Mortimer Adler and Charles De Koninck: The Search for Wisdom

Written By Fr. Cajetan Cuddy, O.P.

Mortimer Adler: A Thomistic “Fellow Traveller”

On 8 May 1935, the American philosopher, educational reformer, and psychologist John Dewey penned the following remark: “It is certainly a wonderful thing to see a go-getting Jew come out as a defender of the dogmas and sacraments of the Roman Catholic church.”1 Dewey, like many people familiar with the University of Chicago during the mid-twentieth century, observed an alarming phenomenon: conversions to the Catholic Church. Arguably, even to a secular observer, such conversions considered in and of themselves can claim little remarkability. Favorable encounters with the Roman Catholic Church regularly emerge within the narrative of western history. What troubled the American pragmatist most was not so much the fact of conversions and converts as the identity of the converter. The “Catholic evangelist” in this case was not a priest, nor a preacher, nor even an apologetical pamphleteer. Quite the contrary. The man most credited with disposing minds towards Roman Catholicism was one of Dewey’s own former students: an unbaptized Jew from Manhattan who famously described himself as a “pagan philosophical theologian”: Mortimer Jerome Adler.2

Dewey was not alone in his disapproval. In 1940 the Trotskyist writer James T. Farrell wrote a virulent essay titled “Mortimer J. Adler: A Provincial Torquemada.”3 Farrell classified Adler as a “contemporary obscurantist and obfuscator” who “writes with a pomposity that some people mistake for profundity; his scholarship is superficial; and although he is fond of using the word logic, his reasoning is weak, even shabby.” Worst of all, Farrell suggests, “With the possible exception of Bishop Manning, Adler might be called the leading American fellow-traveller [sic] of the Roman Catholic Church.”4 With cynicism, Farrell recognized the irony. Adler himself was not Catholic. Not even a Christian. Yet his students found the sacra doctrina of the Roman Catholic Church compelling. Farrell sardonically concedes that Adler “does have one characteristic in common with many of the early Christians[.] They wanted their cake and they wanted to eat it, too. The Emperor Constantine, for instance, waited until he was on his death-bed to be baptized. Adler is still delaying his baptism.”5 In short, “Mortimer J. Adler is merely a provincial Torquemada without an Inquisition.”6

These details compel us to ask a question: who was Mortimer Adler and why were his students becoming Catholics? Fortunately for us, Adler penned not one but two autobiographical accounts of his life and work.7 Moreover, he frequently contextualizes his written academic discourses within his life and subjective disposition. Adler is not shy about the personal context and motivations of his thought. The seventy-eight year old “20th-Century Pagan,” offered the following summary of his initial religious identity and upbringing:

I was born to Jewish parents… My Sunday-school attendance terminated with participation in a confirmation class and in the ceremony of confirmation. Shortly after that, impelled by adolescent rebelliousness, I fell away from religious observance and became, as was characteristic of my age, a scoffer to the point of impiety. My parents were indulgent, requiring little more than my being respectful of their feelings in public.8

Though disinclined toward things religious, Adler did not lack academic interests and passions. A gifted and precocious child, he read the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill at the age of fifteen. The book captivated the teenager, and it inspired him to pursue the intellectual life with committed vigor. Adler soon discovered Socrates, and he relates that this discovery “formed my early resolution to try to become a philosopher.”9

I read that book [the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill] as I had never read any book before. The infant Mill had been tutored by his father, James Mill, and his father’s friend Jeremy Bentham almost as soon as he was out of the cradle. When he was only three, he could read Greek, and by the time he reached five he had read the dialogues of Plato and could distinguish, so he said, between the tricks of the Socratic method and the substance of the Platonic philosophy. At five! Here I was fifteen, almost sixteen, and I had never heard of Plato before, or Socrates for that matter, and I certainly did not make their acquaintance in Greek. The list of books that young Mill read under his father’s tutelage between the ages of seven and eleven included many of the books that John Erksine had assembled for a special honors seminar that I was to participate in four years later when I reached my junior year at Columbia College.10

Fortunately, Adler’s philosophical development did not terminate in Mill and Bentham. His interests eventually matured and he turned to perennial wisdom. One notes that theological questions in particular drew the attention of the young thinker. “In sharp contrast to the superficiality of my involvement in religious worship, Jewish or Christian, is my intense, profound, and lifelong involvement in the study of theology. It began in the early 1920s, when, as an undergraduate at Columbia University, I first read Aristotle’s Metaphysics and became fascinated with the argument for God’s existence in Book XII.”11 The founder of the Lyceum became the vector for introducing Adler to the writings and thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. Ralph McInerny did not find this Aristotelian introduction to Thomism surprising: “Adler’s affinity for Aristotle led him inexorably to Thomas Aquinas.”12 Adler began to study the thought of the Angelic Doctor at the age of twenty, shortly after his graduation from Columbia. Narrating his initial encounter with the Summa Theologiae in English translation, Adler recalls:

I can remember my amazement on beholding twenty-one uniformly bound red buckram volumes of the Summa Theologica on the shelf [of the Benzinger Brothers store]. I don’t know what I expected, but certainly not that. Without knowing about the structure of the work or the significance of its division into their major parts, I decided to buy volume 1, the title page of which bore the subtitle “Treatise on God.” It cost two dollars and a half, a price which now seems as amazing to me as the size of the Summa did then.13

At that moment, Adler discovered the subject and the teacher who fascinated him for the rest of his life. He considered his initial introduction to the Angelic Doctor as nothing less than “cataclysmic” in importance.14 “The intellectual austerity, integrity, precision, and brilliance of that book [the Summa Theologiae], incomparably different from all the philosophical books I had read up to that time, and much more exciting to me, put the study of theology highest among all of my philosophical interests.”15 Adler would return to the bookstore on subsequent Saturdays, purchasing the remaining treatises, volume by volume, week after week.16 From that point on, theology emerged as the “subject of consuming interest in my life.” When recounting his sixty-plus years fascination with Thomism, however, Adler outlines the stages of his philosophical and theological development in a rather peculiar way. What commenced as an interest in sacred theology eventually mutated into a preoccupation with the “natural” (as sharply distinct from the supernatural) and then transmuted “finally [into a] purely philosophical theology as well as [an] anti-theological philosophy.” Adler admitted the unusual direction of this kind of speculative movement when engaging with Thomism.17

Even if unusual in its development, Adler’s interest in the Angelic Doctor continued to grow, and he recounts that over “the next twenty or thirty years, I read all the treatises in Part One of the Summa Theologica and many of the later parts, dealing with moral theology, but not all of the Summa.”18 One observes with interest Adler’s specific attention to the Secunda Pars—the middle and moral part of the Summa Theologiae. Largest in size, this section considers human happiness and the theologal life (see Catechism of the Catholic Church §2686).19 Even though Adler read St. Thomas’s account of what constitutes the good and happy life, even though he no doubt studied the treatise on grace(ST I-II QQ. 109-114) such engagement seemingly did not move his inquiry from the level of external and textual dialectic to formally supernatural and speculative contemplation that accompanies the amata notitia of divine friendship.20 Adler readily concedes this point. “Since at this time I had no religious faith, my preoccupation with theology was entirely philosophical, and I did not yet fully understand the relation of the three domains of theology: sacred, natural, and philosophical theology.”21

After earning a doctorate in psychology from Columbia University, Adler received an invitation from his friend, Robert Maynard Hutchins, recently appointed president of the University of Chicago, to teach philosophy in the institution’s law department.22 Adler’s appointment engendered controversy, to say the least.23 Together, Hutchins and Adler fashioned a two-year course of study devoted to the “Great Books of the Western World.”24 Following a dialectical pedagogy inspired by Socrates, Adler and Hutchins fostered an educational model imbued with the great thinkers and ideas of western thought.25 Within this context, Adler once again returned to the writings of the Angelic Doctor, much to the chagrin and indignation of his academic colleagues. One historian relates that Adler’s “espousal of Aristotelian philosophy, and his agile defense of the version of Aristotelianism set forth in the bulky pages of Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, seemed perverse and, indeed, incredible to most everyone he encountered at Chicago.”26 Such methods and emphases repudiated the preexisting structures of cultured academia. His fellow faculty members “were simply flabbergasted by the spectacle of a nonobservant Jew demanding that the official philosophy (since 1870) of the Roman Catholic Church be taken seriously and explored on its own terms.” Nonetheless, “this was the position Adler took up when he showed up at Chicago; and his argumentative skill, combative temper, and connection with Hutchins soon made it impossible for others to overlook his surprising intellectual posture.”27 Thomism, even in the hands of an admittedly unconventional proponent, emerged as a potent force.

