Etienne Gilson 1884 – 1978

Etienne Gilson was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy, the leading figure of twentieth-century neo-Thomism. He devoted his career to recovering medieval philosophy as a serious philosophical interlocutor and not merely as a historical curiosity, producing monographs on Augustine, Anselm, Bonaventure, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and Bernard of Clairvaux. He held chairs at the College de France and at Toronto, where he was a co-founder of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. His Gifford Lectures, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, defined a generation of Catholic philosophical thought.

Etienne Gilson was born in 1884 in Paris into a lower-middle-class Catholic family. He took his agregation in philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1907 and his doctorate in 1913 with a dissertation, suggested by his Jewish neo-Kantian teacher Lucien Levy-Bruhl, on the medieval sources of Descartes. Severely wounded and decorated in the First World War, he returned to a long teaching career at Strasbourg, the Sorbonne, the College de France, and from 1929 the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, which he co-founded.

His works include The Philosophy of St Bonaventure (1924), the great series of Gifford Lectures published as The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy (1932), History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (1955), Le Thomisme in many editions, Being and Some Philosophers (1949), Painting and Reality, and the late autobiographical The Philosopher and Theology. He was elected to the Academie francaise in 1946 and served briefly as a French senator after 1945.

Gilson made the existential reading of Aquinas — esse, the act of being, as the act of all acts and the principle that distinguishes Christian metaphysics from Greek and modern essentialisms — the dominant interpretation of mid-twentieth-century Thomism, and his historical work helped establish medieval philosophy as a respected academic field. He died at Cravant in Burgundy in September 1978.