Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Glory to Jesus Christ!
One of the most influential modern Catholic advocates for the reconciliation of the molecules-to-man-evolution hypothesis with the Catholic Faith as set forth by St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica was Charles De Koninck (1906-1965). Dr. De Koninck was a Belgian-Canadian Thomist philosopher and theologian, and the director of the Department of Philosophy at the Université Laval in Quebec. In an article in First Things Thomas Hibbs summarized De. Koninck’s attempt to reconcile evolution with the Catholic Faith in his unfinished work Cosmos:
De Koninck begins “Cosmos” with a reflection on diametrically opposed tendencies in the universe. The physical order, seen most clearly in the indefinite expansion of the universe, tends to increasing disorder—to entropy—while the biological order tends to “growing concentration.” Or, in other words, “Time disperses, life gathers, tending toward structures that are more and more tight,” he writes. Tight here does not mean enclosed or predetermined; on the contrary, as we ascend in the hierarchy of living things, we encounter beings capable of ever more complex interactions with the world and of greater degrees of self-determination and freedom.
Even more important and more fundamental is the distinction between the living and the nonliving. Going against the modern tendency to begin with the nonliving and then to try to establish the living, De Koninck argues that we know the living better than we know the nonliving and that we define the nonliving by negation of the living.
Interiority and self-movement are the marks of the living. As Thomas Aquinas notes, “we experience in ourselves that we have a soul and that it is a source of life.” We know that we think, will, sense, and move and that we do so in and through a body, even if, in thinking, the activity itself transcends every bodily organ. The bodily condition of human life signals our animality. The insistence of Aristotle and Thomas on analogies between human activities and those of other animals means that at least one of the assumptions of evolution does not trouble De Koninck. He detects in much of the resistance to evolution a kind of angelism. He wonders why it should be more demeaning of the dignity of human nature to say that it arises from a monkey than to say that it comes from the slime of the earth.
Yet, however much other animals might anticipate the human intelligence, human persons are distinctive. We share with them the capacity for memory, but our memory does not merely preserve the past. It also recognizes that past as past. Even in the operation of memory, the human animal transcends memory and, in a sense, time. In man we can discern the “triumph of spirit over the dissipation of time.” In man, the “world is bent in upon itself.”
Being composed of a spiritual principle and prime matter, the human being “integrates the cosmos.” De Koninck draws out the cosmological significance of Aristotle’s claim that the human soul is “potentially all things.” He makes a nice point—a Socratic point—about the peculiar character of human ignorance: The human intellect’s very awareness that it does not comprehend the whole of being underscores its orientation toward that whole, its capacity to make a “tour of being.”
The evolution of the higher from the lower, made evident from paleontology, requires for its explanation not ad hoc interventions by some higher power but the intentionality of a universal cause, which acts not so much externally on things as internally. De Koninck has no patience for the sort of occasionalism that passes for creationism. By contrast, the Thomistic tendency, inspired by St. Augustine, “enriches as much as possible the causality of the creature, not with the goal of eliminating creative intervention, but in order to increase it: For the creative power, envisaged from the side of its effect, is most profoundly at work where created causes are most causes.”
Of course, matter cannot generate human souls (or angelic creatures), but the development of the animal body prepares the way for, and calls forth, or at least calls for, the spiritual soul. De Koninck speculates that in the higher animals, activities enjoyed for their own sake, such as play, might be said to call intelligence into the world.
De Koninck’s argument here goes well beyond what can be established in experimental science, but it is a great merit of his work that he is careful to distinguish what we know from experimental science, what philosophical reflection on science might contribute, and what further speculation from metaphysics and theology might add to our understanding of the cosmos. One wonders how many contemporary debates about evolution are doomed to futility and incoherence simply by the failure to make disciplinary distinctions.
Part of what he is at pains to clarify is the very notion of creation, which is different from alteration, a change introduced into preexisting matter. The failure to distinguish creation from alteration appears to let some cosmologists equate the Big Bang with creation without wondering whether there did not have to be something there to explode and then expand.
