The Aquinas Review of Thomas Aquinas College Vol. 23, 2019–2020 ISSN 1076–8319 Editor Christopher Decaen Editorial Board Michael F. McLean John J. Goyette Kevin D. Kolbeck R. Glen Coughlin John Francis Nieto The Aquinas Review is published annually by the Office of the Dean, Thomas Aquinas College, Santa Paula, California; Michael F. McLean, President; John J. Goyette, Dean. Unsolicited articles, reasoned criticisms of articles, and letters are welcome. Correspondence should be addressed to: Editor, The Aquinas Review, 10,000 Ojai Road, Santa Paula, CA 93060. A subscription form follows the final article. ©2020 by Thomas Aquinas College. All rights reserved Editor’s Statement The autumn of 2020 will mark the beginning of the 50th year of the existence of Thomas Aquinas College, which is, and has been consistently, devoted to providing the beginnings of Catholic liberal education. As was stated in its founding document, “this college will explicitly define itself by the Christian Faith and the tradition of the Catholic Church. Thus theology will be both the governing principle of the whole school and that for the sake of which everything is studied.”1 Given its manifest success in this regard, the College founded The Aquinas Review in 1994 to “stimulate a continuing conversation with an every widening audience”2 about matters on which our students and faculty, the Church at large, and man as such can meditate, for the better- ment of our souls and—most of all—for the greater glory of God. Ronald P. McArthur, the founding president of Thomas Aquinas College and the founding editor of this journal, had hoped that one of the uses of this journal would be to publish not only original essays of intellectual depth, but also occasion- ally to put into circulation older essays of great worth that are underappreciated, difficult to obtain, or not available in English. With this in mind, the entirety of the fourth issue of the Aquinas Review was devoted to two lengthy essays written by Charles De Koninck, under whom McArthur and others among the College’s founders had studied philosophy at Laval University in the mid-twentieth century. In this issue we follow this example by including an original translation of De Koninck’s Introduction à l’étude de l’âme, published in French in 1947. In future issues we may continue this tradition by providing translations of other works by De Koninck and others. 1 A Proposal for the Fulfillment of Catholic Liberal Education (1969), 49. 2 Editor’s Statement, The Aquinas Review, vol. 1 (1994), iii. iii This issue, which will be the last of our double-issues, also includes five other essays. Robert Augros faces head on the claim that philosophy is pointless because philosophers disagree. Marie George addresses the advances in contemporary neuroscience and whether, or to what degree, they affect our understanding of the human soul. Leon Holmes studies the role our founding presi- dent’s remarkable virtues and his judgment about good govern- ment based on his experience as general played in the success of the American founding, and especially in their relation to slav- ery. Peter Kwasniewski responds to a common criticism that St. Thomas Aquinas’s account of the beatific vision is exclusively intel- lectual, and ignores the love that manifestly should be a part of it. And Andrew Seeley looks at how moral virtue is profoundly transformed, and made more widely available, by the grace that comes with Christian faith. Also, to facilitate the reading of previous issues, we have included at the end of this volume two indices for the first twen- ty-three volumes of the Aquinas Review—one index divided by the science they concern and organized by topics, and the other alpha- betized according to the author’s name. All previous issues of this journal are available in pdf form, free of charge, at the website of Thomas Aquinas College: www.thomasaquinas.edu/review. Christopher A. Decaen Thomas Aquinas College, August 2020 iv Preface At Thomas Aquinas College we often say that the education we provide is only a beginning. For the most part, our students are reading the important works in our program for the first time, and the class discussion, while certainly helping them to better understand the principal arguments and themes in the readings and to acquire the intellectual virtues, only introduces them to the profoundest truths and deepest questions that have engaged mankind for centuries. Accordingly, it is fitting that the College publish The Aquinas Review to honor its patron and to provide a forum for deeper consideration of those matters which constitute its cur- riculum and are central to genuine Catholic liberal education. Consistent with the nature of the College itself, this review is marked by fidelity to the Magisterium of the Catholic Church and a respect for the great tradition of liberal learning which is our common heritage. The essays in The Aquinas Review reflect positions taken by their authors and not necessarily by the College itself. The editor – in collaboration with the editorial board – determines the contents of each issue. Any interested person may submit an essay for consideration or letters or comments on articles already published. It is our hope that The Aquinas Review will be a source of wisdom to its readers and contributors. Michael McLean President, Thomas Aquinas College v Contents INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF THE SOUL ................................1 Charles De Koninck A RESPONSE TO THE SCANDAL OF DISAGREEMENT .................. 101 Robert M. Augros NEUROSCIENCE AND THE HUMAN SOUL .................................... 123 Marie I. George FROM VALLEY FORGE TO APPOMATTOX: GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE FORMATION OF THE AMERICAN NATION .................. 153 James Leon Holmes ON INTELLECTUALISM AND THE BEATIFIC VISION ................... 189 Peter A. Kwasniewski HEROIC VIRTUE AND THE INFUSED VIRTUES ............................ 205 Andrew T. Seeley Index to Volumes 1–23 ........................................................... 227 vii INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF THE SOUL1 Charles De Koninck The author of this little treatise has asked me to provide, by way of introduction, some considerations preliminary to the study of the soul. As this work is aimed at young people who take up the subject for the first time, it is to them that I address myself. 1 Study of the Soul and Study of the Living If one deviates slightly from the truth at the beginning, the gap grows thousand-folds in what follows.2 That is why one should not pass lightly over the preliminaries of a doctrine, nor presume that they are sufficiently known; on the contrary, they deserve all our attention. In Edgar Allen Poe’s The Purloined Letter is found this useful comparison. Charles De Koninck, who died in 1964, was for many years the Dean of the Faculté de Philosophie at l’Université Laval in Quebec. He was as well a pro- fessseur auxiliare of the Faculté de Theologie of the same university and a visiting professor at the University of Notre Dame. The Aquinas Review here reproduces in its entirety a heretofore unpublished translation from the French by David Quackenbush. 1 This introduction was prepared as a preface to Father Stanislas Cantin’s Précis de psychologie thomiste (Quebec: Laval University, 1948). [It was also published, in the original French, in Laval Théologique et Philosophique III.1 (1947): 9-65.] 2 Aristotle, De Caelo I, 5, 271b10; St. Thomas, ibid., lect. 9 (Leonine edition), n. 4; De Ente et Essentia, Prooemium. 1 INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF THE SOUL The principle of the vis inertiae, for example, seems to be identical in physics and metaphysics. It is not more true in the former, that a large body is with more difficulty set in motion than a smaller one, and that its subsequent momentum is commensurate with this difficulty, than it is, in the latter, that intellects of the vaster capacity, while more forcible, more constant, and more eventful in their movements than those of inferior grade, are yet the less readily moved, and more embarrassed and full of hesita- tion in the first few steps of their progress.3 We presume as known the chief problems touching on mobile being in general and in its great divisions: mobil- ity according to place, which is the most common; mobility according to quality, and mobility according to quantity, which is restricted to animate beings. Aristotle has discussed the prin- ciples and properties of mobile being and its great divisions, in general, in the book of Physics. On Heaven and Earth and On Generation and Corruption study in particular the two first spe- cies of mobility. These last two works, which treat of subjects whose study demands a very detailed experience, and many of whose theories remain more or less provisional, are in great part obsolete and replaced by physics and chemistry;4 whereas the books of the Physics, in the measure that they do not resort to phenomena and to theories that depend on the subsequent trea- tises (and it is not always easy to distinguish what is obsolete), are unaffected by time. You are beginning now the study of the third species of mobility, that of animate mobile being, the living body. And notice that a first difficulty arises with respect to the very title 3 “The Purloined Letter,” in Selected Tales, with an introduction by Diane Johnson (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 206. 4 On this subject, see the Praefatio of the Leonine edition of Thomas’s com- mentaries on these works of Aristotle. 2 Charles De Koninck of this treatise. The word “psychology” signifies that it is indeed the soul, and not the living or animate mobile being, that is the object of this discourse, of this treatise.