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DeKoninck’s Cosmos

Charles De Koninck was born in Belgium in July of 1906, and died in Rome in

February of 1965 - he was 58.

DeKoninck taught Mr. Berquist, Mr. McArthur, and Mr. Neumayr.

Mr. McArthur and Mr. Berquist both said that they entered philosophy because of hearing Dr. DeKoninck lecture.

So I think it is fair to say that we would not be here, tonight, without De Koninck.

I met De Koninck in some old mimeographs the tutors were reading during mysenior year, and later I found more old class notes in an file cabinet at Notre Dame.

When I asked Dr. McInerny where the photocopied class notes came from, he toldme about the Charles DeKoninck archive at the University of Laval. Next thing Iknew, we had decided that I should fly up there and photocopy the whole thing. SoI did, enjoying the hospitality of Thomas DeKoninck, son of Charles, a philosopherhimself who has continued his father’s work, and a very kind gentleman. I spent, Ithink, six 10-hour days, photocopying non-stop, manually, about 10,000 pages of mostly unpublished notes and article drafts. The archive has now been scanned, andis readily available to anyone interested.

Dr. Ralph McInerny was another Thomist who studied with De Koninck. And hedevoted himself in the last years of his life to a strenuous effort at producing anEnglish edition of De Koninck’s collected works. Dr. McInerny told us this projectwas motivated by piety, by the strong realization, as he neared the end of his owndays, of what an extraordinary blessing it had been to be a student of De Koninck.

In a memoir written several years ago, McInerny recalled his time with De Koninckmore than 50 years before. I want to start by reading a bit from that:

"De Koninck once wrote that his ambition was simply to be a faithful student of hismaster Thomas Aquinas. Discipleship seems to have either of two results. Thedisciple never emerges from what the master had accomplished and is content toretail it. Or, and this was the case with De Koninck and other giants of the ThomisticRevival, Thomas was followed because his starting points were the inevitable ones,and by acknowledging and seeing where they led, one could go far beyond the textof the master while at the same time claiming that what one said was simply anorganic extension. It is only in this second way that a tradition can live. AndCharles De Koninck was the liveliest Thomist I have ever known."

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I mention these things, before turning to a sketch of De Koninck’s account of theworld, because I feel a similar duty of piety to De Koninck and to this community.

So, for what it is worth, I offer to you my own view that De Koninck is in every wayat the heart of what enables this College to stand in the tradition of living Thomism,and of the intellectual tradition of the Catholic Church. As a College, we should turnto him in gratitude - to his thought, and to the faith and spirit that inform it.

What I will principally sketch for you tonight is De Koninck’s account of an adequatephilosophy of the cosmos, as he thought such an account was available to thephilosopher of the 20th century. But first, some more general remarks about thesignificance of that account.

While still quite a young man, in his first years at Laval, he wrote a book called

“Cosmos.” Let’s notice first what a remarkable thing it was for a man to compose abook with such a title before he was 30 years old. Some might see presumptionhere. I see a confirmation that philosophy must arise from a great and daring loveof wisdom, the kind of love characteristic of the energy of youth.

During these same years, in the mid-30’s, DeKoninck taught a class on Nietzsche, inwhich he heaped contempt on those distressed by the force of Nietzsche’saffirmation of will. De Koninck saw in Nietzsche a kind of providential sign of therevolt of nature against the diminished desires of modern man.

Nietzsche wanted it all, but didn’t know what that meant. DeKoninck thought thatthe Catholic philosopher ought also to want it all, to want to know the meaning of the whole world, and its goodness. The difference, he believed, was that theCatholic philosopher knew, as a fruit of faith, that the Good itself wants to give itself to us, and that the world we seek to know has something to do with this. TheCatholic philosopher has reason to expect the whole cosmos to be a sign for him, ameans of knowing and loving God.

This is the first, and governing, point to make about natural philosophy as DeKoninckunderstood it - to philosophize is to ask about the whole of things, about reality,about the entire world and what it means.

DeKoninck loved and mastered the formalities of philosophy, and the distinctionsbetween disciplines, but he never forgot that the divisions of philosophy aresubordinate to the pursuit of Wisdom. The philosopher studies the natural world,from its astonishing details to its mysterious totality, in order that from suchknowledge might arise a wisdom of the source. Natural philosophy, precisely in

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remaining true to itself, seeks to be surpassed by metaphysics, by a knowledge of the immaterial.

Inevitably then, the philosopher asks about the cosmos, including the human. Heattends to it in all its dimensions of time and space, the very small and the verylarge, the simple and the complex. Above all, he asks what to make of the wholething, as one thing. Aristotle did so, and Charles De Koninck thought that there wasno good reason for a Catholic philosopher in the 20th century to shy away fromdoing so as well.

But while Aristotle could, perhaps, trust hopefully that gazing at the night sky wouldreveal fundamental signs of the causal unity of the cosmos, and trust as well that theordinary experiences of common substances would reveal the unchanging nature of the first material principles, things were a bit more complicated for a philosopher in

the 20th century. Reality had become a rather ungainly, and moving, target forspeculation.

In recent centuries, we have become aware that the material cosmos is billions of years old, and of a size that threatens, in my case quite successfully, to overwhelmour capacity to imagine, even to understand; We have discovered that the periodicelements themselves did not exist for hundreds of millions of years, that they wereborn at particular times in the cores of stars, and that those very particles are morelike dances of mathematical energy than Newton’s inert bits of stuff.

We have learned as well that life began relatively recently, after billions of years of alifeless cosmos, that the various species of living beings have shown up in a bizarreand glorious pageant, roughly in order from the imperfect to the perfect, over thepast 3 billion years. In what Aristotle thought he saw as a permanent, ordered andcomplete set of living kinds, we now know that we see only the latest living edge of life on earth. Perhaps most startling, we now know that the vast, overwhelmingmajority of kinds of living things that ever existed, are extinct. We wonder whatAristotle could not – whether they lived in vain?

The very structures of living things have, in the past century, been revealed to becomplicated and wonderful in ways that compete quite well with more cosmicstunners like 100 billion galaxies. There are new infinites in every direction, withinand without.

And man himself, we now see, is embedded organically, mysteriously, in thisamazing world.

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If you are not astonished almost beyond words by the turn that human knowledge of the universe has taken in the past century, you are not paying attention.

10 years before DeKoninck wrote the Cosmos, an astronomer in Pasadena, EdwinHubble, announced to the world that the Milky Way Galaxy was not the whole of creation, but a minute island in an ocean of galaxies – the current estimate, in thevisible sky, is 100 billion Milky Ways. It is hard to imagine a moment moreapparently hostile to the hope of discerning a conclusive meaning to the whole of material creation. 10 years later, as he wrote “Cosmos,” DeKoninck was aware of the brand new, and still extremely controversial, theory of Belgian priest MonsignorGeorge Lemaitre - also at Louvain - that the universe was expanding from an originalcondition of unity, at a determinate moment in the past.

So, much has been revealed by science to the philosopher. And as with all

revelations, those of science have not always been very welcome.

It was a dizzying, potentially upsetting, disorienting, time to be a Catholic naturalphilosopher. And at this, perhaps culminating, time of transformation of thescientific account of the world, the young Charles DeKoninck composed his daringaccount of the whole shebang.

De Koninck thought that modern Thomists simply didn’t know what to make of thesituation. Aristotle and St. Thomas - and Dante - understood the causal order of theworld to be embodied, literally, in a naturally eternal, spherical universe. Today, inmy own experience, it is hard for us even to imagine what it would be like to believesuch a thing. And yet we read texts of Aristotle and St. Thomas in which the mostfundamental philosophical questions are considered in light of the truth of thisremote image of the world.

De Koninck thought we are tempted by this situation to do one of two things, eitherof them bad.

Put simply, either we abandon crucial parts of the philosophy which, for our masters,appeared to be incarnate in their now surpassed image of the cosmos, or weabandon the conviction that such philosophy depended in any way for them on thatimage.

Either we conclude sadly that our hope of understanding the world passed awayalong with the celestial spheres and the four elements, or we claim that ourphilosophy survived, miraculously, unscathed from the shipwreck of the ancientimage of the world.

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De Koninck thought we could do better. In this he spoke out of the heart of the trueperennial tradition. God does not cease speaking to us through creation as we

understand it better.

Perhaps “revelation” is a loaded term for this situation? Let’s think about that.

Surely, we must say that God intended for the cosmos to be revealed to man - andby man - gradually, through history.