Working from metaphysics and theology, De Koninck proceeds to consider God’s motive in creating: “If God creates, necessarily he creates in order to manifest his glory outside, not to manifest it to himself, as if by creation he could grow in his own regard. Creation is essentially a communication. His work must be capable of appreciating the gratuitous gift that communication is and that is achieved in the person, that is, in an intellectual creature who can give glory to his Principle.” Divine creation is “essentially a communication,” but communication involves conscious reception and reciprocal recognition.
The abundant liberality of nature means that we cannot calibrate in detail the way other natural things serve the end of the human species: “The image of the entire cosmos as essentially ordered to man would appear grotesque from the perspective of the astronomy which provides him a poor little planet born of a catastrophe.” From the prodigality of nature, together with the presence of chance and randomness, there emerges not only life and biological order but the most baffling creature of all, the human species, which has an affinity with the whole.
This emergent order is not incompatible with loss, pain, and suffering on an enormous scale. “Tragedy,” writes De Koninck, is “essential to cosmic life.” Indeed, the greater the order, the greater the prospect for loss and suffering. As we ascend the scale of being, the passion for living becomes increasingly intense and the desire for preservation more ferocious. Death becomes more “terrible.”
So much of modern thinking about human nature tends to extremes, to the complete reduction of human beings to the subhuman or to their exaltation above the order of nature. De Koninck shows us that the presence in the universe of self-conscious life, which recognizes life itself as a good, makes possible both the transcendence of matter and bodily goods through self-sacrifice and the savage, bloodthirsty desire to eliminate all potential threats to one’s existence.
At one point in “Cosmos,” De Koninck takes aim at those, much more numerous today than in his own time, who construe the “intervention of man in nature as an evil.” Perhaps the most striking feature of “Cosmos” is the way it finds a place for human beings in the cosmos and predicates human self-knowledge on an education in metaphysics and cosmology, and history and paleontology. As De?Koninck puts it: “We will only be able to understand ourselves when we understand the universe. Our present is filled with the past.”
https://thomashibbs.org/4957/the-writings-of-charles-de-koninck-volume-1
Rev. Victor P. Warkulwiz, M.S.S. (1940–2019)
Readers familiar with Dr. Sanford’s work Genetic Entropy and the results of Project Encode will realize that Dr. De Koninck has been proven completely wrong in his fundamental assertion about the tendency of living organisms to “growing concentration,” toward structures “capable of ever more complex interactions with the world.” Although Fr. Victor Warkulwiz died before the implications of Project Encode were understood as well as they are now, as the Kolbe Center’s first theological advisor, Fr. Victor wrote an excellent critique of De Koninck’s attempt to reconcile the Angelic Doctor’s writings with the molecules to man evolution hypothesis eighteen years ago in 2008. Since we have never published his critique, I thought that it would be good to do so now, as we have just observed the seventh anniversary of Fr. Victor’s death on July 11, 2019. Commenting on a lecture on St. Thomas and evolution by Dr. De Koninck, Fr. Victor wrote:
- A number of 20th-century neo-Thomists have tried to accommodate the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas to biological and/or cosmic evolution. In doing so they fooled themselves into believing that they were showing conformity of Catholic teaching with modern evolutionary “science.” Some Thomistic scholars in their enthusiasm went so far as to make the false claim that Thomas was not a creationist and that he anticipated evolutionary theory. It seems that De Koninck was one of them. Such scholars thought they were serving the Church by showing compatibility between Catholic belief and modern “science.” But it was an ill-conceived effort. In reality they did a great disservice to the Church by compromising the literal truth of the first eleven chapters of Genesis.
