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Etienne Gilson
An Intellectual and Political Biography
Translated by James G. Colbert
Imprint: Catholic University of America Press
Étienne Gilson (1884-1978) was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy, as well as a scholar of medieval philosophy. In 1946 he attained the distinction of being elected an "Immortal" (member) of the Académie française.
This major biography of Gilson was first published in France in 2018, and now arrives in a long-anticipated English translation. Florian Michel traces Gilson’s life through his time as a professor at the College de France and member of the French Academy. Gilson was a prisoner of war in Germany, was one of the first to describe the horrors of the famine in Ukraine (1922), created an institute of medieval studies in Toronto, published hundreds of articles in the French daily press and took part in the founding conferences of the United Nations.He was neither for Sartre nor for Aron, and advocated, when the NATO agreements were signed, the neutrality and non-alignment of Europe. Gilson did not hesitate to engage in quarrels with the bishops and allows us to understand how one passes from a critical modernism before the First World War to a liberal Thomism and to the Vatican Council II.
James G. Colbert, who translated Gilson’s The Metamorphosis of the City of God, offers a careful and measured translation to bring this important work to an English speaking audience.
Florian Michel is professor of modern history at the University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne. James G. Colbert is emeritus professor of philosophy at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts, and the translator of Etienne Gilson's The Metamorphosis of the City of God.
"Florian Michel's welcome book offers a wider perspective on Gilson…his presentation of Gilson as a political thinker and activist is certainly one of the most valuable elements in a valuable book."
~Times Literary Supplement
"Florian Michel has written a masterpiece - not solely for afficionados of Gilson, but for anyone who cares about the history of Catholicism in the twentieth century and, in particular, about the sudden collapse of Catholic ideas and influence in post-concilar Europe. Michel focuses on Gilson the political thinker, but Gilson the medievalist, historian, and metaphysician is also on display in controversy with the leading Catholic minds of his time. Why did European Catholicism collapse so fully, and what can be done to revive its awareness of the metaphysical and theological tradition that Gilson plumbed? Gilson the thinker was a lover of the real; he invites us to turn again to reality's (and history's) depths."
~Matthew Levering, James N. Jr. and Mary D. Perry Chair of Theology, Mundelein Seminary
"Florian Michel has accomplished a remarkable feat. Many readers will know Gilson as a Catholic philosopher and medieval historian, but Michel shows us that he was also deeply engaged in the tumultous political debates of the twentieth century. The portrait of Gilson that emerges from these pages is of a centrist in the richest sense of the word - a man hostile to all forms of extremism, whether political or theological, who was able to move organically between Catholic intellectual circles and the secular university, between Europe and North America. Now, for the first time, English readers have access to this impeccably well-researched biography of one of the great Atlantic intellectuals of the twentieth century."
~Sarah Shortall, author of Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics