A BRIEF NOTE ON HOW TO UNDERSTAND THE RIVER FOREST SCHOOL OF THOMISM

Draft

Philip Neri Reese, O.P.

Thomism, construed broadly as the way of doing philosophy

and theology that claims St. Thomas Aquinas as its source and

inspiration, exercised a vast degree of influence upon Catholic

thought during the 19th and 20th centuries. This paper will

attempt to situate one particular school of Thomism—called the

“River Forest School”—within the broader history of Thomism’s

20th century ascent and descent. Specifically, I will show that

although the River Forest School does have roots in earlier,

European Thomism, it is best understood as a distinct, North

American, Neo-Thomistic school.

I. The Historiography of 20th Century Thomism

Before turning to the River Forest School itself, it will be

helpful to find our historiographical bearings with respect to

20th century Thomism as a whole. Here we should cover two points:

first, the current consensus regarding the broad view of

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Thomism’s history in the 20th century; second, the markedly

different accounts of 20th century North American Thomism offered by

two contemporary historians.

At the most general level, we find widespread consensus

regarding the history of Thomism in the 20th century. This

account—exemplified by, but by no means limited to—the work of

Gerald McCool, S.J., presents the story of 20th century Thomism

as something of a two-act play. Act one could be titled “Unity”;

act two, “Plurality.” Thus, the history of 20th century Thomism

is the story of Thomism becoming Thomisms. 1 As such, we begin

with the unity that Thomism possessed in the first phase of the

Neo-Scholastic revival:

The intellectual effects of the Enlightenment and the

political effects of both the French Revolution and the

Napoleonic empire devastated the older tradition of scholasticism

that once held sway over the Church’s intellectual life. The one

brought about vast closures of Catholic seminaries throughout 1 See Gerald A. McCool, S.J., From Unity to Pluralism: The Internal Evolution of Thomism (New York: Fordham University Press, 1989) and ibid., The Neo-Thomists (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1994). See also the preface in Helen James John, S.N.D., The Thomistic Spectrum (New York: Fordham University Press, 1966), and chapter one in Brian J. Shanley, O.P., The Thomist Tradition (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 1-20.

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Europe, while the other significantly influenced the textbooks

that were used in the seminaries that remained.2

It was within this educational context that the Catholic

modernist movement—to which are attached the names of Felicité de

Lammennais, George Hermes, Anton Günther, Antonio Rosmini, and

others—arose. Moreover, outside the Church, this period saw the

ascendency of philosophers like Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel.

Historians view the revival of Thomism as a single response to

both pressures.

Whether one speaks of Canon Buzzetti in Piacenza, Joseph

Kleutgen in Germany, Sanseverino in Naples, Zeferino González in

Spain, or the Jesuits and Dominicans in Rome, the early Neo-

Thomists were united in seeing Aquinas’s philosophy and theology

as the only sure way to respond both to the modernist movement

2 In particular, James Weisheipl, O.P., a historian of medieval science, has drawn attention to the heavy influence of Descartes and Christian Wolff on thewriting of Catholic textbooks in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The way in which these manuals approached natural philosophy will become one of the majorfactors in the development of the River Forest School of Thomism. See James A.Weisheipl, O.P., “The Revival of Thomism: An Historical Survey,” lectio occassionalis given before the professors and alumni of the faculty of theology for the Studium Generale of the Order of Preachers and the seminary of Mount St.Bernard in Dubuque, Iowa, 1962. http://opcentral.org/blog/the-revival-of-thomism-an-historical-survey-weisheipl/. See also Romanus Cessario, O.P., A Short History of Thomism (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2003), 81.

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within the Church and to Enlightenment (and post-Enlightenment)

philosophy outside it.3 Even within the seminary system, however,

Neo-Thomism had to struggle to gain a foothold.4 Bit by bit, the

old scholasticism gained new ascendency, and the Neo-Thomists

finally won the laurel with the elevation of one of their own,

Joachim Pecci (Leo XIII), to the papacy. Leo’s 1879 encyclical

Aeterni Patris practically enshrined the Thomistic approach to

philosophy and theology throughout the Church.