Although ostensibly impervious to the movements of grace himself, Adler’s classes began to influence students on affective and intellectual levels. More than a few of his students became Catholic.28 As noted earlier, this perplexed and alarmed many people. Adler among them. He never intended to work as Catholicism’s apologist and often credited other members of the University of Chicago’s intellectual community for the growing number of Catholic converts.29 The following paragraph extracted from a letter written by one of Adler’s most brilliant graduate students vividly adumbrates the situation:

The thirties were a time of extraordinary intellectual ferment at Chicago, in large measure due to Hutchins and Adler. Their stance ran counter to the prevailing campus culture and was propaedeutic so far as Catholicism was concerned. From them I learned to question the received wisdom of the semanticists, psychologists, sociologists, cultural relativists; to respect the intellectual rigor of the Greeks and the medievals; to suspect the reductionism of the physical and biological sciences; to read a text in its own terms, define a concept, and analyze an argument. I cut my intellectual teeth so to speak on all the big questions: the nature of language, knowledge, truth; the nature of man…, of society, of justice, the existence of God. The Hutchins-Adler training was a necessary but not sufficient condition for conversion. It made Catholicism intellectually respectable, but it did not make anyone become a Catholic. A much more powerful and intimate witness is necessary, I think, to enable people to act as contrary to our upbringing and education as our little group did.30

Regardless of Adler’s express intention, however, his perceived role in these conversions only heightened the ever-growing tension between him and the rest of the University of Chicago.31

Adler referred to the years between 1938 and 1945 as his publicly “Thomistic Period.”32 Furthermore, Adler happily maintained that his Thomism subsisted in an exclusively intellectual sphere without any ecclesial accouterments. He professed allegiance to a non-Catholic Thomism. “Without becoming a Roman Catholic, I had become a Thomist in philosophy as a result of my intensive study of the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas.”33 Nonetheless, amidst the festering tensions within the University of Chicago, Adler found personal solace among the intellectuals in the Catholic academic societies and their journals.34 In his memoirs, Adler highlights his contributions to the Dominican speculative publication The Thomist.35 Among the Catholics, his relationship with the Dominicans in particular grew into something akin to a genuine friendship. “During these [Thomistic] years and also in the following decade, I was a frequent guest at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C.”36

Adler’s profile continued to expand. During this period, he published his classic text How to Read a Book: The Art of Getting a Liberal Education, a work essentially articulating his theories about education and learning, refined by semesters of application in his Chicago classroom.37 Adler certainly enjoys standing in the North American commentatorial echelon of “public intellectual.” As summarized by Ralph McInerny: “Mortimer Adler became a public philosopher, an intellectual who dared to engage in the great conversation all his fellow citizens, in the conviction that common sense is indeed common.”38 His work paid off. Literally. Indeed, as McInerny once observed: “Mortimer has borne with Stoic dignity the burden of being the most highly paid philosopher in the United States.”39

In the spring of 1938, Adler wrote to and received a reply from a Canadian philosopher and theologian who likewise began studying the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas at an early age. This man, however, was thoroughly Catholic. His name was Charles De Koninck.

Charles De Koninck: A Thomist

The Canadian Thomist philosopher and theologian Charles De Koninck was born in the small town of Torhout in West Flanders near Bruges on 29 July 1906.40 When the young Belgian was eight, his family immigrated to the United States and settled in Detroit, Michigan where De Koninck’s father, Louis, worked as a contractor.41 A middle child, De Koninck had two brothers and a sister. De Koninck’s mother, Marie, died three years after the family settled in the States.

In 1921 De Koninck’s father sent his son back to Belgium to complete his education at the Collège Notre Dame in Ostende. De Koninck suffered peculiar and debilitating health difficulties throughout most of his early life.42 He distinguished himself as a gifted student with a penchant for the sciences, Latin, and literature—particularly Shakespeare, “whom he would ever love to recite from memory and held [to be] ‘the best in all modern literature.’”43 Although adroit in the arts and the humanities, his scientific interests remained paramount. This fascination with the things of nature influenced the direction of his study and future work. “He liked later to say that he owed in large part his discovery of philosophy to a highly competent physics professor.”44

From the ages of nineteen through twenty-two, he “spent three years reading philosophy (from 1925 to 1928) with the Belgian Dominicans, where the Reverend [Mannes] M. Matthijs became his tutor and encouraged him to pursue his studies as far as the doctorate.”45 His studies with the Dominicans instilled and solidified a deep love for the Angelic Doctor that would shape and permeate the remainder of his life.46 “Charles De Koninck wrote that as a philosopher he had but one desire, to be a faithful disciple of St. Thomas Aquinas.”47 Like the contemplative from Aquino himself, the “Grace of the Word” that St. Dominic introduced into the world attracted De Koninck from an early age, and he even entered the Dominican novitiate.48 Unfortunately, his poor health prohibited him from making vows in the Order of Preachers.49 He continued studies as a layman and finished a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Louvain (summa cum laude) in 1934, submitting a doctoral dissertation entitled “La philosophie de Sir Arthur Eddington” written under the directorship of Professor Fernand Renoirte.50 On 27 April 1933, Charles De Koninck married a young woman named Zoé Decruydt. They would have twelve children.51

The future cardinal Maurice Roy invited De Koninck to teach a semester of philosophy at Laval University in Quebec City immediately after he had completed his doctorate. An engaging lecturer, De Koninck quickly elicited the respect of faculty and students alike. “Charles’ teaching prowess prompted Laval to renew the invitation for another semester, and the next year to offer him a regular professorship, which was in effect to last the rest of his life.”52 Soon students from all over North America sought the instruction of the Canadian Thomist. Ralph McInerny—perhaps the most famous of De Koninck’s many doctoral students—recounted that he was “the best Thomist I ever met,” adding, “that, of course, means the best philosopher.”53 McInerny recounts his initial exposure to De Koninck while studying philosophy at the University of Minnesota. The Canadian’s charisma and speculative acumen captivated the young student. “I had heard Charles De Koninck when he came to St. Paul to lecture and saw a living model of what I wished to become.”54 McInerny moved to Quebec and enrolled at Laval University.55 The longtime Notre Dame professor shares a charming description of the De Koninck he knew during his doctoral studies:

De Koninck was a short, plump man who sat when he lectured, beaming at his audience, on the alert for the response to what he said. He ended almost every sentence with an interrogative ‘eh?’ He once wrote that his ambition was simply to be a faithful student of his master Thomas Aquinas. Discipleship seems to have either of two results. The disciple never emerges from what the master had accomplished and is content to retail it. Or, and this was the case with De Koninck and other giants of the Thomistic Revival, Thomas was followed because his staring points were the inevitable ones, and by acknowledging and seeing where they led, one could go far beyond the text of the master while at the same time claiming that what one said was simply an organic extension. It is only in this second way that a tradition can live. And Charles De Koninck was the liveliest Thomist I have ever known.56

De Koninck loathed any efforts to reduce Thomism to mere intellectual divertissements or cerebral calisthenics. St. Thomas Aquinas contemplated the real in search of the true—and a personal realism characterized De Koninck’s Thomism. McInerny recalls: “Although there is a significant body of written work and many of the lectures found their way into print, De Koninck’s principal influence on me was person to person. The better I got to know him, the more I admired and wished to emulate him.”57 Another former student further remarks: “Few, to my mind, have been so successful in understanding and experiencing, so to speak, the fruitful correlation between the arts and the sciences, on the one hand, and philosophy, on the other, between philosophy and theology, doctrine and life, private contemplation and public action.”58

De Koninck maintained the integrity and the sublimity of the truth. He rejected the balkanization of academia in general and of Thomism in particular. For the Laval professor, no part of human experience—intellectual, moral, personal, societal—lay outside of truth’s reach and influence. In a word, “He [De Koninck] appears before us as an outstanding representation of the philosophia perennis and a living, solid refutation of the current charge that St. Thomas, the man and the idea, is irrelevant to our times.”59 Charles De Koninck knew the importance of authentic wisdom.60 His thinking was truly sapiential.61 And this sagacity perhaps appears most clearly in De Koninck’s Mariological treatises.62 For the Canadian Thomist, searchers of truth must look to the Blessed Virgin Mary in order to consider the fullness of wisdom in its radical depth and contemplative sublimity.63

A Letter from Laval

One observes striking parallels between Mortimer Adler and Charles De Koninck. First, both men enacted certain educational reforms. Adler grew in renown because of his efforts to promote the “Great Books Program,” and for his influence upon the “New Program” of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland.64 De Koninck also encouraged educational reforms, albeit, of less notoriety. Institutional history attests to De Koninck’s “interdisciplinary” educational efforts at Laval University.65 Moreover, his work and legacy inspired the founding of Thomas Aquinas College, in California.66 A dialectical and dialogical form characterized the pedagogy of both professors.67 Each philosopher was deeply committed to the instruction of students.

North American philosophers and theologians quickly recognized the depth and insight of De Koninck’s thought.68 His fame and influence spread. Unsurprisingly, Adler solicited De Koninck’s evaluation of his work.69 A correspondence ensued between them. Their exchange culminated on 15 June 1938, when De Koninck replied to letters from the Chicago philosopher regarding twentieth century philosophy in general and Adler’s recent book What Man Has Made of Man in particular.70 No mean missive, De Koninck’s document runs almost ten thousand words in length.71 The letter’s existence quickly became known among Thomists in North America.72 De Koninck generally disapproved of the wide promulgation of something so transparent and personal.73 Indeed, the author introduces the letter by acknowledging, “I am really opening to you [Adler] a private drawer.”74 It offers readers a glimpse into the mind of one of the Thomist masters of the twentieth century in unveiled sapiential authenticity.

