The Creative Retrieval of Saint Thomas Aquinas

Essays in Thomistic Philosophy, New and Old

W. Norris Clarke

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780823229307
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

W. Norris Clarke has chosen the fifteen essays in this collection, five of which appear here for the first time, as the most significant of the more than seventy he has written over the course of a long career. Clarke is known for his development of a Thomistic personalism. To be a person, according to Saint Thomas, is to take conscious self-possession of one's own being, to be master of oneself. But our incarnate mode of being human involves living in a body whose life unfolds across time, and is inevitably dispersed across time. If we wish to know fully who we are, we need to assimilate and integrate this dispersal, so that our lives become a coherent story. In addition to the existentialist thought of Etienne Gilson and others, Clarke draws on the Neoplatonic dimension of participation. Existence as act and participation have been the central pillars of his metaphysical thought, especially in its unique manifestation in the human person.The essays collected here cover a wide range of philosophical, ethical, religious, and aesthetic topics. Through them sounds a very personal voice, one that has inspired generations of students and scholars.

PART I
Reprinted Articles

CHAPTER 1
Twenty-Fourth Award of the Aquinas Medal, by the American Catholic Philosophical Association, to W. Norris Clarke, SJ

Introduction by Mary T. Clark, RSCJ

We are conferring the Aquinas Medal tonight on one of our own members, a most faithful participant in our annual meetings and regional meetings. We all have our different memories of Norris Clarke, but there is a common ACPA memory which we all share: that of Father Clarke rising up after a paper has been delivered to compliment the author, graciously referring to the fine aspects of the paper, but then gently and critically probe the assumptions and the conclusions reached. Always a philosopher!

Father Clarke’s students have their own individual recollections, but they all remember him as the “personal” professor who really gets to know each student, as a teacher who can clarify the most mystifying of doctrines, and, above all, as a philosopher who never loses his “sense of wonder.”

But Father Clarke’s influence has extended far beyond his university and beyond this association. He is one of the best-known philosophers on the American scene.

In awarding the Aquinas Medal to Father Norris Clarke, SJ, the American Catholic Philosophical Association is honoring someone who has been an outstanding philosopher in the Catholic tradition for more than thirty years. Father Clarke served as president of the Jesuit Philosophical Association in 1960, as president of the Metaphysical Society of America in 1968, as president of the American Catholic Philosophical Association in 1969, and he is an active and esteemed member of the American Philosophical Association. As the American editor in chief and cofounder of the International Philosophical Quarterly (IPQ), a widely respected journal, Father Clarke has enabled philosophers all over the world to develop their positions and win a critical hearing from colleagues and to carry on the philosophical dialogue between East and West, between the ancients and the moderns.

First published in Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 54 (1980): 14–25.

Father Clarke was educated at Georgetown University and at the Jesuit House of Studies in Jersey, England; after receiving his licentiate in theology at Woodstock College and his PhD in philosophy at the Université Catholique de Louvain, he taught briefly at Woodstock and Bellarmine Colleges. In 1955 Fordham University called him, and there he has taught philosophy to appreciative students for twenty-five years, giving them not only the exhilarating experience of enjoying metaphysics but giving them as well that profound sense of the sacredness and mystery of being which he himself possesses.

Despite his teaching and editing responsibilities, Father Clarke has published forty-six articles in books and journals. Some of these have dealt directly with Thomism, and all have been Thomist-inspired. Some of his widely influential articles are “What is Really Real?” “The Limitation of Act by Potency,” and “The Meaning of Participation in St. Thomas.”

But it is above all in his recently published book—The Philosophical Approach to God: A Neo-Thomist Perspective— that we find Father Clarke bringing to light the most important Thomistic texts and revealing the vitality of Thomism for philosophy today. In this book he approaches Thomism in much the same way as Thomas Aquinas approached Aristotle, critically and creatively. He understands by Neo-Thomist “that loosely but recognizably united group of thinkers who acknowledge that the basic inspiration and structure of their thought derives from St. Thomas Aquinas although each one may have made various creative adaptations of his own, in both method and content, inspired by various movements of thought since the time of St. Thomas.”¹ According to Father Clarke, Thomism has a “remarkable survival power, and every so often, just when it seems that it is about to fade out, it has a way of renewing itself, like the phoenix, usually by a double movement of deeper return to its own sources plus the creative assimilation of some new insight or method of later thought.”² Because Father Clarke is sensitive to the essential in Thomistic metaphysics, he is able to free it from its historical moorings for further development.

In his masterly article in IPQ (December 1974), “What Is Most and Least Relevant in the Metaphysics of St. Thomas Today,” Father Clarke cites eight Thomistic themes capable of nourishing philosophical thought. Here he has drawn up a Magna Carta for the future development of a Thomist-inspired philosophy and has called for a new kind of Thomist, critical and creative. Thomism can be a “powerful and much needed leaven to be used in creative confrontation with modern thought and itsproblems, by independently responsible Thomistically inspired philosophers.”³

Because you, Father Clarke, are such a philosopher and because your teaching and your writing for more than a quarter of a century have helped to make many Thomistically inspired philosophers, the American Catholic Philosophical Association is happy to present to you tonight the Aquinas Medal!

Medalist’s Address: The Philosophical Importance of Doing One’s Autobiography

BY W. NORRIS CLARKE, SJ

I should first like to express how touched and honored I am to receive this honor from this association. I am not at all sure whether I really belong in the long list of distinguished thinkers who have received it before me, but that is your problem, not mine. I would like to say that my thirty years of belonging to this association and of attending all but a handful of its annual conventions have been one of the most pleasant and fruitful aspects of my professional life as a philosopher. Together with the meetings of the Metaphysical Society of America these are the ones I have most enjoyed and looked forward to each year, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank the many friends I have found in it down the years for helping to make it the fruitful existential matrix for doing philosophy in the Christian tradition that it has always been for me.

The theme I have chosen to share with you tonight is neither heavy, nor erudite, nor recondite—as befits an after-dinner address. Yet I consider it to be a truly serious philosophical theme, despite its rather odd title: “The Philosophical Importance of Doing One’s Autobiography.”

My attention was first drawn to this idea back in 1974, when, as editor of the International Philosophical Quarterly, I accepted for publication a very brief article by a young author, John Claude Curtin, entitled “Autobiography and the Dialectic of Consciousness” (IPQ 14:3 [1974]), and I have reflected on it off and on since that time with deepening insight, so that my thoughts and his have now merged. Why is it important to do one’s own autobiography? The answer lies in what it means to be a person in the peculiarly human mode. To be is to be one, as Saint Thomas and indeed all great metaphysicians tell us. And to be a person, he tells us again in what I consider one of the simplest and deepest of all definitions of the person, is to take conscious self-possession of one’s own being, to be master of oneself (dominus sui). But our incarnate human mode of being a person necessarily involves living in a body whose life unfolds successively across time, whose life is therefore inevitably dispersed across time. Time is the mode of a being that is not totally present to its whole self. Hence we have a problem in fully being ourselves, in taking full self-conscious possession of our own being, which is so essential to a history, a story. If we let our own past slip away behind us, drift away downstream unretrieved, save for occasional vivid episodes that stand out like isolated islands above the flow, then we have lost hold of a part, an ever-growing part, of our very selves. If we wish to know in full self-consciousness who we are, we must assimilate and integrate—self-consciously and deliberately, I think—at least the key moments and phases of our own past, so that the meaningful pattern hidden within them emerges into our self-consciousness, so that our lives reveal themselves as a meaningful story, and not just a collection of unconnected slides about our past, stored up in more or less accurate memory. In order to thus take possession of our past and integrate it meaningfully into our present, it is not necessary—and it would obviously take too long—to assume all the multitudinous external events of our past. It is enough to pick out the key moments of our inner development, the key phases of our interior autobiography, and draw together the pattern woven into them. For, unlikely as it may seem to some, there always is some pattern to be discerned, even if so many of the moments seem to be negative, shadow-filled, making a step backwards rather than forwards. It is not necessary to write down this autobiography, though it certainly helps. It is enough to reenact it within one’s own inner consciousness—it can even be done quite briefly and still quite fruitfully, but it must be done consciously and reflectively, looking always for the pattern, the connected weave, of the story.