- De Koninck asserts the opinion that the atheistic materialistic version of evolutionary theory is an abuse of the theory and the theory of evolution should not be judged by it. But it should be judged by that. The original theory is completely atheistic in spirit. It was conceived to explain the origin of things by naturalistic causes alone, to discredit the Genesis account of creation and the flood, and to undermine the argument from design for the existence of God. It is hostile to revealed religion. Catholic scholars allowed themselves to be fooled by the persistent and insistent propaganda that evolution is a fact and so distorted Catholic theology and philosophy to accommodate evolution when they should have stood fast and defended traditional Catholic teaching on origins. What is being abused by many Catholic scholars is Thomistic-Catholic doctrine, not evolution.
- De Koninck states that creationism concedes as little as possible to the creature. That is nonsense. Creationism does not concede to ideas but listens to testimony and observes facts. Creationism does not accept the notion that nonliving matter has within itself the power to generate living organisms or that living organisms have the power to transform their own natures. Creationists conclude that not from philosophical speculation but from Sacred Scripture and the observation of nature, that is, not from ideas but from divine testimony and reality.
- De Koninck rightly states that creationism believes that “a special intervention by God is necessary for the establishment of a new natural species.” But he implies that this is wrong because it denies scientists the right to “derive one [creature] from another.” De Koninck wrongly opposes Thomas to that position, saying that St. Thomas was willing to “concede to the creature as much as possible.” St. Thomas would “concede” to creatures everything that their natures allow, but that does not include power to create life or for living creatures to transform their own natures. (De Koninck seems to avoid use of the notions “nature” and “essence.” So to me it seems that he is infected, either consciously or unconsciously, with nominalism, which is the mother of evolutionism.) Even in his acceptance of the spontaneous generation of certain species (such as flies), Aquinas sees a potency for life in “appropriate matter” as having been originally created by God and which can be actualized under certain conditions. He probably followed St. Augustine here, who saw that potency being actualized by the agency of angels and not by an inherent power of matter. Furthermore, St. Thomas was not a transformist. He saw a potency for certain species to be generated out of nonliving matter, but he nowhere shows acceptance of the notion that one living species can transform into another.
- De Koninck says that he rejects creationism because “it is not sufficiently creationist,” that it deprives God of power because it denies His effects to be causes. He makes the statement that “the creative power of God is most profoundly at work where secondary causes are most ‘causal’. The more a creature is capable of acting of its own accord, the more it manifests the power of its ultimate cause….” This outlook he attributes to Thomas, but he does not tell us where in St. Thomas’ writings he found it. Creationism does not deny God’s effects to be causes, that is, it does not deny secondary causes. However, it does deny that secondary causes can create life or transform living natures. And I dare say that neo-Thomists like De Koninck will not find anything in St. Thomas’ writings that disagrees with that.
- I have tried to abstract the essential points in De Koninck’s line of reasoning from the portion of the lecture that was translated into English. De Koninck starts off by making a distinction between the “scientific problem of evolution” and the “philosophical problem of evolution.” He says that science “tries to explain the complex in terms of the simple.” This is what is called analysis. Something is perfectly simple if it cannot be analyzed into constituent parts. The fewer constituent parts something can be analyzed into the simpler it is. De Koninck says that in philosophy, this definition is turned on its head. He maintains that in philosophy “a being is simple according to the perfection of its form.” Thus a man is simpler than an animal which is simpler than a plant which is similar than a rock, decreasing in simplicity according to the number of perfections (a “perfection” being a good belonging to a being) they contain. God is unanalyzable and possesses every good, so He is perfectly simple according to both the “experimental” (scientific) and “ontological” (philosophical) definitions. De Koninck argues that scientists try to explain more complex organisms in terms of the more simple and therefore are led to the notion of evolution. He further argues that the causes involved in evolution are “ontological” and beyond the grasp of the scientist. He condemns those scientists who do not recognize this. He goes on to give his philosophical approach. Science seeks the most simple. But philosophy starts from the most simple; its study of creation advances from man to animals to plants to rocks, and so on because it starts from “the fundamental principle that intelligence is the raison d’ etre of all possible creatures.” He continues, asserting the fundamental place of man in creation: “Now, we can conceive of no other cosmic intelligence but that of man, for an embodied intellect, no matter what shape it may take, will constitute a rational animal: and this is what we mean by man. This means that our universe of space and time is essentially related to man: and that all beings inferior to man, are essentially in function of man: our universe makes no sense outside the perspective of humanity.” This is essentially the biblical doctrine that God created everything for man. De Koninck’s philosophical assumptions are apparently tailored with that truth in mind. Be he goes on from here to subtly inject the non-biblical notion that evolution is directed upward to human beings because the “universe is originally and essentially ordinated to mankind.” He continues: “Evolution will be nothing but the progressive organization of matter in view of the reception of the human soul.” He goes on to describe this “progressive organization of matter.” He makes the statement: “Matter contains potentially all the possible natural forms.” De Koninck is correct in saying that matter has the potentiality for receiving life; that is an observed fact. But it does not have the potential to produce life within itself; it needs an external power to do that. This is a biblical fact supported by biological observations.