And when we contemplate the astonishing turn this knowledge has taken in therecent past, can we doubt that it is part of God’s providence that man should cometo be increasingly provoked by the nature of creation? Is this increased knowledgeof nature itself a principal aspect of cosmic history? Are the histories of the cosmos,

and of man, one history - and if so, can reason begin to anticipate the culmination of this history?

DeKoninck tackles all these questions in the remarkable book of his youth.

Now I’ll try to give you a first glimpse at how he does so. What follows is not somuch an argument, as a tour, of some of the principal judgements at whichDeKoninck thought natural philosophy could arrive regarding the cosmos.

So what, according to DeKoninck, is the cosmos? The short answer is that thecosmos is mobile being - that the whole of physical reality is fundamentally onecreature, moving toward its maturation, its perfection, in order to return to God.

DeKoninck thought that the much disputed evolution of biological species was, forthe philosopher, one aspect of the motion of the entire world toward God.

Writing at a time when most Catholic philosophers saw in the idea of evolution athreat to Catholic and philosophical truth, De Koninck insisted that we should wantevolution, and not just biological, but cosmic, evolution, to be true.

The idea of evolution was particularly convincing to him precisely because Divinepower is most present where created causes are most causes. An evolving cosmosis a cosmos with a nature, an intrinsic principle of motion toward its own perfection.

In such a world, the Divine wisdom gives to every creature the privilege of joining inthe work of ascent, of return to God the first principle.

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When we diminish the causal role played by creatures, we diminish the principalgood God intended in creation - the universe as one thing, having a unity of

essential, and consequently of causal, order.

But Is Evolution True?

De Koninck thought that evolution - the ascent, forming a cosmic history, of thekinds of physical substances that exist - follows necessarily from the philosophicalprinciples of Aristotle and St. Thomas:

"The philosophy of nature, being certain knowledge through causes, is able to reachonly what is essential to nature, and necessary, such as the matter/form compositionof natural substances, the contingency which this composition entails, the necessity

of evolution, [and] the necessity of humanity as the final end of this entire ascensionof the world.”

This point is worth repeating – De Koninck identified evolution, and the culminationof evolution in man, as two of the few strictly demonstrable truths of naturalphilosophy.

But what about philosophical objections to evolution, against the higher arising fromthe lower, or one kind of thing causing something specifically different? Are not thespecies of corporeal beings eternal?

DeKoninck thought we need to remember what corporeal beings are, and whatmakes them different from angels. Modern philosophical objections to evolution, hesaid:

"attribute to natural beings . . . properties (that) are specific (to) purely spiritualcreatures. Our Philosophy of Nature reeks with sins of angelism, it is often no morethan bad angelology."

What does this mean?

Without noticing it, we too often think about material substances, cosmic beings, asthough they were pure spirits, immaterial beings. We don't, of course, forget thatbodily things are, or have, bodies, but we don't think carefully enough about thedifference matter makes.

What does Aristotle teach us is the common feature of every cosmic substance?

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Composition from matter and form. DeKoninck contrasts such cosmic essence - theessences of possible corporeal substances - with angelic essences this way:

"What pure spirits have that is quite specific by opposition to cosmic beings issimplicity and perfect determination of essence."

Because the angelic essence is simple, it is received once and for all, in its entirety.Angels have no past or future. They are perfectly what they are, all at once, with nopotency to be anything else. This is good.

Cosmic beings – rocks, plants, planets, dogs - on the other hand, have essences thatare complex. And one of the principles of their complex essence is purelyindeterminate, namely, matter. Since the way things exist follows from what theyare, beings with a complex essence have a complex existence. This is, relatively

speaking, bad.

From such unfortunately complex existence - the story of our cosmic lives - arisesthe necessity of time. “A being with a complex essence must have a complex existence. That means anexistence received successively. But this successively received existence must bealways that of the same being, so it must be successively and continuously received.But successive and continuous duration is precisely the definition of time.”

So the career of a cosmic, a physical, a natural being, is inevitably spread out acrossthe dimension we call time. My now is not my then – being what I am now ismysteriously, continually, divided from what I was and from what I will be. I amcomplex in a way that I experience as a defect of unity, an imperfection in the way Iam. This is true of rocks, electrons, planets.

"Natural beings are busy in pursuit of existence, and spend time in doing so."