De Koninck begins the letter by giving Adler high praise:

I must say that I read you with greater pleasure than any of our contemporary authors on those subjects. Notwithstanding that I feel you have not enjoyed the rigorous schooling of a scholastic. What you have done without this is the more admirable. Even this is a gross understatement, for men like yourself ‘quasi ab ipsa veritate coacti’ [‘compelled, so to speak, by the truth itself’ (ST I, Q. 11, A. 3)] and drawn to perennial philosophy by its intrinsic value are what we need today.75

However, De Koninck also expresses his general observations about contemporary thought with transparency. “I am always conscious of the utter impossibility of meeting modern philosophers on a common ground. They are essentially dogmatic. They are forever telling us. They are like poets who are not to be interrupted.”76 The prime reason for this lack of common ground surprises no one familiar with Aristotle and St. Thomas: “They [modern philosophers] cannot stay on first principles.”77 De Koninck blames the devaluation of principles on the failure to distinguish properly art and science:

In science the object is first principles, it is the measure. On the contrary ‘principium artis est in faciente’ [Commentary on the Metaphysics (Lib. 6 l. 1 n. 10)].78 ‘In scientiis practicis finis est quasi constructio ipsius subjecti’ [Commentary on the Posterior Analytics (Bk. 1, L. 41, n. 7)].79 In perennial philosophy, the object is the dictator. In modern philosophy, the philosopher is the dictator. Intellectual dictatorship is the very essence of modern philosophy. How can we converse with dictators in philosophy? We cannot even indulge in dialectics. We have no common object. The philosopher makes the object, all he can do is tell us.80

De Koninck does not deny the importance of dialectics. Certainly, it plays a vital role in the pursuit of wisdom.81 “Dialectics is essential as an introduction to philosophy,” because “we must prepare the terrain [via dialectics] in order to determine the problems and definitions.” 82 Nonetheless, he rejects the reduction of philosophy to mere dialectics. Indeed, De Koninck suggests that a form of dialectical materialism governs the day: “a purely artistic conception of reality, a complete denial of speculation and nature. In so far as modern philosophy has enclosed itself in the field of art, it has deliberately cut away the very possibility of communication. It is a philosophy that negates itself as philosophy.”83

The true philosophers “have no elections to win; they do not have to take seriously any one who happens to open his mouth to speak, as politicians must do. They are concerned primarily and formally with speculative truth.”84 Their interests lie exclusively in reality. In contrast “the lines along which modern philosophy develops has nothing to do with this subject-matter. It starts from a desire to make, not to know: the unmade is synonym of unknowable.” De Koninck traces this critical difference back to the Cartesian inversion of the speculative and the practical: “Going back to Descartes, we may consider him as the true father of all modern philosophy in that he made philosophy a practical science, that is an art or prudence: ‘au lieu de cette philosophie spéculative qu’on enseigne dans les écoles, on en peut trouver une practique par laquelle . . . nous pourrions . . . nous rendre comme maîtres et possesseurs de la nature.’”85 The wise man must not confuse the speculative and the practical.86 He reminds Adler of the sapiential center of St. Thomas’s contemplation: “Intellectus speculativus extensione fit practicus.”87 Doing and making are indeed important, but the practical flows out of—and depends upon—the real in all of its speculative purity and splendor.88 If reality is forgotten, deleterious results follow. “Philosophers have adopted the attitude of the artist. When they do argue, they do so like art critics, not like men of science.”89 Thus, the communication of modern philosophy is not a “communication in science, but only communication of products which have their principle not in the object, but in the maker.”90 This has gravely harmed the contemporary mind to such a degree that philosophers have forgotten the importance of the real: “The modern mind lacks the natural quality of the philosopher, the ability to grasp the transcendental import of first principles, of the ‘est’ and ‘non-est.’ It has the obscure confidence of the animal. In fact, it does not need philosophy. Its actual needs are so easily satisfied; the nature of the things it wants is essentially platitudinous.”91

De Koninck then proceeds to contrast the Cartesian project with the way towards wisdom:

The thinking of modern philosophers, starting with Descartes is more like a transitive action than immanence. They must have an audience. The ‘aliis tradere’ is prior to ‘contemplari’. Without an audience there would be no certainty and no reason for philosophy. Notwithstanding his much affect isolation and his cogito, monsieur Descartes never for a moment thought for the sake of thinking. He really abhorred solitude: ‘Je crois qu’il serait très nuisible d’occuper souvent son entendement à les mediter (les principes métaphysiques)’. This fear of transcendency pervades all his writings. In his meditations there is not the faintest trace of meditation. He always describes his philosophy as invented ‘comme utile à l’humanité’, ‘pour l’honnête homme’; ‘Pour moi, je n’ai jamais presume que mon esprit fût en rien plus parfait que ceux du commun’. Nonetheless, when he writes ‘mon dessein n’est pas d’enseigner ici la method que chacun doit suivre pour bien conduire sa raison’, he is acting like a politician. All his thought is governed by an initial preoccupation to teach.92

This clear reference in Latin to the Summa Theologiae, II-II Q. 188, A. 7 warrants further consideration: “Sicut enim maius est illuminare quam lucere solum, ita maius est contemplata aliis tradere quam solum contemplari” (“For even as it is better to enlighten than merely to shine, so is it better to give to others the fruits of one’s contemplation than merely to contemplate”). Friars preachers never grow weary of pointing to this beautiful articulation of the grace of the Word St. Dominic introduced into the world.93 This contemplative illumination informs the study of the Dominican, transforms the life of the Dominican, and conforms the death of the Dominican. Moreover, whenever there is a Thomistic discussion of “light” and “illumination,” one immediately thinks of the angelic hierarchy.94 The angels herald in their very being the speculative purity of contemplation. The inversion of the practical and the speculative, even for the angels, is deadly:

The modern mind is a negation of open-mindedness: the negation of intellectus. It is obsessed by the demon of fabrication. It would do as the dark angels whose sin consisted in an effort to shape and lift themselves to the beatific vision. They wanted an object only in so far as they could build it through their own power. Their sin was against science. They chose the primacy of art.95

De Koninck begins to speak very personally to Adler towards the end of the letter:

One cannot be both modern (always in the vulgar sense of the word) and open-minded, i.e. objective. Objectivity is an innate quality of the intellect. It cannot be acquired. It is that perfection of the intellect which recognizes an object. The object itself does not make the objectivity of the mind. You personally are open to Thomism, I should say that if you always were, it is not because Thomism has opened your mind. Millions are in [the] presence of [the] same object, but they do not heed it. Aristotle and Thomas are there to be recognized. I think that the first and main thing we have to do in their respect is to keep and develop them there as something that can always be recognized by those who look for the object. This is where modern scholastics have failed. When they are not considering traditions themselves as the formal object (instead of using them for an object), they have turned to the moderns with the zeal of an apologist: they too are above all makers. I am convinced that the men who have actually rendered the greatest service have always remained hidden to the modern world, to their time: they are the Cajetans, Banez[s], John’s of s.Thomas [sic]. As speculative minds they could not have done more without contaminating themselves.96

The theme of the “hidden life” of Thomism reoccurs throughout the letter. “I think Thomism triumphs when it lives in our world today. But I am also convinced that its life must be hidden, because it is immanence in a world that has eyes only for pure extrinsicism. Thomism is not ‘foris’. There is a mass of Thomists today. But in this, because it is a mass, there is ‘malum ut in pluribus’: Thomism has reached therein one of its most profound forms of deformation.” Lest he sound too strong, however, De Koninck offers a softening clarification:

By this I do not mean that we should hide it: I mean that ipso facto it becomes hidden as we approach it more profoundly. The purer our Thomism is, and the better we speak of it, the less it is heard. I derive the greatest pleasure from reading you: it is to me recognition. But at the same time, thinking of the mass of your readers, I realize how futile you must sound in their ears: what you then say becomes impossible. In this mass I include your scholastic readers. I have read appreciations of your work in scholastic periodicals. I think that many of the criticisms on purely technical points are correct. But I still have to read a compte rendu that seizes the spirit of your writings. The best of what you offer is completely overlooked. And if you are right, it could not be otherwise. But I also feel that you do not realize this: that you entertain certain vain hopes. Having studied in strictly scholastic milieux during a period of fifteen years, and now working therein, I think that I have had a certain experience to support this opinion.97

De Koninck was interested in being. His whole life was ordered by and towards the truth. The primacy of being and truth come before all else and informs all else. “I continually use the term ‘Thomism’. Though I do not identify Thomism and philosophy or theology, as a Thomist I consider it the closest approximation to philosophy: it is the only school in the path of philosophy. It will keep casting off waste matter as it approaches philosophy. Non-Thomist philosophy is not what is being assimilated, but what is being cast off in the process of assimilation of the object. I believe no more in plurality of forms in the science of philosophy than in natural substance. Nor can Thomism change its substantial form as it grows.”98

After the Letter

Adler appreciated De Koninck’s lengthy missive.99 Adler considered De Koninck one of the few Thomists with whom he could engage in profitable discussion.100 The Catholic Thomists, in turn, were praying for him.101 “I shall look forward with keen interest to your article in the Thomist. Even tho [sic] the gentiles are not convinced, nor yet people like Muller-Thym, yet Adler and those who pray for him need your assistance. One remark he made to me shows what kind of fellow he is: ‘In all this I realize that I must be very careful not to be driven into any faults of character, such as cynicism, bitterness, etc.’”102 Many of the philosophers and theologians in De Koninck’s circles thought Adler was naive.103 Adler also tended to innovate on matters Thomistic.104 Most of Adler’s Thomist interlocutors believed that he was still a work in progress—a work with tremendous value, but still very much in motion.105

On 13 February 1965, De Koninck collapsed in his room at the Columbus Hotel on the Via della Conciliazione, in Rome.106 This marked his second and final heart attack. He was only fifty-eight years old. “It was a Saturday morning [when he died]; he had just completed his task for the subcommittee [on contraception], had lectured the night before at the Canadian College in Rome, and was scheduled for a private audience with Paul VI on Monday.”107 He died during the final year of the Second Vatican Council while serving as a theological peritus to his bishop. His was a unique privilege: “he was the only lay theologian fully admitted to the council.”108

Time continued. Adler, although still resistant to the movements of grace, recounts his growing openness to Christianity. Writing in 1980, he remarks:

Since my youth I have had little or no involvement in the ceremonies and practices of the Jewish religion or in Jewish religious life. In later years, through marriage, I have become involved in the religious life of my family, at least to the extent of frequently attending, with my wife and children, Sunday services in a Protestant Episcopal church and becoming acquainted with its liturgy, its Thirty-nine Articles, and its Book of Common Prayer. There have been moments in my life, during my late thirties and early forties and later in my early sixties, when I contemplated becoming a Christian—in the first instance a Roman Catholic, in the second [instance] an Episcopalian. Suffice it to say, I have not done so. I have remained the pagan that I became when I fell away from the religion of my parents.109

The philosopher strove to remain detached in his inquiry and thought. “It was through my study of philosophy, not through religious observances and rituals, that I became interested in God—as an object of thought, not as an object of love and worship. It was the God of Aristotle and of Spinoza, not the God of Judaism and Christianity.”110 Indeed, “What for Aquinas were his articles of Christian faith, I was willing to take as postulates or assumptions that called upon him or anyone else to engage in philosophical thought for the sake of discovering their implications or consequences. What for Aquinas was philosophy serving as the handmaiden of theology in the process of faith seeking understanding was for me just a philosophical exercise, as exacting in its demands on the intellect and as rigorous as higher mathematics.”111

Things change, however. “I am sure that many of my Roman Catholic friends wondered why I did not become a Roman Catholic, but with the one exception of Father Robert Slavin of the Dominican House of Studies, none of them ever broached that question explicitly in conversation with me.”112 Why not become Catholic? Indeed, this was a question Adler posed to himself. “There were moments in the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s that I put that question to myself. As I look back at the answers that I then gave myself, I think the reasons I gave were superficial. They cloaked my disinclination to become religious. I simply did not wish to exercise a will to believe; and from what I understood about faith as a supernatural, theological virtue, which was a give of divine grace, my will was not moved by faith.”113 Here one observes something of an intriguing oddity. A self-admitted pagan reflecting upon what Thomists have come to call “physical premotion.”114 When famous convert to Catholicism Clare Boothe Luce “made strenuous efforts to convert me,” Adler responded by citing the difference between “dead faith” and “living faith”: “I told Clare that simply being able to understand Thomist theology was what Aquinas called dead faith. It was not enough to carry one into a Christian religious life.”115

Mortimer Adler concludes his second memoir with a touching chapter entitled “The Blessings of Good Fortune” in which he recounts a life “lesson” he learned early on from Aristotle.116 “Whether or not we succeed in having lived a good life is not entirely a matter of free choice and moral virtue. Virtue is certainly a necessary condition; it may even be the most important factor; but by itself it is not sufficient. The other necessary, but also insufficient, condition is having good fortune.”117 If Charles De Koninck were still alive, we might imagine him—smile on his face—opening the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas and pointing to a passage from the Prima Pars: “Nothing hinders certain things happening by luck or by chance, if compared to their proximate causes: but not if compared to Divine Providence, whereby ‘nothing happens at random in the world,’ as Augustine says” (ST I, Q. 116, A. 1, ad 2).118 The reason St. Thomas Aquinas articulates the moral—the happy—life according to the pattern of virtue is located in the fact that we, first and foremost, participate in the eternal law of God. The eternal law is simply how God knows the world to be. All real things necessarily fall under his knowledge, causality, and order. In other words, what Adler attributes to “fortune” St. Thomas and St. Dominic would allocate to God’s providence. It is this providential—ordered—vision that constitutes wisdom.

Late in life, Adler wrote an essay entitled “A Philosopher’s Religious Faith.”119 He had, by this time, become an Episcopalian.120 His friend and colleague, the late Ralph McInerny, perhaps offers the best summary and description of the movements of grace in Adler’s life and thought:

Adler was regularly asked how he could know so much about Catholic theology without accepting it as true. He gave what he called a Thomistic answer. He had not been given the grace of faith. But that, one might say, is a Calvinist rather than Thomist reply. The grace of faith is not offered to a select few and withheld from the rest. It is offered to all, but each must accept it himself. Eventually, Adler became a Christian. Finally, he became the Roman Catholic he had been training to be all his life. That a number of prominent notices of Adler’s death failed to mention this central event in his life is a distressing sign of how peripheral religion has become for many in our time.”121

McInerny concludes his tribute with a very touching anecdote from the end of the Adler’s life:

A few years ago a symposium on Adler’s work was held in Aspen. Many papers were given, and Adler listened to them all. He was already very old, indeed he had to be helped into the seminar room by two of his sons. It was an occasion when he might have felt posthumous. But he never could be simply a third person; he had to be an interlocutor. The high point of the meeting was Adler’s detailed response to all the papers. Speaking extemporaneously as always, it was clear that he hadn’t missed a word and that the old feistiness was still there. But the truly memorable moment came when he spoke of the transition in his own life from being intellectually convinced of the existence of God to loving the God that he knew. The philosopher’s God became incarnate in Christ, and finally Adler saw that his long quest for wisdom could best be seen as a kind of Imitatio Christi.122

Finally, the American philosopher and public intellectual moved beyond the level of mere theoretical dialectics to the loving contemplation—indeed, the amata notitia—of divine friendship. Mortimer Jerome Adler, at long last, was fully Thomist. He “lived as a Catholic the last year of his life.”123

  1. John Dewey to M.C. Otto, 8 May 1935, copy in file 7, box 175, Sidney Hook Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford, California; cited in John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003), 193.↩︎

  2. Mortimer J. Adler, A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror: Further Reflections of a Philosopher at Large (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1992), 274. See William H. McNeill, Hutchins’ University: A Memoir of the University of Chicago 1929-1950 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 35. Adler admitted to being a difficult student to have in class: “I wrote adversely critical letters to John Dewey when I attended a course of lectures he gave after he returned from China. They were sufficiently annoying and frequent to cause Professor Dewey to have his assistant ask me to refrain from continuing my letter writing” (Adler, A Second Look, 11).↩︎

  3. This essay is included in James T. Farrell, The League of Frightened Philistines and Other Papers (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1947), 106-109.↩︎

  4. Farrell, “Mortimer J. Adler: A Provincial Torquemada,” 106. Farrell goes on: “Adler and his co-thinking Catholic philosophers all sing the same tune: Modern thought is heretical, and only they possess the true belief; the true belief is self-evident; because of the influence of heretics in the last several centuries, modern man is unhappy, modern man is in chaos, and modern thought is in a blind alley; man must believe as they believe… None of these thinkers, Catholic and fellow travellers, have any originality in mind. They run in pat and settled grooves, and they mix up vagueness and sentimentality with appeals for authoritarianism” (107-108).↩︎

  5. Farrell, “Mortimer J. Adler: A Provincial Torquemada,” 109.↩︎

  6. Farrell, “Mortimer J. Adler: A Provincial Torquemada,” 108.↩︎

  7. Mortimer J. Adler, A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror: Further Reflections of a Philosopher at Large (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1992). Mortimer J. Adler, Philosopher at Large: An Intellectual Autobiography (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1977).↩︎

  8. Mortimer J. Adler, How to Think about God: A Guide for the 20th-Century Pagan (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1980), 18-19. Adler records that the writing of this book was a “crucial step in my [eventually] becoming a religious Christian” (Second Look, 271).↩︎

  9. Mortimer J. Adler, Philosopher at Large, 1.↩︎

  10. Adler, Philosopher at Large, 5.↩︎

  11. Adler, How to Think About God, 19.↩︎

  12. Ralph McInerny, “Memento Mortimer,” First Things 117 (November 2001): 14-16 at 15.↩︎

  13. Adler, Philosopher at Large, 82.↩︎

  14. Adler, Philosopher at Large, 83.↩︎

  15. Adler, A Second Look, 264.↩︎

  16. “Week after week I went down to Benzinger Brothers and bought another volume” (Adler, Philosopher at Large, 83).↩︎

  17. “In that respect, as the pagan author of this book I am probably different from most of its pagan readers” (Adler, How to Think about God, 20).↩︎

  18. Adler, A Second Look, 265.↩︎

  19. See Romanus Cessario, O.P., Christian Faith and the Theological Life (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996).↩︎

  20. See ST I, Q. 93, Art. 9, ad 4. See Romanus Cessario, O.P., “Sonship, Sacrifice, and Satisfaction: The Divine Friendship in Aquinas and the Renewal of Christian Anthropology,” Letter & Spirit 3 (2007), 71–93; Jerome Wilms, O.P., Divine Friendship (Dubuque, IA: The Priory Press, 1958).↩︎

  21. Adler, A Second Look, 265. Of course, Adler’s parsing of theological distinctions is rather peculiar in light of Aquinas’s own distinction between natural theology and what we could call sacred theology.↩︎

  22. A fascinating figure in his own right, several studies document the life and legacy of Robert Hutchins: Harry Scott Ashmore, Unseasonable Truths: The Life of Robert Maynard Hutchins (Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Co., 1989); Mary Ann Dzuback, Robert M. Hutchins: Portrait of an Educator (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1991); Milton Mayer, Robert Maynard Hutchins: A Memoir (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993); Edward Shils, "Robert Maynard Hutchins," American Scholar 59, no. 2 (1990): 211–216.↩︎