3 Despite the geographical distance between these branches of the revivalist movement, a common lineage can be traced. Proximately, at the Collegio Alberoni Canon Vincenzo Buzzetti taught the highly influential Jesuit Sordi brothers, who in turn drew their confreres Matteo Liberatore and Luigi Taparelli to Thomism. It was the latter who won Joachim Pecci (the future Leo XIII) to the cause. At roughly the same time, Gaetano Sanseverino—who had also had contact with one of the Sordi brothers—led a revival in Naples, while the autodidact Joseph Kleutgen did the same in Germany. The Dominicans had their own Thomistic resurgence, the major figures of which were Tommaso Zigliara (in Italy) and Zeferino González y Díaz Tuñón (in Spain). The remote source for the Thomism of nearly all these men was the 1777 Summa philosophica by the Italian Salvatore Roselli, O.P., along with Antoine Goudin, O.P.’s Philosophia Juxta D. Thomae Dogmata of nearly a century before. For more on each of these figures, see Thomas J. A. Hartley, Thomistic Revival and the Modernist Era (Toronto: Institute of Christian Thought, 1971). For a detailed textual comparison showing the dependence of Buzzeti’s Institutiones Philosophicae upon Roselli’s Summa philosophica (thereby proving that the movement must be traced all the way back to Roselli), see appendix 1 of R. Enrico Ignazio Narciso, O.P., La Summa Philosophica di Salvatore Roselli e la Rinascita del Tomismo (Rome: 1966).4 One can take as examples the 1833 punitive reassignments of Domenico Sordi and Luigi Taparelli for covertly disseminating Thomistic treatises to students, or the battle that raged at the Gregorian University prior to the 1881 departure of the famous (and famously anti-Thomist) professor Domenico Palmieri (1829-1909). See Hartley, Thomistic Revival, 30-31 and 34-35, respectively.

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And yet it is precisely at this apparent high-point that

contemporary historians locate the foundation for the movement’s

future fragmentation. As Gerald McCool has noted, Aeterni Patris

proposed a two-fold task to the Thomists of the day: (1) to

engage speculatively with contemporary thought and (2) to

investigate historically the scholastic texts upon which the

movement was grounded.5 In principle, there is no reason why

these two paths of scholarship should lead in the same direction;

and practically they did not. As such, Aeterni Patris resulted in a

broad division between historical Thomism and speculative Thomism—the

former focusing on what Thomas said; the latter on what Thomas

would have said (to contemporary questions).

This duality of Thomistic approaches yielded a plurality of

Thomistic schools as the 20th century progressed. While Gerald

McCool, Helen James John, and Brian Shanley have all catalogued

the variety of Thomisms that subsequently developed, by far the

most current, complete, and detailed account of these Thomistic

schools can be found in Benedict Ashley’s The Way toward Wisdom.6 5 See Gerald McCool, From Unity to Pluralism, 32-35. See also his parallel discussion in The Neo-Thomists, 34-36.6 See Benedict M. Ashley, O.P., The Way toward Wisdom: An Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Introduction to Metaphysics (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press,

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Ashley identifies seven schools of Thomism in addition to his own

(the River Forest School):

On the side of speculative engagement with modernity, the

Transcendental Thomism of Pierre Rousselot and Joseph Maréchal

attempted to construct a Thomistic response to Kant by adopting

Kant’s own critical methodology; the Phenomenological Thomism of the

Lublin School (brought to prominence by Karol Wojtyła) took on

aspects of both personalism and phenomenology; and the more

recent movements of Analytic Thomism and Semiotic Thomism adopted the

logical precision of Anglo-American thought and contemporary

interest in meaning and signification, respectively. Also on the

speculative side—though its engagement with modernity was far

less conciliatory—we can place the “Strict Observance” Thomism of

Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange and others who continued the tradition

of the earlier neo-Thomists. On the historical side, we find both

the Existential Thomism of Étienne Gilson, which emphasized the

difference between Aquinas and his philosophical predecessors—

particularly with respect to St. Thomas’s doctrine of existence,

and the Platonizing Thomism of Cornelio Fabro and Arthur Little,

2006), 44-54.