We are not used to thinking this way, perhaps. But from this perspective, the longersomething exists, the more its existence is dispersed, spread out.

From this perspective, DeKoninck says, “Natural subhuman species should beconsidered as more and more audacious attempts to detach the world itself from thedispersion of time, in order to dominate it from outside, instead of being borne awayby it.”

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Matter, and the correlative imperfection of corporeal forms, make the course of cosmic existence contingent as well. Only natural beings have a future, and thatfuture cannot be perfectly determined to be one way or another, because natural

beings are insufficiently determined, insufficiently real, to make that part of theirexistence which we know as their future be necessarily one way or another.

From these consequences of the matter/form composition of natural substances, DeKoninck thought we can see the necessity of evolution culminating in humanity.

But he also understood that drawing this conclusion, even from the most basicprinciples of natural philosophy, was made much easier by the modern scientificdiscovery that the cosmos has, since its origin, been developing toward structure,complexity, interiority, and life.

The vast, cooperative, complex, ordered endeavor of modern natural science toassemble what is, in effect, a cosmic "natural history," was not available to St.Thomas. It was available to De Koninck. He thought this natural history couldprovide the philosopher crucial extrinsic support for strictly philosophicalconclusions. His argument shows how natural science, although not itself achievingphilosophic certitude, can serve the philosopher.

Man must be the reason the cosmos exists, the reason matter exists, and the reasonthat all other natural forms exist.

1. Man is the reason the cosmos exists - its final explanation and its end, or goal.This can be seen in several ways.

First: no motion can be an end in itself. Movement is a going toward a good whichis not possessed. It is contradictory to think of a motion as good in itself- its veryaccount denies this possibility. So the final term of any mobile being must besomething simply immobile, something achieved - which means something abovetime. This term is man, who as a spiritual being does not pursue his existence intime, although he remains in time in so far as he is corporeal.

Further, the universe, and all its parts, have their final end in God. This means thatcreatures must be capable of a return to God. But the corporeal universe, thecosmos, can only achieve that return to God through man, for only an intellectualcreature can return to God.

For these reasons, a physical creation without man is literally unthinkable - acontradiction.

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"A world cannot exist in order to be indefinitely separated from its own existence,and indefinitely separated from itself by space. By the very fact that it is made for

intelligence, it is necessary that it be able to be present to itself; it is necessary thatan intelligence be able to restore this entire ensemble to its principle, and that theworld become a kind of hymn. In order to arrive at that, it is necessary that time bearrested and that it be immobilized, and that space be entirely penetrated andpresent. Now, that cannot be done but in an intelligence, which is as such outside of space and outside of time. And our universe will be immobilized at the momentwhen intelligence will have made its conquest."

So man and his return to the Creator are the reason for which the entire cosmosexists. Man, thought De Koninck, is the way the material creation enables itself toreturn to God.

2. In addition to being the reason for which the cosmos exists, man is also thereason for which matter exists.

The matter in every bodily being is properly understood as an appetite, a desire, forthe human form. Matter is intelligible by reference to act - but no act which remainsmingled with potency can be the principal goal of matter. As pure potency anddeterminability, matter is the same in every being. It is an appetite or desire for allforms, the lowest to the highest, but most properly it is a desire for the highest form,which is the form of man. So the human form is desired principally by all matter.

3. Man is also the reason for being of all possible natural forms, as much as he is of matter.

Natural forms are like attempts to satisfy the desire of matter for the perfectimmobility of the spiritual human form. Accordingly, each natural form is turned inthe direction of man. Infra-human forms are attempts at immobile act, as thougheach were an attempt at the human form. From this perspective the infra-humanforms are much less final states than tendencies. They are, recall, “more and moreaudacious attempts to detach the world itself from the dispersion of time.”

And so we arrive at a cosmic hierarchy.

The possible infra-human natural forms form a continuum. De Koninck thought thatonly four natural species are philosophically definable, necessary, within thiscontinuum - inorganic, plant, animal, and man. Man must be a body, he must be aliving body, a sensitive body, and he must have a rational soul. Accordingly, these

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degrees of being must exist.

All other, more specific, degrees of being may or may not exist - like particular

places one may or may not set one's foot in a walk with a determinate starting pointand a determinate goal. Animal was necessary, turtle was contingent.