- De Koninck describes evolution as a notion that gives lifeless matter a teleological objective. Matter progressively organizes itself “in view of the reception of the human soul.” I don’t know of any place in Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition or Scholastic philosophy where such a notion is espoused. Traditional Catholic teaching certainly does not espouse the view that God “programmed” matter to seek its destiny in human life. And natural science does not support such a view, despite the protestations of theistic evolutionists. De Koninck’s notion that prime matter “contains potentially all the possible natural forms” [including living forms] is true, but he speaks of it in a way that implies that prime matter has an independent reality. This is a gross misconception, which I will discuss later. He goes on to say that these natural forms can be released by created causes. I agree that lifeless matter can transform by chemical and physical processes from one lifeless form to another. This is observed in nature. But lifeless matter transforming into living matter has never been observed. To hold that it does an extrapolation of enormous extent. It is very poor natural philosophy indeed to argue from extrapolations that go far beyond observation. De Koninck does admit that “the inorganic will not be able to deliver itself of the potential life it contains. It cannot generate life.” He goes on to rightly conclude that “the suscitation of new life in this world cannot be explained but by a direct intervention of the creator.” But he wrongly goes on to say that Thomas thought otherwise. He seems to misinterpret St. Thomas’ thought. Although St. Thomas said that the human soul is the ultimate form towards which generation tends, he does not mean that main a temporal sense but in a teleological sense. It is a philosophical way of stating the biblical truth that man is the crown of God’s creation and all creation is directed toward his good. It does not mean that matter took a temporal course from formlessness to the human being. That notion is a gross distortion of Thomas’ doctrine, tailored to suit evolutionism. De Koninck says that “the universe tends toward the ultimate form which is the human intellect” and quotes St. Thomas in Latin to substantiate it. The Latin word St. Thomas uses in the quote is intendit, which is properly translated as “aims” not “tends.” “Tends” indicates a movement in time but “aims” indicates a purpose, an intention. St. Thomas meant that God’s intention was for the whole material world to be directed toward the good of the human species, not that matter “tends” to transform from non-living matter to living matter to man.
- De Koninck says that prime matter “desires” to be organized into life and that there is no need for the intervention of a Creator. De Koninck looks to Aquinas in support of his argument. The Thomas Aquinas De Koninck seems to portray is not the Thomas Aquinas I know from my reading. It seems that De Koninck’s argument is based on a mistaken understanding of prime matter. To say that Thomas believes that prime matter “desires” to take on more “perfect” forms shows that De Koninck does not have a firm grasp of Thomas’ understanding of the notion of prime matter, which is clearly laid out in his Treatise on the Principles of Nature. Prime matter does not have an existence of its own, although it is a principle of material existence. It makes sense and exists only in union with a form, just as, for example, a wife, as a wife, only makes sense and exists only in reference to a husband. So prime matter has no nature in itself by which it can “desire,” even in an analogous sense.
