons sur l’histoire de la philosophie, 3, p. 606: “[Aristotle] was one of the richest and widest (deepest) scientific geniuses that ever existed” (ibid., p. 499); “In reality, Aristotle is superior to Plato in speculative depth insofar as he has known speculation, the most rigorous idealism, and affirms it within the widest empirical development” (ibid., p. 500); “Aristotle’s greatness and mastery are affirmed in this way of gathering determinations into a concept, as well as in the simplicity of his approach, in his way of judging in few words” (ibid., p. 513); “His concepts have penetrated all spheres of consciousness; and this isolation in determination by concept, since it is no less necessary, contains in each sphere the most accurate and profound thoughts” (ibid., p. 606).
3 M.-D. PHILIPPE, Conference of June 30, 2006, quoted in: M.-C. LAFON, op. cit., p. 228.
4 See H. DE LUBAC, Exégèse médiévale, Les quatre sens de l’Écriture, I, II, Paris, Aubier éditions Montaigne (“Théologie”, 41, 42, 59), 1959, 1961, 1964.
Some have portrayed Father Marie-Dominique Philippe as a guardian of the scholastic temple, upholding the old neo-Thomistic school that is powerless to respond to the challenges and questions of the contemporary world. Yet, without opposing Saint Thomas in the name of modern developments, as many have done, it was his philosophical effort – an effort to return to the source – that enabled him both to situate each of the developments of this renewal and to integrate them into his own approach, without hardening things into sterile oppositions. Marie-Christine Lafon sums it up as follows: “His position in the famous school of theology that is Le Saulchoir is now taking shape. Well immersed in this effervescent studium, where most admitted the need to renew their reading of Thomas Aquinas, deformed by decadent scholasticism, Brother Marie-Dominique was convinced that one of the best ways to do so was through philosophy. Aristotle in particular1.
Why is philosophy so important to him? Raising this question seems crucial to us, insofar as forgetting the place of philosophy and, more profoundly, its specificity, is one of the reasons, if not the main reason, for the lack of understanding of Father Marie-Dominique Philippe’s itinerary and the originality of his approach. However, this approach needs to be understood for its own sake, before any criticism can be made.
In addition to the historical element mentioned above, which consisted in taking seriously St. Thomas Aquinas’ assertion that “the Philosopher” is Aristotle, Father Philippe gradually explained the importance of philosophy for authentic training of the intelligence in the school of existing reality. We can simply recall here the main elements of this conviction: first, precisely, the fact that realist philosophy, as first developed by Aristotle, considers that human intelligence has no other measure in the search for truth than existing reality in all its dimensions, and above all in its very being. St. Thomas Aquinas says no differently, when he emphasizes that the realities of nature are the master of intelligence2 and asserts for this reason that, in philosophy, authority is the last of reasons3. Secondly, philosophy is explicitly interested in man, whom it wants to know in all his dimensions (extension) and in all his depth (understanding), thus making explicit what he is (τί ἐστι), without forgetting the limits of his conditioning, insofar as they affect his way of being (πῶς). This depth of philosophical insight into man, thanks to its constant search for the purpose, the why of his being and his spirit, explained both ethically (that of human action) and metaphysically (that of being as such), alone makes it possible to make explicit the problem of the person; a vital contribution, particularly in the face of research in the human sciences. Finally, by questioning the existence of a primordial Being, a primordial Person whom religious traditions call God, it alone takes into account to the end and makes explicit, by becoming wisdom, the great aspirations of the human person to surpass himself.
In a way, Father Philippe summed up the importance of philosophy for him in an article published in 1989 in the magazine Seminarium, at the request of the Roman Congregation for Catholic Education4.
1 Op. cit. p. 179: “More radically, in the course of his studies, research and exchanges, the young religious felt the compelling need to ‘start all over again’. It was a crucial step in his development. His great intellectual intuition. His fundamental inspiration. And all within his own Dominican tradition. It’s not a question of going back or correcting what’s been done, but of going back to the cause, of walking the path himself” (ibid.). “He would gladly have taught theology, for he was interested in the debates that animated his brothers, and clearly saw all the theological issues at stake. At the same time – a precocious intuition – he understood that their background was philosophical. He grasped the relevance of his approach to contemporary questions. In the midst of the effervescence of the Saulchoir, Father Philippe embarked on a fundamental, metaphysical research, looking in particular at the link between being and becoming” (ibid., p. 229).