So the actual infra-human forms constitute a scale, as of steps from one form to thenext, whose order has the human form as its principle.

This is not to speak yet of an order in time, but an order of natures.

"The fixity of infra-human forms is then a counterfeit fixity. We are naturallymetaphysicians, and so we incline to assimiliate the cosmic hierarchy to a series of whole numbers, and to the immobile hierarchy of pure spirits; whereas there is only

an analogy between them."

This, notice, is what De Koninck means by “bad angelology.”

But must we postulate a temporal order in the realization of this hierarchy of actualforms? What prevents the ultimate and instrinsic end of the cosmos from beingrealized from the beginning?

“From the beginning, matter is essentially ordered to man, to this intelligence thathas need of passive experience, therefore of sensation and animality, which entailvegetative life and corporeity. If matter does not have this act right away, this isbecause originally it is not sufficiently disposed and first much must be done, a workwhich consists in eliciting ever more simple quidditative determinations. The causeof this resistance of the world is nothing other than the indetermination of matter."

But we are still, necessarily, speaking of a world of fundamentally contingent events.Although intelligence must come to matter, the manner of its coming is contingent.

The particular infra-human forms have arisen from matter like cuts in a line - thereare infinitely many cuts that might be made, and no way to know in advance whichones will be made. So all infra-human forms more particular than inorganicsubstance, plant and animal, are contingent. This contingency is a universalproperty of material beings, arising from the indetermination of the matter which isan essential principle of them all. The corresponding incompleteness or imperfectdetermination of natural forms is a correlative source of the contingency of thenatural.

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Only natural science, or methodical natural history, can discern the actual path thatnature takes to arrive at man, and only after the fact.

The cosmos will, then, necessarily pursue a contingent ascent toward the ultimatedisposition of matter to receive the form of man. Evolution, De Koninck says,consists precisely in the formation of an adequate corporeal instrument to serve thehuman spirit - the least of the created intelligences. But matter is not, all by itself, the principle of motion. For there to be a determinedprinciple of motion, there must be matter, which desires, and form, whichdetermines the kind of motion by which the desired end can be pursued. Bothmatter and form are essential parts of any nature. How a composite can be changedwill follow from what kind of being it is now - from its form.

So different natural substances will be in motion toward man differently, according totheir different, contingent, degrees of perfection.

How can new natures come to be?

Generation of new substances occurs as the term of alterations in existingsubstances. Every natural composite is generated by another natural compositethrough alteration. In such generation, substantial form is elicited from matter by anagent of generation, by means of instruments. To generate is just to draw a possiblenatural form, already given in the potency of prime matter, into actuality.

So if a new form, higher than any existing corporeal or cosmic form, is to be elicitedfrom matter, it will be elicited by the causality of existing corporeal forms. Thenatural way for any substance, new kind or not, higher or not, to come to be is asthe term of alterations of existing substance.

After initial co-creation of prime matter in the original composite beings, no specialcreative act is necessary for such generation. All possible corporeal forms are givenin the potency of matter, and need only be drawn into act.

There remains the question of the principal agent. How can new beings, moreperfect than any previous cosmic beings, be generated without the directintervention of God?

De Koninck's answer is that modern scholastics have departed from St. Thomas inrejecting the purely philosophical demonstration of the existence and causality of pure spirits, of angels, who as nobler parts of the universe are related to the cosmos

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precisely as universal causes.

Having forgotten the philosophy by which we understand the difference between

angels and corporeal beings, we have made two errors. We have unknowinglyattributed angelic attributes to corporeal beings - perfect determination andsimplicity of essense. And we have forgotten that the universe includes intelligentcauses at work in the cosmos.

So pure spirits are the intelligent agent causes which, responding to the naturaldesire of the cosmos, suffice to draw out of the original composites with which thecosmos began all the forms which are necessary for it to reach its end.

Since this angelic causal power is natural, it must act on natures according to thelaws inscribed in them:

"In the ascending movement by which more perfect beings are drawn from lessperfect, the given intra-cosmic composite is only an instrument, the spiritual agentbeing the principal cause. The spiritual pressure will not draw [just] any nature outof any composite whatsoever. The instrument, although it produces an effectsuperior to itself under the influence of a superior cause, implies neverthelessessential limitations. The more perfect the substances engendered, the more willthey be in their turn more perfect instruments."

