Q&A with James Matthew Wilson
February 29, 2024
MacGreevy’s poetry and criticism redescribes the modern world in terms of Augustine’s theory of the Two Cities. Coffey, who studied with Maritain and at one point taught Aquinas at Saint Louis University, saw the neo-Thomist revival as a way to save modern persons from the suicide of Kantian idealism; Aquinas’s understanding of being as gift, as intelligible and so capable of giving itself, by way of form, to be known by intellects saves us from solipsism, skepticism, and madness. For MacGreevy and Coffey, Samuel Beckett represented that fateful solipsism if Aquinas’s insights were ignored. Go figure. They were very close friends. Coffey and Beckett were even golf partners. It would be hard to understand the meaning of Beckett’s work without seeing how it engaged, and was fruitfully engaged by, Coffey’s Thomistic philosophy. For Devlin, Michel de Montaigne and Blaise Pascal understood the modern age as few others could. They saw the chaos of historical experience and realized that mankind could not be saved by any external development, including political justice.