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which emphasized the continuity between Aquinas and his neo-

Platonic predecessors—particularly with respect to St. Thomas’s

doctrine of participation.

In general, historically-minded Thomists criticized

speculatively-oriented Thomists for betraying Aquinas’s thought

(for example: Transcendental Thomism in favor of Kant, Thomism of

the Strict Observance in favor of St. Thomas’s baroque

commentators), while the latter criticized the former for robbing

Thomism of its relevance; moreover, within their own fields the

various schools worked to prove the inadequacy of the others—

particularly with respect to the proper foundation of metaphysics

as a legitimate field of inquiry.7 Thus, from the middle of the

20th century to the present, the history of Thomism has fractured

into the history of Thomisms.

At this point, we must turn our attention away from the

consensus that exists regarding 20th century Thomism’s

overarching history, and consider briefly the strikingly

different accounts given by Gerald McCool and Florian Michel of

that history in North America. For Michel, the Thomisms of North 7 See, for example, Gerald McCool, The Neo-Thomists, 157-161.

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America are basically rooted in and derivative of European

Thomisms. Thus, he structures his work around four major European

Thomists and their influence upon higher education in North

America: the story of North American Thomism is the story of

Étienne Gilson’s influence at Harvard and the University of

Toronto, M.D. Chenu’s influence upon the Dominican friars in

Canada, Charles De Koninck’s influence in Québec at the

University of Laval, and Jacques Maritain’s influence at Notre

Dame, Chicago, and Princeton.8

In contrast, Gerald McCool presents a far more nuanced

account of Thomism in North America by insisting that it had a

three-fold source. Without denying the importance of European

influences (1), he goes on to add as distinct sources (2)

religious orders with a strong philosophical tradition, and (3)

The Catholic University of America.9 With respect to the third,

McCool insists: “the philosophers at the Catholic University felt

no disciple’s awe for Gilson, Maritain, or other European

8 See Florian Michel, La pensée catholique en Amérique du Nord: Réseaux intellectuels et échanges culturels entre l’Europe, le Canada, et les États-Unis (années 1920-1960) (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2010), passim.9 Gerald A. McCool, S.J., “The Tradition of Saint Thomas in North America: At 50 Years,” The Modern Schoolman 65 (1988): 189.

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Thomists.”10 These same philosophers first began the American

Catholic Philosophical Association, and between the university

and the association, McCool affirms that “they had provided the

North American Neo-Thomist movement with its official center of

unity.”11 Thus, McCool’s account gives far more autonomy to North

American Thomism than does Michel’s. For our purposes, it is also

important to note that McCool keeps religious orders distinct

from both the “European” and “American” categories.

Given the foregoing historiographical considerations of both

general consensus and particular difference, we can now pose two

questions that will give focus to our investigation of the River

Forest School itself: (1) should the River Forest School be seen

as basically a form of historical Thomism, or of speculative Thomism?

And (2) should the River Forest School be seen as basically

continuing European Thomism across the Atlantic, or as an

autonomous North American school? Before we can answer these

questions we must turn to the history of the River Forest School

itself.

10 Gerald McCool, “The Tradition of Saint Thomas in North America,” 191.11 Gerald McCool, “The Tradition of Saint Thomas in North America,” 191.

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II. The History of the River Forest School

The undisputed founder of the River Forest School of Thomism

was the American Dominican friar, Fr. William Humbert Kane, O.P.

(1901 – 1970). Fr. Kane was ordained a priest of the St. Joseph

Province (Eastern Province) of the Dominican Order in 1927 and

studied medicine before being sent to Rome to pursue a doctorate

in philosophy. While studying at the Angelicum, he came under the

tutelage of Fr. Anicetus Fernández-Alonso, O.P. (d. 1981), a

Spanish friar and natural philosopher who eventually became the

Master of the Dominican Order from 1962 to 1974. After completing

his dissertation in 1930, Fr. Kane returned to the U.S. and began

a long career of teaching at what was then the province’s House

of Philosophy, located in River Forest, Illinois.