One interesting thing that happens when one thus takes possession of one’s past, integrating it into a whole with one’s present, is that a surprising amount of psychic “energy” is released. This startled me a bit when I did it recently in preparation for this talk. But when I checked with a colleague and old friend of mine, Dr. Ewert Cousins of the theology department at Fordham, a well travelled master in the realms of psychology and spirituality, he at once answered, “Why, of course, your past is always a latent source of psychic and spiritual energy, and whenever you retrieve the important moments into consciousness they release a large amount of energy.” This is the value, by the way, for individuals and societies, of commemorating the important events of their past in celebrations: new creative energy is thereby released each time. “Do this in memory of Me …,” as Jesus asks of us in every Eucharistic prayer.

If the doing of one’s autobiography in some deliberate form is important for one’s personal life as a whole, so too is it important for philosophers, as philosophers, to take conscious self-possession of the key moments in their own philosophical autobiography, their own inner development as philosophers, in a word, to try to come to know who they are existentially as philosophers. In what follows, I would like to sketch out for you a few of the main moments in my own philosophical autobiography, not that mine has any special deep significance for everybody, but only in order to stimulate you to do your own philosophical autobiography, to evoke from you the key moments of your own philosophical development that match in some analogous way those which I will propose. So as I unfold some of the key moments in my story I invite each one of you to use it as a springboard at each step to evoke your own story. That experience, and not any significance of my story in itself, is the main point and contribution of this whole address.

First Coming to Self-Consciousness

This is an important moment, and the modes of coming to it are amazingly diverse for different people. I have been able to pinpoint mine fairly accurately at around three years of age, and the memory of it sixty-three years later is almost as vivid as it was then. As a boy I used to play out in the West Side Park in New York City along the Hudson River, where the West Side Highway is now. There was a large rock formation in this park that was ideal for kids to climb on. In the middle was a deep cleft in the rock several feet wide. It was a perennial challenge to leap over this—to a child—impressive abyss, and apparently I had not yet gotten up sufficient courage (or perhaps strength in my legs) to pull it off. Then one day I must have gathered up my determination and I made a soaring leap successfully to the other side. As I landed I suddenly burst into self-consciousness with “I did it, I did it.” It was my achievement, and I savored it to the full. I was the one who had leapt over the chasm on my own.

This coming to self-consciousness was through a positive physical achievement. Others have told me they have come to theirs through a negative experience. Thus one woman recently told me that when she was around two or three she picked up a live baby turtle. Not realizing what she was doing she kept squeezing it till it suddenly went limp, and her friends around her cried out, “You’ve killed it, you’ve killed it!” She suddenly emerged into self-consciousness with the feeling of shock, perhaps even something like guilt, “I am the one who killed a turtle.” What was your first moment? And what is the significance of the content and modality of this first moment for one’s later development? I leave this to you to reflect on.

The Role of High Places

I consider this phase to be of quite profound significance in my life, even to this day. And apparently the same thing is true of many philosophers, especially metaphysicians. Some German philosopher, whose name I have long forgotten, many years ago drew up an impressive list of the correlation between some experience of high places, mountains, etc., and the lives of great metaphysicians. For example, Saint Thomas was taken at the age of six to live at the great Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino, perched, as many of you know, on the edge of a mountain with a vast perspective over the surrounding countryside. For myself, I remember with the utmost clarity how I used to love to climb the highest trees I could find, perch myself securely in the crotch of a branch, and look out over the surrounding territory, with a wonderful feeling of expansion of consciousness.