2 Cf. De Veritate, q. 11, De magistro; and ST, I, q. 117, a. 1.
3 Cf. ST, I, q. 1, a. 8.
4 “To avoid the shipwreck of man, today’s world demands the rediscovery of a realist philosophy”, in : Seminarium 41 (N.S. 29) no. 1, January-March 1989, Studiorum philosophicorum nostra aetate, pp. 54-69. This Roman Congregation is responsible for overseeing teaching and formation in Catholic seminaries and universities worldwide. This is indicative of the importance of the commission requested of Father M.-D. Philippe.
He situates philosophy particularly well on the epistemological level, especially in relation to mathematics1 and modern scientific developments, but also to the human sciences and their application to contemporary issues. This statement, among others, sums up Father Philippe’s position: “Saint Thomas, in his time, used a realist philosophy (in the face of the Avicennian philosophical tradition, he returned to Aristotle) to organize theology scientifically. In today’s world, to save man in his deepest dimension (homo religiosus), we need to rediscover a realist philosophy – and even, dare we say it, a philosophy that is even more radically and explicitly realist, in the face of the influence of Hegelian dialectics, which has allowed the proliferation of atheistic ideologies (especially that of Nietzsche)2 “.
This brings us to two points that help us understand how Father Marie-Dominique Philippe saw the rediscovery of philosophical wisdom as a vital issue for the contemporary world and for the Church today.
On the one hand, the deep conviction that philosophy is the most profound natural development of human intelligence. It echoes the affirmation of John Paul II in his encyclical Fides et Ratio: “Man possesses many resources for stimulating progress in the knowledge of truth, so as to make his existence ever more human. Among these, philosophy stands out, as it contributes directly to asking the question of the meaning of life and to sketching out the answer; it therefore appears to be one of humanity’s noblest tasks3“.
On the other hand, it is an eminently fruitful tool for faith and Christian theology, because it is wisdom and develops in an analogical way, which makes it eminently capable of serving faith and explicating the Word of God without diminishing the truth of the mystery to which it relates4.
1 See M.-D. PHILIPPE, Le manteau du mathématicien, Science et Philosophie, entretiens avec Jacques Vauthier, 2e corrected edition, Paris, Eska, 2015, pp. 46-47.
2 “Pour éviter…”, p. 54: “If we have the courage to search for the truth, we must reiterate that the search undertaken by Saint Thomas is not tied to a particular era: it is still relevant today. But for the new battle in which we are engaged, it needs new impetus. The Church, whose mission is the same as Christ’s, must bear witness to the truth (cf. Jn 18:37), and the Church’s renewal cannot ignore a renewal in the search for truth. Isn’t this what the Second Vatican Council called for when it asked Christians to open up to the world? Doesn’t it call for this very radical renewal of the search for truth, not only in the field of theology, of doctrina sacra, but also in the field of philosophy and the sciences, to help the men of our time not to let themselves be seduced by the many sirens of contemporary thought?” (ibid., p. 57); outlining in this article the various developments, “the various avenues of research of a realist philosophy”, he emphasizes that they “enable us to reorganize from within a genuine search for what man is – something that classical Thomistic scholasticism could not give us, since it stemmed from a systematic secularization, at the logical level, of the theology (doctrina sacra) of Saint Thomas” (ibid., p. 64). It couldn’t be clearer how Father Marie-Dominique Philippe situates the specificity and stakes of an authentic realist philosophy of man today…
3 S. JOHN PAUL II, Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio, no. 3; “In different ways and forms, [philosophy] shows that the desire for truth is part of man’s very nature” (ibid.); “Philosophy, which has the great responsibility of shaping thought and culture by the constant call to the search for truth, must vigorously rediscover its original vocation” (ibid..), n° 6); “In God lies the origin of all things, in Him is found the fullness of mystery, and this constitutes His glory; to man belongs the duty of seeking truth through his reason, and in this consists his nobility” (ibid., n° 17);
“Even when he avoids it, it is always truth that influences [man’s] existence. For he could never base his life on doubt, uncertainty or lies; such an existence would be constantly threatened by fear and anxiety. Man can therefore be defined as one who seeks truth” (ibid., no. 28).
4 See in particular the important article “Comment la foi chrétienne réclame-t-elle une métaphysique”, (“How the Christian faith requires metaphisics” in: Bulletin du Cercle thomiste Saint-Nicolas de Caen (BCTC), no. 96, December 1982, pp. 19-30. For example: “The Christian faith, let us say straight away, does not need metaphysics to exercise and develop itself. It is sovereignly independent of metaphysical thought. This must always be affirmed first and foremost. For faith connects us immediately with divine Revelation, giving us a divine light that ennobles our intelligence in a unique way, enabling it to adhere to the mystery of Christ, the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity, the mystery of man as son of God by grace. From this point of view, let’s recognize that faith frees us from all philosophy, and that it enables the “little ones” (Mt 11:25) to have access to the contemplation of God, to live in his mystery of love. But let’s not forget that while faith has as its object the primary Truth, God revealing Himself to us, in its exercise it makes use of our human intelligence and the word of God. Here we grasp the conditioning of faith: it cannot be exercised independently of the life of the intelligence, and in order to grow, it needs to be nourished by the word of God” (loc. cit.). “Doesn’t the Christian faith require the believer who can and must teach in the Church, and who must therefore acquire a certain theology, to be attentive to metaphysical knowledge and even to do everything in his power to acquire it? We cannot say, as some do, that the use of metaphysics in the service of the Christian faith was excellent in the Middle Ages, for Saint Thomas, but today this is outdated, and anthropology must replace metaphysics. Such a judgment presupposes that not only metaphysics, but also faith, remains subordinate to this or that era, to this or that civilization. It would be more accurate to say that, for scientific theology, metaphysics will always be necessary, but that, for a mystical theology, anthropology is necessary. However, we cannot deal with this subject here, even though it would be very important and topical” (ibid.). And more recently: “Saint Thomas is not the theologian of nature, but of the person, which can only be fully explained in a mystical theology, i.e. in a theology of love and finality. In this way, we can also see what is important and interesting about modern philosophy and phenomenology. But in order to grasp this in a just, true way, it is necessary not to forget the whole development of a philosophy of being: this is above nature and ends in the study of the person. Phenomenology, on the other hand, remains in the lived experience; alas, it puts being in brackets, never reaching it! As if intelligence could only be itself by rejecting that for which it was made in the first place; it can then only contemplate itself… To be able to discover the cooperation of intelligence and faith, we need to look at a philosophy that is wisdom. Only a philosophy that attains being in the first place can discover the existence of God, and thereby become wisdom” (M.-D. PHILIPPE, “Nature, person and grace”, loc. cit., p. 17).
These brief remarks enable us to better understand how Father Marie- Dominique Philippe responded to the demands of renewal that were working on the Church in the years preceding the Second Vatican Council, and integrated them in a profound order, an order of wisdom, thanks to his philosophical effort.
A meeting and a confirmation
Sent to teach philosophy at the University of Fribourg in 1945, his meeting with Father Santiago Ramirez, OP (1891-1967), then Professor of Moral Theology and considered the most important neo-Thomistic philosopher of the 20th century, was for him the confirmation of an older brother on the validity of the research he had already been undertaking for several years. He wrote about it in Les trois sagesses :
Ramirez was still one of those old Spanish Dominicans in the style of Bañez (an old scholastic, but a great scholastic!). When I said to him, “I believe that philosophy can no longer be taught in the way it has been taught in the tradition of the Order, that is, in a scholastic way,” he looked at me and said, “Explain a little.” I mentioned certain points to him, in particular this one: “There are enormous confusions, such as starting metaphysics with the transcendentals; that’s Suarez, it’s not Saint Thomas. In St. Thomas, the transcendentals are a critical perspective, and metaphysics should not begin with criticism. If you start that way, there’s no way out, you have to start all over again!” And I was very happy to meet a Dominican who, after teaching philosophy for many years, and then moral theology, said to me: “Yes, you must continue like that! Scholasticism is over. I’m committed to it, I’m going on with it; but it’s over, you’ve got to take up philosophy all over again.” (…) He understood that we had to move towards something very new, which implied, in fact, a return to something very old, but with the freedom to free ourselves from decadent scholasticism to take up something very radical. He was categorical. What’s more, in his relentless pursuit of truth, he had read the whole of Aristotle and all his commentators, St. Thomas and all his commentators (Cajetan, John of St. Thomas, Nazarius, Capreolus etc.), and all modern philosophy. One day, he said to me: “This philosophy that was born from Descartes, it hasn’t led me to discover any new principles. It’s all descriptions; it’s interesting, but there isn’t a single principle!” It was wonderful for me, that someone like Ramirez was there, inside the Order, to tell me: “Yes, walk in that direction! It’s not the moderns who will give you a new truth; you have to read them to know what today’s world thinks; but what will they give you as a new discovery of man?” It was a wonderful confirmation.1
Wonderful, but also demanding and painful. We recall the testament bequeathed by Father Ramirez to Father Marie-Dominique Philippe as he left Fribourg to take up a new post in Spain: never to diminish the strength of his classes, without giving in to the temptation to take the easy way out in order to be more suitable; and above all, never stop working on first philosophy, knowing that doing so, he would be “hated, hated, hated”2. A prophetic statement…