Though Fr. Kane’s research interests had already settled on

natural philosophy, it was during his time serving as Lector

Primarius in River Forest (1933 – 1940) that his distinctive

approach came into sharper focus. In 1936, Fr. Kane read an

article published by his former teacher, Fr. Fernández, on the

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subject of science and philosophy according to Albert the

Great.12 Convinced by Fernández’s criticisms of then-current Neo-

Scholastic accounts of the relationship between (natural)

philosophy and the contemporary sciences, Kane developed this

line of thought and passed his views on to his students.

In 1939, the Province of Saint Joseph made the decision to

split its territory in the US and erect a new “central” province

that would be based in Chicago. Fr. Kane, who was born just

outside that city and had been teaching in Illinois since

returning from Rome, chose to join this newly established

Province of Saint Albert the Great. At this point, the studium in

River Forest became the sole house of studies (for both

philosophy and theology) of the new province. Moreover, from 1940

to 1948, Fr. Kane served as the province’s Pro-Regent of Studies,

during which time he oversaw the establishment of the house in

River Forest as a Pontifical Faculty, became its first President,

and was awarded the honorary ring and biretta of a “Master in

Sacred Theology”—a unique degree conferred by the Dominican Order

12 Anicetus Fernández-Alonso, “Scientiae et Philosophia secundum S. Albertum Magnum” Angelicum 13 (1936): 24-29.

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upon scholars of the highest caliber. It was during this period

that Fr. Kane also taught his two ablest students: Raymond J.

Nogar, O.P., and Benedict M. Ashley, O.P.

On November 15th, 1951, after three years of teaching

natural philosophy in Rome, Fr. Kane returned to the States and,

together with the newly ordained Frs. Nogar and Ashley,

established the Albertus Magnus Lyceum for Natural Science at the

River Forest studium. The express purpose of this institute was

to promote dialogue between philosophers and scientists, and its

summer sessions and publications continued until 1969. From 1957

to 1965, Fr. James A. Weisheipl, O.P., an Oxford-trained

historian of medieval science, taught philosophy at the school

and became heavily involved with the Lyceum. The prolific natural

philosopher and historian of Galileo, Fr. William A. Wallace,

O.P., though a friar of the Saint Joseph Province, was also

actively involved in the work of the Lyceum. These five Thomists

formed the core of the “River Forest School.” 13

13 There are also strong similarities between the River Forest School and the “Laval School” of Thomism, though the two remained distinct. For more on that relationship, see note 103 in Ashley, The Way toward Wisdom, 469.

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The Albertus Magnus Lyceum closed in 1969, and the studium in

River Forest followed just a few years later. However, the work

of the River Forest Thomists, both in teaching and in

publication, continued to exercise significant influence in North

America. Though far reduced from what it once was, the influence

of the River Forest School can still be found in some

philosophical faculties today.

III. Understanding the River Forest School

With this brief history of the school in mind, we can now

turn to the two questions posed at the end of part one: is River

Forest Thomism historical or speculative? Is it European or

American?

In answering these questions, it will be helpful to compare

the three principal theses found in Fr. Anicetus Fernández’s 1936

article (which so profoundly influenced Fr. Kane) with the eight

theses that Fr. Ashley identified in 1991 as defining River

Forest Thomism.14 The former stand behind the development of the

14 Ashley’s account can be found in Benedict M. Ashley, O.P., “The River Forest School and the Philosophy of Nature Today,” in Philosophy and the God of Abraham: Essays in Memory of James A. Weisheipl, O.P., ed. R. James Long (Toronto: PIMS, 1991): 1-15.

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River Forest School, while the latter characterize it

retrospectively. The relationship between the two will draw out

just how much continuity there is between the school and its

historical source.