  23. “Adler arrived on campus in the autumn of 1930 and started his stormy career at the university by telling Chicago’s social scientists that they were guilty of logical ineptitude. Three years younger than Hutchins and far more indiscreet in public discourse, Adler showed up at Chicago with a fresh Ph.D. and the rank of associate professor, together with a salary that exceeded what most of the university’s senior faculty received. This deeply offended scholars whose long years of service and accomplishments in research far outweighed anything Adler had yet achieved. But what made him an especially intense center of controversy was the fact that Hutchins’ personal association with him made it unclear how far Adler’s emphatic pronouncements carried Hutchins’ endorsement” (William H. McNeill, Hutchins’ University, 34). It is also worth noting that McNeill was a classmate and fraternity brother of Benedict Ashley, O.P. (see Atheism Bumps into Reality, 54).↩︎

  24. See Mortimer J. Adler, How to Think About the Great Ideas: From the Great Books of Western Civilization (Peru, IL: Open Court Publishing Company, 2000).↩︎

  25. Benedict Ashley, O.P., recounts how Adler and Hutchins conducted their classes: “Let me now say something about Hutchins’s and Adler’s methods in teaching the Great Books Seminar, where Aquinas and Marx were given equal time. They never lectured but pursued a rigorous Socratic method, usually beginning with the question, ‘What kind of book is this?’ Adler, whose manner was considered by many a bit too much like an aggressive prosecuting attorney whose questioning was precise, penetrating, and relentless, pursued a logical line of questioning as long as the victim would keep striving to formulate a reasonable counter position. When things got too thick, Hutchins, very handsome, cool, devastatingly witty, would intervene and take a different, more ironic line” (Benedict M. Ashley, O.P., “How the Liberal Arts Opened my American Mind,” Nova et Vetera 9, no. 4 [2011]: 883-892 at 886).↩︎

  26. McNeill, Hutchins’ University, 37.↩︎

  27. McNeill, Hutchins’ University, 37.↩︎

  28. Fr. Benedict Ashley, O.P., is one of the most well known among his “converts” (see Chapter 6: “Opening to God,” in Atheism Bumps into Reality, 114-162). Among others, Otto A. Bird (see his Seeking a Center: My Life as a Great Bookie [San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1991]) and M. Raphael Simon, O.C.S.O. (see his The Glory of Thy People: The Story of a Conversion [New Hope, KY: Remnant of Israel, 1986]).↩︎

  29. Nonetheless, the following anecdote (which Adler himself recounts) arrests attention: “The years before, the reading and discussion of Aquinas’s Treatise on God proved to be as rewarding an exercise as the one we had performed with the Meno. We spent weeks on the three articles of Question 2 [of the First Part of the Summa theologiae]: (1) Whether the existence of God is self-evident?; (2) Whether it can be demonstrated that God exists?; and (3) Whether God exists? The students and I agreed that we would not move beyond that third question either until I persuaded all of them that Aquinas had succeeded in demonstrating God’s existence, or until they persuaded me that he had failed. Session after session we stuck at this task until, finally, all but one student had assented, probably out of boredom or fatigue… Charles Adams, the one student who held out, remained obdurate despite everything I was then able to say on the subject, and he was righter than he knew. Malcolm Sharp intervened to break the deadlock. He suggested that, instead of persisting in my effort to persuade young Adams, I spend the rest of that particular session telling the class something about the life and work of Aquinas.

    “Relieved of the burden of proof I was unable to discharge, I launched into an eloquent account of the saint’s career, his travels by donkey across the Alps from France to Rome and back, and the dictation of voluminous works to scribes at various monasteries during daylight hours, frequently interrupted by compulsory attendance at religious services. When I stressed the fact that Aquinas had composed a vast number of treatises of extraordinary complexity and systematic rigor, involving innumerable quotations from Scripture, from the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and other ancient philosophers, as well as from the works of Augustine and other early Fathers of the Church, without the aid of libraries, such as we now have, or other scholarly implements, Charles Adams chided me, ‘Why didn’t you tell us all this in the first place?’ When I expressed puzzlement, he went on to say, ‘If you had told us all this, you wouldn’t have had to argue for God’s existence. It would have been obvious that Aquinas could not have done what he did without God’s help’” (Adler, Philosopher at Large, 156-157).↩︎

  30. Letter from Janet Kalven to Martin Gardner, quoted in Ashley, Atheism Bumps into Reality, 64.↩︎

  31. Adler recounts the unpleasant resolution to the conflict in Philosopher at Large, 149-190. See also McNeill, Hutchins’ University, 39-132.↩︎

  32. Adler, A Second Look, 36.↩︎

  33. Adler, A Second Look, 267-268.↩︎

  34. “For the give and take of philosophical discussion, I found fellow Thomists in the American Catholic Philosophical Association a more receptive audience for the books and essays that I was disposed to write than were my colleagues at the University of Chicago, or the professors of philosophy at other secular universities” (Adler, A Second Look, 268).↩︎

  35. Adler recounts the articles published in The Thomist with historical context and detail: “The Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. published a magazine called The Thomist. After delivering a paper on the demonstration of democracy at the annual meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Association in 1939, Father Walter Farrell and I co-authored a book-length series of essays entitled ‘The Theory of Democracy,’ which was published in The Thomist in successive issues from 1941 to 1943. The Thomist also published my long essay on ‘The Problem of Species’ (which elicited a storm of adverse criticism from my fellow Thomists) and the essay I contributed to the special issue of The Thomist in 1943, celebrating the sixtieth birthday of my friend Jacques Maritain. That essay, entitled ‘The Demonstration of God’s Existence,’ attempted to show why the five ways of proving God’s existence presented by Aquinas in Part One, Question 2, Article 2 did not succeed. That elicited an even greater storm of protest from the Thomists” (Adler, A Second Look, 268).↩︎

  36. Adler, A Second Look, 268. To my delight, I discovered among the stacks of the Dominican House of Studies library a first edition of Adler’s classic How to Read a Book signed by the author with this inscription: “To the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC with my gratitude for hospitality, Mortimer J. Adler” (unfortunately, there is no date accompanying the inscription).↩︎

  37. Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Art of Getting a Liberal Education (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1940). Adler released a second, “special edition” of this text in 1966. He extensively re-wrote the book with Charles Van Doren in 1972 (Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book: The Classic Best-Selling Guide to Reading Books [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972]).↩︎

  38. Ralph McInerny, “Adler on Freedom,” in Freedom in the World: Jacques Maritain, Yves R. Simon, and Mortimer J. Adler, ed. Michael D. Torre (Mishawaka, IN: American Maritain Association, 1989), 72.↩︎

  39. McInerny, “Adler on Freedom,” 65.↩︎

  40. Thomas De Koninck, “Charles De Koninck: A Biographical Sketch,” in The Writings of Charles De Koninck: Volume One, trans. and ed. Ralph McInerny (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 69. For more on De Koninck’s life and background, see Charles De Koninck, Œuvres de Charles De Koninck: Inédits et témoinages, ed. Maxime Valcourt-Blouin (Laval: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2020).↩︎

  41. De Koninck, “Charles De Koninck: A Biographical Sketch,” 69.↩︎

  42. “His symptoms were only later diagnosed as due to the relatively uncommon Ménière’s disease. The theoretical cause of that disease is an increase in fluid in the labyrinth of the ear, affecting balance and hearing. Its chief manifestations—dramatic and violent attacks of vertigo and nausea, sometimes so severe that the patient cannot stand—exactly describe what Charles suffered. The only reliable treatment appears to be surgery in the ears to restore the balance. Eventually Charles would undergo this surgery with success, but not before erroneous diagnoses had forced on him, at least twice, surgical treatment of the stomach, and much distress. Once cured of the disease, he would still retain an extreme sensitivity of hearing and a lifelong susceptibility to sudden motion, which kept him from practicing the sports he loved” (De Koninck, “Charles De Koninck: A Biographical Sketch,” 69-70).↩︎

  43. De Koninck, “Charles De Koninck: A Biographical Sketch,” 70.↩︎

  44. De Koninck, “Charles De Koninck: A Biographical Sketch,” 71.↩︎

  45. De Koninck, “Charles De Koninck: A Biographical Sketch,” 71. Father Mannes Matthijs, O.P. (1892-1972) also encouraged the vocation—both intellectual and religious—of Edward Schillebeeckx, O.P. (see Erik Borgman, Edward Schillebeeckx: A Theologian in His History [New York: Continuum, 2004], 35, 39-40).↩︎

  46. “His [De Koninck’s] wife recalls how thoroughly he would study Saint Thomas, memorizing chunks of the Summa theologia as was the custom, marvelling [sic] at the Commentaries of Aristotle, and querying the relative neglect they suffered. To her mind he was largely self-taught” (De Koninck, “Charles De Koninck: A Biographical Sketch,” 71).↩︎

  47. Ralph M. McInerny, “Charles De Koninck: A Philosopher of Order,” The New Scholasticism 39 no. 4 (1965): 491-516 at 493.↩︎

  48. For a further treatment of the Dominican “grace of the Word,” see Romanus Cessario, “The Grace Saint Dominic Brings to the World: A Fresh Look at Dominican Spirituality,” Logos 15, no. 2 (2012): 1-17.↩︎

  49. He eventually pursued membership in the Dominican Third Order (see McInerny, “Charles De Koninck: A Philosopher of Order,” 491). He also had a son named “Dominique.” See De Koninck, “Charles De Koninck: A Biographical Sketch,” 71; Benedict M. Ashley, O.P., The Dominicans (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1990), 219; John R. Shook, “De Koninck, Charles (1906-1965)” in Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers: Volume 1, A-C, ed. John R. Shook (Bristol, England: Thoemmes Continuum, 2005), 602-603.↩︎

  50. “He had found a kindred spirit in Sir Arthur Eddington, the English astronomer whose writings and own discoveries contributed so much to the understanding of relativity. A great, civilized intellect with a love of science and a marvellous [sic] capacity for wonder at the universe of the human mind, Eddington was an entertaining, witty writer to boot, endowed with that most indispensable quality to Charles, a genuine sense of humour, and respectful of the common mind. His [De Koninck’s] enthusiasm for Sir Arthur was such that, having named their first son Thomas, after Thomas Aquinas, he and his wife agreed over the name Arthur for their second son. This esteem continued unabated till the end. Though, to be sure, Charles’ own opinions as to the value of science and the scientific world-view were to become more nuanced than when first formulated in his thesis, he never failed to defend Eddington’s soundness for his time as well as his talent for stimulating questions concerning the philosophical presuppositions and implications of contemporary physics” (De Koninck, “Charles De Koninck: A Biographical Sketch,” 71). Ralph McInerny subsequently translated this work into English: “The Philosophy of Sir Arthur Eddington (1934)” in The Writings of Charles De Koninck: Volume One, 99-233. De Koninck would also receive a doctorate in sacred theology, writing on the Blessed Virgin Mary (see McInerny, “Charles De Koninck: A Philosopher of Order,” 492).↩︎

  51. De Koninck, “Charles De Koninck: A Biographical Sketch,” 72. “His [De Koninck’s] correspondence at the time makes light of Nietzsche’s suspicion of the married life for the philosopher (‘The bigot theory of the incompatibility of philosophy and married life is bunk. I do not think Aristotle was of that opinion: he married twice’). Twelve children were the result from this union, the first being born in Louvain in 1934 and all the others in Quebec; one girl died at birth, four girls and six of the seven boys (Dominique died in 1995) are to this day alive and thriving. He and Zoé always most dearly loved each other. He kept wondering at the energy she deployed holding together and indeed upholding that huge family, at times almost singlehandedly, since his work not infrequently took him abroad. She was, he wrote ‘la meilleure moitié de mon âme (the best half of my soul)’” (ibid., 72).↩︎

  52. De Koninck, “Charles De Koninck: A Biographical Sketch,” 73. For more on De Koninck’s role and influence at the University of Laval, 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).↩︎

  53. Ralph McInerny, I Alone Have Escaped to Tell You: My Life and Pastimes (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 85.↩︎

  54. McInerny, I Alone, 93.↩︎

  55. “I had the great good fortune of studying under Charles De Koninck and receiving both my licentiate and doctorate under his direction. During the summer of 1950, I followed his courses at Laval. After receiving my M.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1952, I decided to complete my graduate studies at Laval in order to study under De Koninck… It would be disingenuous of me to suggest that the writings of Charles De Koninck are for me simply an important trove of materials in the Thomistic Revival. A year or two ago, for quite accidental reasons, I began to reread Charles De Koninck. I was overwhelmed. One night, having finished an essay of his on the Eucharist, I sat back and said aloud, ‘Thank God that I studied under this man’” (Ralph McInerny, “Preface” in The Writings of Charles De Koninck: Volume One, vii-viii).↩︎

  56. McInerny, I Alone, 93.↩︎

  57. McInerny, I Alone, 95. “De Koninck and the others seemed to have every line of Thomas at their fingertips, as a television evangelist has the Bible. The analogy does not limp. We read Thomas as an all but sacred text, forming our minds, becoming Thomists of the strict observance. Not that our professors were disinterested in the relevance of Thomas to what had happened since, but one had to go to their published writings for this. The classroom was where one concentrated on Thomas; only when Thomas’s thought had become second nature could comparisons be possible” (McInerny, I Alone, 94).↩︎

  58. Juvenal Lalor, O.F.M., “Professor Charles de Koninck” in The American Catholic Philosophical Association, vol. 38 (1964), 12.↩︎

  59. Lalor, “Professor Charles de Koninck,” 12.↩︎

  60. During the introductory speech to de Koninck’s reception of the “Cardinal Spellman-Aquinas Medal” at the thirty-eighth annual meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical association (held at Kansas City, Missouri; 30 March-1 April 1964), Juvenal Lalor, O.F.M. “One of my earliest student-day recollections of the Medalist is his insisting, on one occasion, on the consequences of the Aristotelian theme, sapientis est ordinare—and disapproving, I might add, of a certain universal abdication in this connection. A result of this contingent event was a habitual association in my own mind of his image and any mention thereafter of this dictum of Aristotle” (“Professor Charles de Koninck,” 11-12).↩︎

  61. Lalor, “Professor Charles de Koninck,” 12. He goes on: “His [de Koninck’s] strong grasping of principle coupled with constant relating of it to consequent, by way of verification or prediction, has always impressed me as one of his most striking characteristics—and it was once my privilege (a student’s dream) for four months of almost daily association to follow his penetrating gaze into the problem of the distinction between the mode of being and the mode of knowing” (ibid.).↩︎

  62. “He was also interested in theology, principally Mariology—he had a doctorate in theology as well as philosophy” (McInerny, I Alone, 95).↩︎

  63. “He himself judged La piété du Fils his best book all around, largely owing to a long chapter (VI) on the death of the Blessed Virgin where philosophical argumentation reaches a peak” (De Koninck, “Charles De Koninck: A Biographical Sketch,” 82-83). See also: Charles De Koninck, “Ego Sapientia: The Wisdom that is Mary” in The Writings of Charles De Koninck: Volume Two, trans. and ed. Ralph McInerny (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 4. This work originally appeared in French under the following title: Ego Sapientia… La Sagesse qui est Marie (Quebec: Laval-Fides, 1943).↩︎

  64. Adler, Philosopher at Large, 191.↩︎

  65. De Koninck, “Charles De Koninck: A Biographical Sketch,” 73-75.↩︎

  66. http://thomasaquinas.edu/about/marcus-r-berquist (accessed 12 March 2024).↩︎

  67. One of De Koninck’s former students referred to him as a “natural dialectician” (De Koninck, “Charles De Koninck: A Biographical Sketch,” 75). Regarding Adler, see Benedict M. Ashley, O.P., “How the Liberal Arts Opened my American Mind,” 886.↩︎

  68. “Gosh, I wish I knew enough French to translate your articles into English and run them in some American publications. The American Catholics need your stuff. The men in the association who really know St Thomas are few and far between, and the trouble is that there are so many of them, like Sheen, who think they know him. How about having someone in Quebec,—there must be someone who could do it and would have the time,—to put your stuff into English? I would be glad to give any assistance I could by way of going over it to check the English rendering, if it would be of any service to do so” (James Belleperche, S.J. to Charles De Koninck, 6 January 1938).↩︎

  69. De Koninck’s (unpublished) correspondence with Fr. James Belleperche, S.J. and John A. Oesterle offers helpful background and context to the De Koninck-Adler exchange. Both Belleperche and Oesterle benefitted from De Koninck’s influence. Belleperche thanks De Koninck for saving him from Suarezianism. “Adler tells me that he sent you a copy of ‘What Man Has Made of Man’. I should like to know your opinion of it. Unfortunately, the printer made a botch of it even after the last proofs were corrected, and Adler isnt [sic] in a position to raise a howl about it because the head of the printing firm is a personal friend of his and he would never get another job from Longmans if Adler made a protest. There are a couple of blunders in Scholastic terminology also, that are Adler’s own fault, such as, in one place, an apparent confusion between ens ut sic and ens realissimum, but in general it would seem to me that he has done a good job. Last time I saw him he was wondering what you thought of it, and asked whether I had heard from you” (James Belleperche, S.J. to Charles De Koninck, 7 November 1937).↩︎

  70. Mortimer J. Adler, What Man Has Made of Man: A Study of the Consequences of Platonism and Positivism in Psychology (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1938).↩︎

  71. 9,526 words total.↩︎

  72. “Adler told me in the first letter I received from him from Marlboro that he had had a tremendous letter from you, and of course I judged that it was about WMHMOM [What Man Has Made of Man], etc. As you know, I’ve been anxious to know your reactions to his work, and so I’m hoping you’ve saved a copy of the letter which I can seen when I get to Quebec. From a letter of Gilson to him which he allowed me to read I gathered that G[ilson] was in agreement with his general standpoint, but thought that his hammer and tongs methods would not be very effective in attracting the opposition, which means most American philosophy people, to his views or those of St Thomas. Adler calls it ‘the rhetorical problem’. But he’s a born scrapper, and I doubt whether G[ilson] or anyone else can change him. He gave the ‘Aquinas lecture’ at Marquette University last March on ‘St Thomas and the Gentiles’, a discussion of how we ought to deal with the modern gentiles, interesting as an exposé of his own ideas on the subject. Whether he follows them in practice is another matter. I shall try to think to bring this little book along, in case you havent [sic] seen it” (James Belleperche, S.J. to Charles De Koninck, 27 June 1938).↩︎

  73. In a letter to John A. Oesterle, De Koninck describes it as “a letter I wrote to Adler intended for Adler” (Charles De Koninck to John A. Oesterle, 18 January 1941). In his response to De Koninck, Oesterle explains: “One thing about that Adler letter. It is true that a great many people read that letter which certainly should not have happened, and which I admit is an abuse of your privacy. But before an act of judgment does fall on the enunciatio, I would like to point out: 1) I did have a copy of that letter—how I got it, I admit I do not remember now; 2) the copy I had was never seen by anyone but me” (John A. Oesterle to Charles De Koninck, 23 February 1941).↩︎