DeKoninck insists that the development of the biosphere is an increasing elevationabove time. Not metaphorically, but really, a being is lifted above the conditions of space and time in the measure that it is perfected. And this elevation, in turn,corresponds to the degree of life it has. To live is to triumph over the separations of space and time. In its local motion, with accumulated memory of its experience atprior locations, an animal labors at the great project of unification. This, he says, “isthe profound sense of the locomobility of knowers, a power that frees them from theshackles of their spatiality, and which in the final instance is at the service of theexploring intelligence.”

The necessity of humanity as the specific term of the cosmic motion does not meanthat the cosmos reached its natural perfection when man came to be. What did theevolutionary perspective imply for De Koninck about the naturally perfected cosmosthat lies ahead?

Man as knower, and as maker, tends to complete the subordination of cosmic matterto himself. This not Baconian hubris – it is the purpose of the world.

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He tends toward ubiquity by extending his presence, his sense knowledge, and hisintellectual knowledge, to the whole of the cosmos. In thus making the world moreand more simply one in his knowledge, he overcomes in himself its separation from

itself.

In man, the cosmos increasingly tends as well to transcend its separation from itself in time. Past and present are increasingly collected in the knowledge of man, andthe whole of cosmic existence thus increasingly achieves a unity which, without man,is utterly lacking.

From this perspective, the entire cosmos may be viewed as an impulse toward theperfected life of thought.

“We can consider the maturation of the cosmos as a tendency toward the thought in

which all its parts are united and lived; the cosmos thus tends to compenetrateitself, to touch itself in the intelligence of man, in which it can realize (the) explicitreturn to its First Principle.”

"What would be the ideal state that we would pursue in time and in thought?” DeKoninck asks. “I would wish to exist all at once. I would wish that all things bepresent in me all together. I would wish to contemplate them in an instant immobileand indivisible. I would wish to have a present which has no past, and which isnever separate from the future.”

But it is clear that the “man” who anticipates this culminating condition is not an “I,” but a “we.” It is humanity, not isolated men, in whom the self-possession of thecosmos will reach perfection. The perfected cosmos will be, on this view, a commongood, possessed as such by the perfected human community.

In fact, the entire cosmic ascent can be viewed as well as an ascent of love, of desirefor the good. Moved originally from without, before the coming of life, the cosmosincreasingly desires its perfection with a love from within, culminating in the rationaldesire called will. In man, the cosmos loves itself explicitly

Each individual being, of course, has its particular end. But for a lion, for example,to be all that a lion can be - for it to reach its own individual completion in theaccidental order - is not the principal end of a lion. Even the essential principles of the lion, its matter and form, are seeking spirituality, the immobile act.

The accidents which perfect the lion as lion may be all that this lion can achieve foritself as an individual toward this goal. But this is not the same as saying that the

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perfect day of hunting is all that either the matter or the form of the lion are for, allthat they, and the lion, are ordered to, all that they desire.

Nor is the species to which every individual is proximately ordered an end initself. To have an essence composed of matter and form is to have a perfectibleessence.

Nature may bring about many lions so that the leonine nature can continue to exist,and to exist well, as what it is. But this specific existence itself, spread out overindefinitely many individuals, must in turn be ordered to something higher. It isgood that lions continue to be, for a time, but nature seeks perfect lions so thatthere can, eventually, be more perfect natural beings. The whole of nature isessentially a principle of ascending movement, an intensifying desire for theculminating good.

"Lower natures serve universal nature even in generation. When a higher nature iselicited from the potency of a lower nature by equivocal generation, this eliciting is .. . always natural in the degree that it responds to the desire of the lower nature asordered to the good of universal nature and to the ultimate intrinsic end of theworld."

"Every part of the universe, even the humblest and farthest removed from the OneWho is goodness by His essence, tends naturally and more intensely toward thegood, intrinsic and extrinsic, of the universe than towards the good of its genus, of its kind, and last towards its own."

Nature, De Koninck says, is generosity, and evolution is, for the ascending natures, agift of self in the precise degree that it is a work of nature.

“All infrahuman things,” he says, “are love of and desire for man by their verytendency toward the explicit love of God.”