Fr. Fernández’s main concern had to do with preserving the

autonomy of natural philosophy. As we have seen, in the period

leading up to the Neo-Scholastic revival, seminary textbooks had

been heavily influenced by non-scholastic philosophy. One of the

results of this was that Aristotelian natural philosophy was cut

from the curriculum and replaced by Cartesian or Newtonian

mechanics. The aspects of it that remained (like cosmology and

philosophical psychology) we subsequently taken up into

metaphysics. As such, Fr. Fernández’s goal was to reclaim the

traditional place of natural philosophy. His three main theses

were: (1) natural philosophy is distinct, both formally and

materially, from metaphysics, (2) natural philosophy is distinct

formally, but not materially, from mathematized versions of the

natural sciences (like mathematical physics), and (3) natural

philosophy is not distinct, either formally or materially, from

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the (non-mathematized) natural sciences (like biology, chemistry,

physics, or medicine).

When we turn to Fr. Ashley’s eight theses of River Forest

Thomism, it is immediately clear that significant development has

occurred and a shift has taken place. These theses state:

1. Aquinas’s philosophy is best drawn from his

Aristotelian commentaries.

2. Aquinas should be interpreted as a convinced

Aristotelian.

3. Aquinas’s order for learning the sciences is also

necessary for establishing those sciences; thus,

metaphysics cannot be established without natural

philosophy.

4. Natural philosophy and natural science are united in

object, scope, and method.

5. Aquinas’s natural philosophy is best understood in

light of Aristotle’s logical works, especially the

Posterior Analytics.

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6. Seeming differences between contemporary natural

sciences and natural philosophy are either only

apparent differences, or are non-essential.

7. Aristotelian natural philosophy provides the tools for

resolving present-day scientific paradoxes.

8. Neither metaphysics nor theology can supply the

necessary theoretical basis for the modern sciences.

We can group these theses into two main categories. Theses

1, 2, and 5 are historical claims regarding the correct

interpretation of Aquinas’s thought. Theses 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8 are

theoretical or systematic claims about philosophy. The former

group is absent from Fr. Fernández’s approach (Ferdández focused

on the thought of Albert the Great, not Aquinas) and represents

the River Forest School’s engagement with historical claims of

Gilson’s Existential Thomism and the claims regarding Aquinas’s

Platonic-pedigree found in Thomists like Fabro and Little.

The speculative theses can be further subdivided with

respect to Fernández’s three: River Forest theses 4 and 8 map

straightforwardly onto Fernández’s third and first theses,

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respectively. Moreover, Ashley’s sixth and seventh theses, bear

strong affinities to some claims made in the course of

Fernández’s article, and at the very least can be characterized

as conclusions that follow easily from what Fernández had already

said. The third of the River Forest theses, however, demands

closer investigation.

As mentioned above, one of the major debates amongst the

different schools of Neo-Thomism in the 20th century centered on

how one should go about establishing metaphysics as a proper

field of inquiry in its own right. According to Transcendental

Thomists, the epistemological turn of modern philosophy has

closed off the older avenues for approaching metaphysics, and the

correct starting place for contemporary Thomists must be St.

Thomas’s teaching on reflexio—the human mind’s reflection upon its

own act of knowing. Thomists of a more historical vein, however,

turn to a textual consideration of Aquinas’s various redactions

of a particular text (quest. 5, art. 3 of his commentary on

Boethius’s De Trinitate) in order to highlight his teaching on

separatio (the negative judgment that X is not Y) as St. Thomas’s

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own way of establishing metaphysics.15 But for Fr. Ashley and the

River Forest School, metaphysics receives a firm foundation only

after natural philosophy has proven the existence of something

beyond its own scope (i.e., something immaterial, like God,

angels, or the immortal soul, which natural philosophy cannot

treat directly). This is the meaning of their third thesis.

Despite claims to the contrary,16 this particular thesis

does not seem to have roots in the thought of Fr. Fernández.