  74. Charles De Koninck to Mortimer Adler, 15 June 1938.↩︎

  75. Charles De Koninck to Mortimer Adler, 15 June 1938.↩︎

  76. Charles De Koninck to Mortimer Adler, 15 June 1938.↩︎

  77. Charles De Koninck to Mortimer Adler, 15 June 1938.↩︎

  78. “Quod autem scientia naturalis non sit factiva, patet; quia principium scientiarum factivarum est in faciente, non in facto, quod est artificiatum; sed principium motus rerum naturalium est in ipsis rebus naturalibus. Hoc autem principium rerum artificialium, quod est in faciente, est primo intellectus, qui primo artem adinvenit; et secundo ars, quae est habitus intellectus; et tertio aliqua potentia exequens, sicut potentia motiva, per quam artifex exequitur conceptionem artis. Unde patet, quod scientia naturalis non est factiva” (“Now it is evident that the philosophy of nature is not a productive science, because the principle of productive sciences is in the maker and not in the thing made, which is the artifact. But the principle of motion in natural bodies is within these natural bodies. Further, the principle of things made by art, which is in the maker, is, first, the intellect which discovers the art; and second, the art which is an intellectual habit; and third, some executive power, such as the motive power by which the artisan executes the work conceived by his art. Hence it is evident that the philosophy of nature is not a productive science”).↩︎

  79. Here De Koninck footnotes St. Thomas’s Commentary on the Posterior Analytics (Bk. 1, L. 41, n. 7): “He says therefore first that a science is said to be one from the fact that it is concerned with one generic subject. The reason for this is that the process of science of any given thing is, as it were, a movement of reason. Now the unity of any motion is judged principally from its terminus, as is clear in Physics V. Consequently, the unity of any science must be judged from its end or terminus. But the end or terminus of a science is the genus concerning which the science treats: because in speculative sciences nothing else is sought except a knowledge of some generic subject; in practical sciences what is intended as the end is the construction of its subject. Thus, in geometry the end intended is knowledge of magnitude, which is the subject of geometry; but in the science of building that which is intended as the end is the construction of a house, which is the subject of this art. Therefore, the unity of each science must be considered in terms of the unity of its subject. But just as the unity of one generic subject is more universal than another, for example, being or substance is more common than mobile being, so one science is more general than another. Thus, metaphysics, which treats of being or substance, is more general in scope than physics, which treats of mobile body. (“Dicit ergo primo quod scientia dicitur una, ex hoc quod est unius generis subiecti. Cuius ratio est, quia processus scientiae cuiuslibet est quasi quidam motus rationis. Cuiuslibet autem motus unitas ex termino principaliter consideratur, ut patet in V physicorum, et ideo oportet quod unitas scientiae consideretur ex fine sive ex termino scientiae. Est autem cuiuslibet scientiae finis sive terminus, genus circa quod est scientia: quia in speculativis scientiis nihil aliud quaeritur quam cognitio generis subiecti; in practicis autem scientiis intenditur quasi finis constructio ipsius subiecti. Sicut in geometria intenditur quasi finis cognitio magnitudinis, quae est subiectum geometriae; in scientia autem aedificativa intenditur quasi finis constructio domus, quae est huiusmodi artis subiectum. Unde relinquitur quod cuiuslibet scientiae unitas secundum unitatem subiecti est attendenda. Sed sicut unius generis subiecti unitas est communior quam alterius, ut puta entis sive substantiae quam corporis mobilis, ita etiam una scientia communior est quam alia”).↩︎

  80. Charles De Koninck to Mortimer Adler, 15 June 1938.↩︎

  81. See William A. Wallace, O.P., “Thomas Aquinas on Dialectics and Rhetoric” in A Straight Path: Studies in Medieval Philosophy and Culture, Essays in Honor of Arthur Hyman, ed. Ruth Link-Salinger (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1987), 244-254.↩︎

  82. Charles De Koninck to Mortimer Adler, 15 June 1938.↩︎

  83. Charles De Koninck to Mortimer Adler, 15 June 1938.↩︎

  84. Charles De Koninck to Mortimer Adler, 15 June 1938.↩︎

  85. “Instead of that speculative philosophy taught in the schools, we can discover a practical one, through which, knowing the force and action of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens and all the other bodies which surround us, as distinctly as we know the different skills of our artisans, we can use them in the same way for all the purposes to which they are suited, and so make ourselves the matters and possessors, as it were, of nature” (René Descartes, Discourse on Method, Optics, Geommetry, and Meteorology, rev. ed., trans. by Paul J. Olscamp [Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2001], 50).↩︎

  86. “The left holds to the priority of art affranchised from nature; the right holds the priority of science. This shows what happens when we get the speculative and the practical intellect mixed up. This confusion itself is already due to art. When the practical intellect becomes supreme, all that remains for us to do is to construct, to work upon reality conceived as prime matter, pure potentiality, considered, not as a nature, but as privation (Plato had failed to make this distinction). Even mathematical logic as affranchised construction ultimately entails dialectical materialism” (Charles De Koninck to Mortimer Adler, 15 June 1938, 6).↩︎

  87. See Steven A. Long, “Speculative Foundations of Moral Theology and the Causality of Grace,” Studies in Christian Ethics 23, no. 4 (2010): 397-414.↩︎

  88. “I fully agree with you that we should argue with our adversaries. Had I read your ‘St. Thomas and the Gentiles’ before writing the notes, I might have been more moderate on the impossibility of a dialogue. You might class me among those who have been loath to absent themselves ‘from the felicity of moving further into the interior of philosophical thought, when there is pressing work to be done on the border.’ My only excuse is that I still have essential work to do such as reading Cajetan, Banez, John of St. Thomas, and start St. Thomas all over again, etc. Though I remain convinced that we have no adversaries worth attacking for the sake of philosophy, I agree with you that in the practical order we should not ignore them. But ‘intellectus speculativus extensione fit practicus’; I want to make this extension worth while, the more so that I see more clearly everyday that the study of the elders gives deeper insight into all modern philosophy. I encourage my students to work on such authors as Fonseca, Vasquez, Suarez etc.” (Charles De Koninck to Mortimer Adler, 15 June 1938).↩︎

  89. Ironically, however, De Koninck notes that “strictly speaking, the modern mind does not even believe in art, for art implies mimèsis, and mimèsis implies some pure object. (That is mimèsis of nature; nature as a work of divine art is a mimèsis of divine nature which is the object). The art the modern has in view is one completely affranchised from nature, as in dialectical materialism” (Charles De Koninck to Mortimer Adler, 15 June 1938, 5).↩︎

  90. Charles De Koninck to Mortimer Adler, 15 June 1938.↩︎

  91. Charles De Koninck to Mortimer Adler, 15 June 1938.↩︎

  92. Charles De Koninck to Mortimer Adler, 15 June 1938.↩︎

  93. See Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., “Character and Principles of Dominican Spirituality” in Dominican Spirituality, trans. by Anselm M. Townsend, O.P. (Milwaukee, WI: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1934), 57-82; and Guy Bedouelle, O.P., Saint Dominic: The Grace of the Word (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1987).↩︎

  94. See ST I Q. 50-64.↩︎

  95. Charles De Koninck to Mortimer Adler, 15 June 1938, 11.↩︎

  96. Charles De Koninck to Mortimer Adler, 15 June 1938, 11.↩︎

  97. Charles De Koninck to Mortimer Adler, 15 June 1938, 11.↩︎

  98. Charles De Koninck to Mortimer Adler, 15 June 1938, 11.↩︎

  99. See Belleperche to Charles De Koninck, 7 November 1937.↩︎

  100. “You no doubt heard at length from Adler, I found a letter on my desk from him when I returned here, expressing his enthusiasm, saying that you were the only man with whom he finds he can discuss things profitably in public, and asking my opinion as to the feasibility of some more sessions of the kind. I answered by telling him I thought next time, if there is a next time, it might be a good thing to induce a few more ‘doctors’ to come, that the problem to be discussed should be fully written out, mimeographed, and mailed to the important people who might take part, beforehand, so that they would be prepared to discuss it, that means might well be provided, such as as a stenotype, to transcribe the discussion, and that he himself should bring a secretary with him if possible.” (Belleperche to Charles De Koninck, 31 August 1941).↩︎

  101. “Your [De Koninck’s] suggestion that it would be nice to have Adler up for a while gives me to think. Maybe I shall get a chance to work on him. With you and him and a couple of bottles of good Canadian stout, that would be a fanning bee to gladden the heart. As you say, he is not so far away, a little more than one day’s drive, I take it from a glance at the map. He is very good company, on Philosophy or anything else. Have I your permission to work on him?” (Belleperche to Charles De Koninck, 27 June 1938).↩︎

  102. Belleperche to Charles De Koninck, 6 January 1941. John Oesterle adds interesting details: “The general subject for the convention [Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, Detroit, 30-31 December 1940] was The Problem of Liberty. The undertone subject of the convention was Adler’s Problem of Species. Muller-Thym’s ‘article’ in the Schoolman had set things off at a dizzy pace, and this was countered by the sudden appearance of the January Thomist at strategic places around the convention wherein appeared an article by M. Maritain. Adler confined himself to his hotel room during the convention, except for his appearance to lead the reading of the Metaphysics, and felt pretty low the first half of the convention. It is now quite apparent that the Muller-Thym article was the product of a conspiracy of Torontoites to nail unscholarly Adler to the wall (the Toronto bunch has never forgiven Adler for his unhistorical treatment of history in the Commonweal last year)… The upshot of this was (and Adler told me himself) that on the last day Muller-Thym came up to Adler’s room and with ‘tears in his eyes’ apologized for the article, indicating that it was not entirely a product of his own initiative” (John A. Oesterle to Zoé and Charles De Koninck, 18 January 1941).↩︎