1 Op. cit. p. 210-211.
2 See M.-C. LAFON, Marie-Dominique Philippe, pp. 267-268.
This encouragement was all the more important when Father Philippe was just beginning to teach at Fribourg, as Father Ramirez is known, in particular, for a controversy that pitted him against Jacques Maritain on the subject of moral philosophy in the 1930s. While the latter asserted that there is no philosophical human ethic independent of theology, Father Ramirez criticized this fideist position, defending a truly autonomous moral philosophy against Maritain’s moral theology.
Father Marie-Dominique Philippe’s long years of teaching in Fribourg (a time shared with teaching at Le Saulchoir at the request of the Order’s Master General) were both demanding and fruitful. Demanding, because they involved for Father Philippe a distance from the Province of France and a real deprivation from the conventual life led at Le Saulchoir; it should be recalled here that it was at the explicit request of the Master General of the Order, in obedience and against his personal preferences, that Father Philippe was sent to Fribourg and remained there for over thirty years2. Fecund, because, as he himself says: “It was Fribourg that made my vocation as a philosopher. Because in Fribourg, as a university lecturer, I was obliged to rethink everything on my own3 “, as evidenced in particular by the publication of numerous articles and books in philosophy and theology during those university years.
As we said, this effort to take everything back to its philosophical source is what makes Father Marie-Dominique Philippe’s intellectual approach so original. It is in this way that he made an objective, albeit largely ignored, contribution to the renewal efforts of which we have spoken and in which the Order, particularly in the Province of France, was one of the main players. We’ll mention this briefly, emphasizing that it would be worthwhile to explore this question in greater depth to better understand how philosophy, because it is wisdom, has an essential epistemological role to play in ordering and situating all these developments; and by the same token to consider objectively Father Marie-Dominique Philippe’s place at the heart of the twentieth century.
Here, we can simply situate how, throughout his years of teaching at Le Saulchoir and then in Fribourg, he perceived the upheavals in the world and the Church, and how he dialogued with and integrated into his own itinerary all the questions raised before, during and after the Second Vatican Council.
Father Philippe has always considered it important to distinguish between the exegetical sciences, born primarily out of an apologetic concern to respond to the modernist crisis, and biblical theology proper. Not being a “scientific” exegete himself, he spent many years in dialogue with leading exegetes, contributing his philosophical expertise, essentially on the fundamental questions: What is the human word? In what way does every theological conception of the Word of God include a philosophical conception of human speech? Why did God reveal himself through human speech, and through human beings
2 This testimony is also eloquent: “After ten years teaching philosophy in Fribourg, I put this problem to Marthe Robin in Châteauneuf-de-Galaure. I said: ‘Marthe, don’t you think it would be much better if I asked to stop teaching in Fribourg, so that I could go and preach to the contemplatives? I get requests all the time! I could spend my whole year preaching to Carmelites, Benedictines, Poor Clares, Dominicans… It would be much better than teaching at university, where you get the impression that a few understand, but the others don’t understand at all and are there just to pass exams. Out of a hundred students, ten are really interested in the course, while the rest are just there for the exams. But we’re not here to help with exams, we’re here to be witnesses to Christ!” Martha was silent for a few moments, then replied: “No, Father, don’t leave Fribourg! You’re more useful to the Church teaching philosophy than preaching to contemplatives. You are more useful to the Church, and to men today, by teaching philosophy as you do, in this desire to seek the truth”. I confess that, at first, I didn’t understand it at all” (Les trois sagesses, p. 262-263).
3 Les Trois Sagesses, “The Three Wisdoms”, p. 52
themselves?1 In what way does the Word of God find in the mystery of Christ its fullness of truth and all the depth of the divine intention that commands Revelation? In what way does the Word of God include a history, as seen above all in the order of God’s Revelation in the Old Testament? For Father Marie- Dominique Philippe, the key that, in a way, commands all biblical theology is this: every time God reveals himself to man, he reveals to man who man is to God; and every time God reveals to man who he is, he reveals himself in his mystery. In a way, this is a theology of God’s Covenant with man, which develops throughout the history of the people of Israel and culminates in the ultimate and definitive Covenant realized in Christ. And no one can be unaware that Father Philippe taught biblical theology in this way for many years, commenting in particular on Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy and the prophetic books. Not only for the Brothers of St. John, but also for a wide range of lay and religious audiences2. In addition to his philosophical reflections on the human word and its links with a fundamental theology of the Word of God, particularly in dialogue with Heidegger’s philosophy, Father Philippe has shown that only a realist philosophy that rises to the level of a genuine first philosophy can correctly articulate the links between the truth of being and historical becoming, and thus, in particular, respond to the problem raised by contemporary hermeneutics3.