More exciting was when, at about fourteen or fifteen, I would climb up the great towers of the George Washington Bridge from the river shore to the roadway, some three hundred feet above. It was not really that difficult or dangerous if one had rubber-soled shoes and cool nerves. I had a sufficient supply of both, and the expansion of consciousness was tremendous. Even better was to climb up the sheer five-hundred-foot-high cliffs of the Palisades on the other side of the river, finding a niche two-thirds of the way up, and sitting there quiet and all alone—I did my serious climbing alone—contemplating the vast panorama of the river, and feeling somehow, intuitively and inarticulately, the vast hidden forces of nature supporting me and making the whole world pulse with life, and then hidden behind these and woven somehow through everything some still vaster mysterious unifying Presence, which I thought dimly must be something like God.

This particular climb, as I realized later and perhaps even then, was really quite a dangerous one, requiring considerable skill and a large supply of cool nerves. When I first tried it, at a place I discovered to be the best, just above a large sign, “No Climbing Here,” I had made it two-thirds of the way up and then got stuck, and could move neither up nor down. Looking down, I saw the traffic all stopped on the river road below, motorists shouting and gesticulating at me to come down, then a contingent of police yelling they were going to arrest me. I shouted back, “Come and get me. I would love to get arrested, anything to get out of here.” But I knew they would be afraid to climb up after me. Then they said they would get a rope and pull me up from above, and departed. I realized that if they did rescue me I would promptly end up in the local cooler, a disgrace to my family, etc. On studying my situation more carefully I discovered there was a bulge of rock to my right and I could see only that there was a niche for my foot beyond it. If there was one for my hand higher up, which I could not see, I could swing around and from there on it was easier going and I could get away. A decision had to be made at once. With a prayer and a hope, literally not knowing whether death or life awaited me, I gathered up my courage and swung around the rock into space. Luckily, as you can see, there was a handhold. I caught on, quickly snaked up the rest of the cliff and fled into the bushes to watch just as the cops arrived with ropes to pull me up and arrest me. But something momentous happened to me as I swung out into space, suspended between being and nonbeing. At that moment I suddenly broke through to the felt awareness of existence as such; I felt the bittersweet but extraordinarily exhilarating taste of actual existence in my mouth, the taste of its infinite preciousness and yet precariousness, and of its unspeakable difference from nonexistence. I felt I had somehow broken through to a new level of consciousness, and this indescribable taste of existence still lingers in my mouth today, almost as clear as it was then, fifty years ago. It still nourishes my metaphysical intuition.

Later, as a young Jesuit philosophy student, I had the good fortune to climb a real alp, the ten-thousand-foot Schesaplana on the border between Austria and Switzerland, with a Swiss Jesuit guide. We reached the edge of a glacier near the top by nightfall, slept in a hut on its edge overnight, then crossed the glacier and climbed the last five hundred feet to the summit for sunrise. The resulting vista of snowcapped peaks, valleys, rivers, towns, all woven into a single vast tapestry, blew my mind, lifting me into a kind of altered state of consciousness in which I got a glimpse into the essence of majesty, sublimity, purity, and beauty. It has left traces ever since in the deepest recesses of my memory.

Since that time I have always seized the opportunity to go to any mountaintop or high place of vision I could find. Mount Mansfield, the famous ski mountain of Stowe, Vermont, with its 360-degree vista from Lake Champlain to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, has long been one of my favorites, and I have been there many times. On my first trip to India I was able to savor what is justly considered one of the great sights of the world, sunrise over the Himalayas, including Mount Everest, seen from the eighty-five-hundred-foot-high Tiger Hill in Darjeeling. There was also a quick side trip into the fabled tiny mountain kingdom of Sikkim on the edge of Tibet (now absorbed into India), and finally a vanishing act from an international philosophy congress into Nepal to spend the night in the mountains and take the famous Mount Everest airplane ride in a tiny plane right along Mount Everest and the great peaks—a ride during which I got so excited I had to close my eyes to avoid exploding inside. This was the fulfillment of a persistent childhood dream to some day look upon the “ultimate mountains of the earth,” which in fact seemed to me like immense white-robed contemplatives, their ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I: Reprinted Articles
• Part II: New Articles
• Notes
• Name Index
• Subject Index