  103. “Very much interested in what you say in your card (which was, as you say, quite long!) both about Adler’s NY stuff and about the Modern Schoolman francas. Especially noted your use of the word ‘naive’ in regard to the former. I had a conference with him in his room in which I told him pointblank that he is naive, and he admitted it. He was crushed by the brickbats thrown by Muller-Thym. [Adler] enjoys philosophical argument, but is deeply hurt by personalities. However, Father Slavin, of the Thomist, arrived the second day with 25 copies of the January issue of the Thomist (which you will have seen) containing Maritain’s answer to Muller-Thym rather than for Adler. Muller-Thym also took quite a beating from his Toronto friends, who felt, I think, that he had done compromised [sic] them. But I think there is politics behind it all. In the first place, there is some evidence that Phelan is miffed because Adler criticized the Toronto crowd for their historicism, in the Commonweal some time ago. Secondly, some resent the fact that, on account of the activity of Adler, the University of Chicago is frequently spoken of in the press as ‘the center of Scholasticism in the USA’. Of course, the answer is that if the rest of us had been on the job all these years no one could even think that. I know for a fact that Adler very much overestimated the competence of Catholic philosophers in this country when he first started writing and speaking along these lines. And he feels that he is fighting our battle and cannot understand why so many Catholics snap at his heels. It is Newman over again, even allowing for the fact that Adler does make his mistakes” (Belleperche to Charles De Koninck, 6 January 1941).↩︎

  104. “Adler and I have had some words in connection with his article that appears in the Maritain volume. He sent the original to me, which had a different introduction and which, among other things, contained a subtle attack on St. Thomas’ sanctity by charging him with subservience to Aristotle at the expense of truth. The present introduction is just as bad and only a shade different. Aside from the confusion he must be in with respect to what the five proofs show, and talking loosely without proving the existence of God as believed in revelation, and also a curiously twisted paragraph about his faith etc., etc., I suppose you have noticed where he directly twists St. Thomas out of context at the end of the Contra Gentiles argument from motion—in fact, even misquotes him. Then, again, he certainly places a different interpretation on Cajetan’s commentary on the Summa than Cajetan himself. I don’t know whether there is much point writing him about this or not. I don’t know what he supposes St. Thomas is worth if he supposes that St. Thomas is even horsing up the proofs for the existence of God. Adler struck me more than ever, in his writing, of bending everything to fit a pre-conceived thesis he has” (John A. Oesterle to Charles De Koninck, 9 March 1943).↩︎

  105. “Adler asked me, even strongly requested, to assist him in his work on analogy. I am aware, of course, of his somewhat tempestuous manner in these things, and I shall not, accordingly, co-operate to the extent he might want—namely do some of the actual writing. But since I think he is an excellent tonic in revitalizing the tradition in spots where it so easily embrace[d] decay, I am going to assist at least by way of thrashing out points or difficulties to the extent I am able, and perhaps also prevent him from unnecessarily getting out on a limb. I have read his first copy of the book, which needs revision, but I think he at least has a problem to present and, in addition to that, I hope to be of assistance in suggesting a manner of writing such that it will really be an objective presentation of trying to find out what is the case. This would tend to avoid occasional subjective dispositions he himself incurs and, even more so, perhaps forestall the usual slimy reviews he gets in return. I am convinced myself that Adler has an awful lot to offer even at the expense of his usual prematurity in writing. My hope is that even if his problem of analogy does not make whatever points he holds, it will be written in such a way that it will lead to analytical precision on the matter and this alone, I think, would be a philosophical advance and worth the effort. For if he will write it that way, then there ought to be the occasion for decent philosophical communication about it; if not even this minimum value is obtained, I shall despair of any philosophical communication at all in this century of personalistic and sectarian perspective. At present have very little impregnation by the object; it seems to be mostly intellectual masturbation. My position in the thing is only as a learner, so, in any event, I should profit. At most I might write a preface to the thing, gently hinting at the dire need of genuine philosophical communication. I think you would approve this” (John A. Oesterle to Charles De Koninck, 20 August 1942).↩︎

  106. McInerny, I Alone, 94.↩︎

  107. De Koninck, “Charles De Koninck: A Biographical Sketch,” 90.↩︎

  108. George, “Teacher-Scholar,” 587.↩︎

  109. Adler, How to Think about God, 19.↩︎

  110. Adler, A Second Look, 264.↩︎

  111. Adler, A Second Look, 264-265.↩︎

  112. Adler, A Second Look, 268. Fr. Robert Joseph Slavin, O.P., former president of Providence College (from 1947-1961), received his License in Sacred Theology from the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC (1935) and a Doctorate in Philosophy from the Catholic University of America (producing a dissertation titled: The Philosophical Basis for Individual Differences According to Saint Thomas Aquinas [Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1936]). See “Father Slavin Dead: PC Laments Sudden Loss; Services Set,” in [the Providence College newspaper] The Cowl 23, no. 17 (April 26, 1961). Like Adler, Slavin was also quite interested matters related to education. See his “The Thomistic Concept of Education” in Essays in Thomism, ed. Robert E. Brennan, O.P. (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1942), 311-331.↩︎

  113. Adler, A Second Look, 268-269.↩︎

  114. See T.C. O’Brien, “Premotion, Physical,” in volume 11 of The New Catholic Encyclopedia: Pau to Pyx (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1967), 741-743.↩︎

  115. Adler, A Second Look, 269.↩︎

  116. Adler, A Second Look, 287-302.↩︎

  117. “Fortune, good or bad, plays a part in everyone’s life. The accidents of fortune are the things that happen to you. When good luck happens, you may aid and abet it by seizing the opportunities it affords, but its happening to you is beyond your control. The only things entirely within your own power are the things you freely choose to do, and even some of these require attendant good fortune for them to be fully achieved. You may take care of your health by virtuous conduct on your part, but your achievement of a healthy body may also require a healthy environment, which may or may not be your good fortune to enjoy” (Adler, A Second Look, 287).↩︎

  118. “What happens here by accident, both in natural things and in human affairs, is reduced to a preordaining cause, which is Divine Providence” (ST I, Q. 116, A. 1). Garrigou-Lagrange explains why this distinction carries a particular relevance when it comes to order: “Chance is a cause per accidens, a cause that is accidentally connected with a cause per se, and therefore an accidental cause cannot be the first cause of the order of things, for then order would come from the privation of order, and intelligibility would come from unintelligibility” (The Trinity and God the Creator, 572).↩︎

  119. Published in two places, Kelly James Clark, Philosophers Who Believe: The Spiritual Journey of 11 Leading Thinkers (Downers Grove, I.L.: InterVarsity Press, 1993), 203-221; and A Second Look in the Rearview Mirror, 263-286.↩︎

  120. “Father Francis Lickfield, the rector [of Episcopalian ‘Church of the Redeemer,’ near the University of Chicago] and I became good friends, but, as I recall, he never tried to convert me… [Father] Bob Howell [of the Episcopalian ‘Saint Chrysostom’s Church’ in Chicago] became a friend, but he never raised any question about my becoming a baptized Christian” (Second Look, 269). Upon hearing from his wife that Adler did not always think the sermons he heard were “sufficiently theological in their exegesis of the gospel text appointed in the liturgy of the day,” one of the Episcopal priests invited him to preach at his parish! (Adler, A Second Look, 268-269). Adler agreed and delivered the sermon on Mother’s Day, 11 May 1980. “I did so, avoiding the text that was appointed for that day in the church calendar. I tried to explain the relation between the Mosaic decalogue and Christ’s two precepts of charity, from which, Jesus said, ‘hang all the and the prophets.’ The title of my sermon was ‘The Old Law and the New’ and, since it was delivered on Mother’s Day, I gave special attention to the commandment about honoring thy father and thy mother” (Adler, A Second Look, 269). All told, Adler was invited to preach from the Episcopalian pulpit six times before his conversion “from being an irreligious person.” “Since then [i.e. the first sermon], I have delivered about twelve sermons in Grace Episcopal Church in Chicago and in Christ Episcopal Church in Aspen, and in one or two other Episcopal churches elsewhere. About half of these sermons were delivered before I became an Episcopalian, and half after my conversion to Christianity, not from Judaism, but from being an irreligious person” (Second Look, 269). His wife, Caroline, reported that they were “not good pastoral homilies.” In other words, “they are not exhortative at all, but entirely explicative and exegetical—philosophical disquisitions about biblical texts and points in Christian doctrine” (Adler, A Second Look, 269).↩︎

  121. McInerny, “Memento Mortimer,” First Things 117 (November 2001): 14-16 at 15.↩︎

  122. McInerny, “Memento Mortimer,” First Things 117 (November 2001): 14-16 at 16.↩︎

  123. Deal W. Hudson, “The Great Philosopher Who Became Catholic,” Crisis Magazine, June 29, 2009 http://www.crisismagazine.com/2009/the-great-philosopher-who-became-catholic (accessed 12 March 2024).↩︎

Fr. Cajetan Cuddy, O.P.

Fr. Cuddy teaches dogmatic and moral theology at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. He serves as the general editor of the Thomist Tradition Series, and he is co-author of Thomas and the Thomists: The Achievement of St. Thomas Aquinas and His Interpreters (Fortress Press, 2017). Fr. Cuddy has written for numerous publications on the philosophy and theology of St. Thomas Aquinas and the Thomist Tradition. 

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