While he did insist that natural philosophy does not receive its

legitimacy and foundation from metaphysics, he does not appear to

have made the stronger, inverse claim that metaphysics depends

upon natural philosophy for its foundation.17 Moreover, this

thesis also appears to be absent from the works of the major

15 For a brief synopsis of the lengthy North American Thomistic debate regarding the thesis in question, see John F. Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 44-62.16 Fr. Ashley makes this claim in passing and without citation in his autobiography. See Benedict M. Ashley, O.P., Barefoot Journeying: An Autobiography of a Begging Friar (Chicago: New Priory Press, 2013), 174.17 I have been unable to find any such claim in the works of Fr. Fernández available to me. Moreover, adherents of the River Forest School such as Frs. Kane, Ashley, and Weisheipl only ever cite the one article by Fernández, wherein the third River Forest thesis is absent. If, elsewhere in his published works, Fr. Fernández had actually held the position attributed to him, it is reasonable to expect that at least one of them would have provided a citation.

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Spanish Dominican Thomists who would have influenced Fernández.18

In the writings of Fr. Kane, however, the position is explicit.19

Thus, the third River Forest thesis seems to be a claim unique to

the school.

IV. Conclusions

What conclusions can we draw from the foregoing analysis?

With respect to the first question posed—whether the River

Forest School is better seen as a form of historical Thomism or

of speculative Thomism—the answer seems to be that the school was

predominantly speculative, despite the fact that it included

medieval historians among its members. Not only do the historical

theses articulated by Fr. Ashley appear subordinate to the

school’s speculative interests, but also the actual practice of

the Albertus Magnus Lyceum (holding summer sessions for 18 For example, Fr. Zeferino González y Díaz Tuñón’s (1831-1894) highly influential three-volume Philosophia Elementaria ad Usum Academicae ac Praesertim Ecclesiasticae Juventutis lacks a section devoted to natural philosophy, instead treating of philosophical psychology in conjunction with Logic, nor does he anywhere make the claim that metaphysics presupposes a given proof from natural philosophy. I have also been unable to find any indication of this thesis in the Philosophia S. Thomae Aquinatis auribus hujus temporis accomodata of the earlier Spanish Dominican, Philippo Puigserver (fl. 1826). It is likewise absent in the works of Goudin and Roselli, both of whom served as sources for Puigserver and González.19 See William H. Kane, O.P., “The Subject of Metaphysics,” The Thomist 18 (1955): 503-521.

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scientists and natural philosophers) witnesses to the priority

the school gave to speculative engagement with contemporary

thought.

With respect to the second question—whether the River Forest

School ought to be viewed as carrying on a European tradition of

Thomism or as an autonomous North American school—our answer must

be a bit more nuanced. For many of the positions that define the

River Forest School, there is strong historical evidence to

support the claim that its speculative roots are European, at

least insofar as four of its theses either recapitulate or

develop the thought of Fr. Fernández, who, we recall, was a

Spanish friar that taught for many years in Rome. However, for at

least one of the speculative theses held by the River Forest

School there seems to be no historical evidence of the position

having roots earlier than the school itself. Given that Fr.

Ashley considered all eight theses to be definitive for River

Forest Thomism, and the fact that the thesis in question served

as a significant point of debate in North American Thomistic

literature, we must conclude in favor of autonomy rather than

continuity.

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As such, we can summarize the place of the River Forest

School within the history of 20th century Thomism thus: River

Forest Thomism was a unique, North American school of Neo-Thomism

that was speculatively focused on the importance of natural

philosophy, both for engaging with contemporary science and for

establishing the proper basis of metaphysics. On the former

point, it developed and continued an earlier line of European

Thomistic thought that sought to correct an error in post-

Enlightenment seminary textbooks. On the latter point, it offered

an answer, distinct amongst 20th century Neo-Thomist schools, to

the contemporary question regarding the validity of metaphysics.

It is my hope that, by clarifying the historical identity of

the River Forest School in this way, some contribution has been

made to understanding the network of Thomisms that arose in the

20th century, which in turn forms an indispensable part of a full

understanding of 20th century Catholic intellectual life in

general.