Accordingly, in cosmic evolution, he saw not only an attempt by the world at self-possession in knowledge - the cosmos also “tends to be united to itself and possessitself effectively in love.” The world tends toward this self-knowledge and self-love,he says, “not, doubtless, as ultimate end, but as the pre-condition of the explicitreturn to the First Principle by love.”

Cosmic development seeks perfect self-possession in preparation for self-donation toGod. And it is on man that this highest hope of the world rests.

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I want to conclude by remembering once again the importance, the dignity, that DeKoninck attributed to the natural sciences. It is unreasonable, he repeatedly said of evolution, to judge a theory by the abuses that are made of it. He certainly thought

the same of the tendency of philosophers to be ungrateful to the sciences. I expectthat Charles de Koninck thanked God fervently for the blessing of being alive whenhe was, at a time of glory and triumph for the natural sciences.

But I believe he thanked God more fervently for the blessing of having a glimpse of the higher truths which he believed that science helped the philosopher, and thetheologian, to reach. At the conclusion of the first part of “Cosmos,” entitled “TheScientific Point of View,” De Koninck articulated both the importance, and thedignity, of the scientific effort:

“Science, while being only a flat projection of what has relief and depth, enables us

to foresee the immense effort and the prodigious cost nature invests in thepreparation for the coming of man. And whether he knows it or not, everything thathappens in the world is done for him. The scale of natural species is only a scale of assault. If man is the ultimum in executione , he is nonetheless the primum inintentione . The all too poor account that we have given enables us to suspect therichness of the human being who contains virtually all the degrees of perfection of that which is below him. And it is not only in the formidable display of power that weshould look for this richness: the reaches of space, the unimaginable masses, thevertiginous speeds of astronomy are not worth a lily. But we have also seen that wehave need of the stars to understand the lily. We will only be able to understandourselves when we understand the universe. Our present is filled with the past.”

“The more profoundly we understand the world, the better we comprehend that wetouch it only with the feet, and that with our head we touch the bottom rungs of another hierarchy of which nature is only a fleeting shadow.”

Cosmos, the book, was never published. It has been suggested that this wasbecause De Koninck reconsidered some of its principal ideas. I believe that this isnot true. To mention just one, but in my view, decisive, indication of this: when, in1962, a French journal devoted an entire issue to honoring him, De Koninck chosethe central chapter of “Cosmos,” entitled “The Cosmos as Impulse toward the Life of Thought,” to be published for the first time.

But 1962 was a long time after 1936.

In my view, the likely reason the book was never published was that De Koninckdecided that those who would read it were not ready for it. In 1936, Catholic

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intellectuals who publicly embraced evolution were viewed with suspicion, at best.One of the greatest philosophical souls of the 20th century, whose understanding of the world was remarkably akin to De Koninck’s, spent his entire productive life in

various forms of banishment from the world of ideas because of those views.

Teilhard de Chardin, a great scientist, great philosopher, and holy priest, had beenbanished to China by the Jesuits because of the inconvenient popularity of his viewson cosmology, evolution, and the place of man in the world. Those views weresubstantially the same as DeKoninck’s. Aristotle fled rather than let Athens sintwice against philosophy; Descartes changed his publishing plans after seeing whathappened to Galileo. I believe DeKoninck probably took the prudent path as well.

Nietzsche speaks of the mask that great men must wear, and of the pain they bear.In 1952 Teilhard wrote to a friend from his final place of banishment, New York City,

that “the University of Laval at Quebec is about to hold a congress on Evolution.Naturally no one has thought (or dared) to ask for a contribution from me. . . .” Inthe publication of the proceedings of the conference, hosted by De Koninck, mentionis made by one of the presenters of De Koninck’s well known views on evolution, anda promise is made of their publication in a later edition of the Laval Journal. Thisnever happened. Teilhard died two and a half years later, still probably thinking thatCharles De Koninck was a rear-guard apologist for the Vatican on evolution.

It saddens me that these two champions of the view that Jesus Christ is the Lord of the Cosmos and of History never met, and it may still be worthwhile to ask why theydidn’t. It took courage to trust, in those confusing years, that natural science wasworking in service of the glory of the Lord. For having that courage, both men aremy heroes.

Ron McArthur wrote his dissertation under De Koninck on the subject of universalcausality. I propose that we would do well to recognize in Charles De Koninck –educator of our Founders and liveliest of Thomists – a universal cause of ThomasAquinas College.

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