On the other hand, Father Philippe has approached the reading of the Church Fathers not in opposition to Saint Thomas Aquinas, as some have done, but by considering, following Father Chenu, the distinction between the various authorities in theology, in particular that of authentica and magistralia. An article summarizes his position on this subject4. It is true that Father Marie-Dominique Philippe is not a historian specializing in the Church Fathers, but we cannot overlook the relevance of his perspective and the precision of his own contribution to the renewal of the reading of Saint Thomas that he has proposed.
In terms of history, while Father Marie-Dominique Chenu insisted on the historical character of certain dogmatic definitions, thereby relativizing a certain formalism of a fixed theology, Father Marie-Dominique Philippe situated dogma in relation to faith in a different way and by a different path. Indeed, he has never considered dogma as a measure or a boundary, and in this sense cannot be qualified as fundamentalism, but as a safeguard for faith. For him, the role of dogmatic definitions is above all negative: if we do not adhere to a particular truth of faith solemnly defined by the Church, we put ourselves in danger of leaving the authentic interpretation, according to the truth of faith, of the Word of God. It is therefore through the problem of the truth of the mystery and the role of the Magisterium in serving the faith of believers that Father Philippe has situated the place of dogma and the authority of the Church’s Magisterium, and not by relativizing it through history. Historical context has its place, and Father Philippe never denied this, saying to the end of his life how much Father Chenu’s research had fascinated him. But in his opinion – and here we find again his metaphysical intelligence and sense of God – the truth of the mystery of God surpasses and measures all that can be said about it. That’s why he used to say: “A true theologian must be a contemplative. He must burn his conclusions every year and always return to the mystery to which he adheres in faith”.
As for the theology of the Church, Father Philippe closely followed the research of both Father Congar and Abbé Charles Journet. And while he has always stressed how right and fruitful Father Congar’s intuition of seeing the Church as a living being was, he has also always disputed whether modern biology could provide an analogy to explain this mystery of life. And that’s why, here too, his philosophical research into the living is important for situating the analogy of the Church as living in the mystery of Christ in the hope of his return.
1 S. THOMAS OF AQUIN, ST, I, q. 1.
2 Particularly for the Bethlehem monasteries, as evidenced by handouts such as Creation and Re-creation or From Earth to Heaven.
3 “The importance of metaphysics becomes still more evident if we consider current developments in hermeneutics and the analysis of language. The results of such studies can be very helpful for the understanding of faith, since they bring to light the structure of our thought and speech and the meaning which language bears. However, some scholars working in these fields tend to stop short at the question of how reality is understood and expressed, without going further to see whether reason can discover its essence. How can we fail to see in such a frame of mind the confirmation of our present crisis of confidence in the powers of reason? When, on the basis of preconceived assumptions, these positions tend to obscure the contents of faith or to deny their universal validity, then not only do they abase reason but in so doing they also disqualify themselves. Faith clearly presupposes that human language is capable of expressing divine and transcendent reality in a universal way—analogically, it is true, but no less meaningfully for that. 103 Were this not so, the word of God, which is always a divine word in human language, would not be capable of saying anything about God. The interpretation of this word cannot merely keep referring us to one interpretation after another, without ever leading us to a statement which is simply true; otherwise there would be no Revelation of God, but only the expression of human notions about God and about what God presumably thinks of us.” (S. JOHN PAUL II, Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio, no. 84).4 M.-D. PHILIPPE, “Reverentissime exponens frater Thomas”, in: Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie (1965), pp. 240-258. “S. Thomas rediscovers the working spirit of the auctor to whom he refers [in this case Saint Augustine], he goes beyond the materiality of the sign and, better than the author, makes explicit the fullness of the signified. One would be tempted to say that it is not only the most charitable but also the most faithful of expositions, since it is the most loving and penetrating of the truth sought and found in the common dialogue between the authorized writer and his commentator.
Father Marie Dominique Philippe, O.P. 