{"id":5200,"date":"2017-09-27T11:54:34","date_gmt":"2017-09-27T11:54:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2017\/09\/27\/thomas-mertons-hostility-to-scholastic-manualism\/"},"modified":"2017-09-27T11:54:34","modified_gmt":"2017-09-27T11:54:34","slug":"thomas-mertons-hostility-to-scholastic-manualism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2017\/09\/27\/thomas-mertons-hostility-to-scholastic-manualism\/","title":{"rendered":"Thomas Merton’s Hostility to Scholastic Manualism and the Forgotten Fr. Hickey"},"content":{"rendered":"

As much of a flaky liberal as Thomas Merton (1915 – 1968) is, both politically and theologically, I love the guy I meet in the pages of the seven volumes of The Journals of Thomas Merton<\/em>.  I am presently savoring Volume Six, 1966-1967.  This morning I came upon the entry of May 21, 1967, Trinity Sunday, in which he reports being "dazzled and baffled" by a new book on quantum physics by George Gamow.<\/span><\/p>\n

The 52-year-old gushes excitedly  over the accomplishments of "Niels Bohr and Co." and "this magnificent instrument of thought they developed to understand what is happening in matter, what energy really is about  — with their confirmation of the kind of thing Herakleitos was reaching for by intuition." (237) Now comes the passage the vitriol of which caught my attention:<\/span><\/p>\n

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What a crime it was — that utterly stupid course on "cosmology" that I had to take here [at the Trappist monastery of Gethsemani in the 1940s] (along with the other so-called philosophy in Hickey's texts!). Really criminal absurdity! And at the time when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima! Surely there were people in the order who knew better than [to] allow such a thing! Dom Frederic, no. He couldn't help it. The whole Church still demanded this, and God knows, maybe some congregation still does. (237-238)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Now I have read my fair share of scholastic manuals, including Klubertanz, Vaske, van Steenberghen, Garrigou-Lagrange, Smith & Kendzierski, and a some others, but I was unfamiliar with this Hickey. Curious to see how bad his manuals could have been, I did some poking around but came up with very little. But I did glean some information from Benjamin Clark, O.C.S.O., Thomas Merton's Gethsemani<\/a>:<\/span><\/p>\n

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We used as text the three-volume series by J.S. Hickey, abbot of Mount Melleray in Ireland 1932-1934, a text quite widely used in seminaries in the United States at the time. The text was in Latin, but English was spoken in class, unlike some seminaries in the United States at the time where the philosophy lectures were still given in Latin. Most of our students did not have enough Latin background for that, and some found even reading the text rough going at times.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Does anybody have volumes from the Hickey series? Is he willing to part with them?  What about scholastic cosmology as presented by Hickey got Merton so worked up?<\/span><\/p>\n

My desultory research also led me to a quotation<\/a> from a guy I know quite well:<\/span><\/p>\n

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At any rate, a recent blog post <\/a>by Bill Vallicella got me thinking about it again. The post is ostensibly about the origins of political correctness. In reflecting on that, Vallicella also had this to say:<\/span><\/p>\n

By the time I began as a freshman at Loyola University of Los Angeles in 1968, the old Thomism that had been taught out of scholastic manuals was long gone to be replaced by a hodge-podge of existentialism, phenomenology, and critical theory.  The only analytic fellow in the department at the time was an adjunct with an M. A. from Glasgow. I pay tribute to him in In Praise of a Lowly Adjunct<\/a>. The scholasticism taught by sleepy Jesuits before the ferment of the \u201860s was in many ways moribund, but at least it was systematic and presented a coherent worldview. The manuals, besides being systematic, also introduced the greats: Plato, Aristotle, Thomas, et al. By contrast, we were assigned stuff like Marcuse's Eros and Civilization<\/em>. The abdication of authority on the part of Catholic universities has been going on for a long time.<\/span><\/p>\n

So, how bad was scholastic manualism?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Edward Feser counts as a latter day manualist.  See his Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction<\/em> (Editiones Scholasticae, 2014). Here<\/a> is an article by Ed in which he lays into David Bentley Hart to repel the latter's charge of scholastic manualism. Excerpt:<\/span><\/p>\n

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Menacing references to the threat of \u201cmanualism\u201d and \u201cbaroque neoscholasticism\u201d have long been a favored tactic in theologically liberal Catholic circles. Given Aquinas\u2019s enormous prestige and influence within the Catholic Church, attacking some position he took has always been a tricky business. The solution was to invent a bogeyman variously called \u201cmanualism,\u201d \u201csawdust Thomism,\u201d etc. This allows the critic to identify the hated position with that <\/em>and proceed as if it has nothing to do with Thomas himself. Such epithets generate something like a Pavlovian response in many readers, subverting rational thought and poisoning the reader\u2019s mind against anything a Thomist opponent might have to say. Though neither a theological liberal nor a Catholic, Hart knows what buttons to push in order to win over the less-discriminating members of his audience.<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As much of a flaky liberal as Thomas Merton (1915 – 1968) is, both politically and theologically, I love the guy I meet in the pages of the seven volumes of The Journals of Thomas Merton.  I am presently savoring Volume Six, 1966-1967.  This morning I came upon the entry of May 21, 1967, Trinity … Continue reading “Thomas Merton’s Hostility to Scholastic Manualism and the Forgotten Fr. Hickey”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73,362],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-merton-thomas","category-scholasticism-new-and-old"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5200\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}