- De Koninck goes on to say that for this “aspiration of matter” to be satisfied, St. Thomas asserts the necessity of a spiritual power driving our universe to higher levels of life, a power whose nature St. Thomas does not specify. Again De Koninck quotes Thomas in Latin (without a citation) to substantiate this assertion. And again he grossly misinterprets St. Thomas. In that quote St. Thomas is talking about the movements of the heavens, not the evolution of matter. He is considering the same thing he does in Chapter 2 of his Treatise on Separate Substances. There he speaks of the population and motions of the heavens: “Each of the heavenly bodies is animated by its own soul, and each has its own separate appetible object which is the proper end of its motion…. According to the position of Aristotle, between us and the highest God, there exists only a twofold order of intellectual substances, namely, the separate substances which are the ends of the heavenly motions; and the souls of the spheres, which move through appetite and desire.” De Koninck then goes on to invalidly conclude that “this immediately removes all possible philosophical objections against evolution based on the principle of sufficient cause.” De Koninck’s conclusion is invalid because he is using St. Thomas’ argument concerning the motions of the heavens by created causes for the production of life in matter by created causes. That is a non sequitur because the creation of life is an essentially different question than the motion of the heavens. The fact that created spiritual substances can move heavenly bodies does not imply that they can create life in lifeless matter. The remainder of his argument rests on the invalid conclusion that they can and is therefore invalid.
- De Koninck then goes on to correctly respond to the argument against evolution that states that a form is what constitutes a thing what it is and therefore no form can be transformed into another. He says that this betrays an Platonic and not an Aristotelian notion of form. In Aristotelian-Thomistic generation one form is replaced by another, not transformed into another; the underlying identity of the thing is preserved by its matter, which has a potency for the new form that is received. De Koninck then goes on to describe evolution as “an immense effort of nature, sustained by that spiritual driving power, to dispose itself and to make its last appeal to nature’s desire…by the creation of the human soul.” Nature has a “spiritual impulse” that “responds to the essential desire of prime matter to be delivered of the forms it potentially contains, and to be increasingly organized by way of alteration.” This notion is not Thomistic nor is it confirmed by sound theology or natural science. No such “spiritual impulse” is mentioned or even alluded to in Sacred Scripture or Catholic Tradition, nor has it manifested itself to observers of nature. De Koninck’s affirmation of a “spiritual impulse” driving evolution of the universe onward to its ultimate goal, the preparation of the human body ready to receive the specially created human soul, is the profession of an ideology dreamed up to make evolution philosophically and theologically palatable.
- De Koninck apparently is attempting to make evolution something respectable for Catholics to believe, but he evades the question as whether or not he himself believes in it, saying, “This question cannot not be answered by a yes or no, but by a treatise of philosophy;” which, he says, “I sincerely hope you are not looking for in this lecture.” That’s a typical cop out of intellectuals. What more of essence could he say in a treatise than he’s already said? He adds nothing essentially new in the remaining part of the lecture (of that part translated into English). De Koninck sows seeds of doubt in special creation, in the truths asserted by Genesis, and thus does injury to the Catholic faith.
The Cosmic Tragedy of Thomistic Evolution
- It is truly tragic that Dr. De Koninck’s creation theology has been accepted so uncritically by so many learned and devout Catholics. In the interest of an unencumbered search for Truth, one would think that conservative Catholic colleges and universities would at least allow for a public forum on theistic evolution in which Kolbe representatives could argue that theistic evolution is incompatible with the teaching of St. Thomas and the authoritative teaching of the Catholic Church and De Koninck advocates could argue that theistic evolution is compatible with the same. If the leaders of Catholic liberal arts colleges are not willing to give defenders of the traditional Catholic doctrine of creation an opportunity to be heard, how can they claim to be truly dedicated to giving their students the opportunity to evaluate the arguments on both sides of controversial subjects so that they can follow the truth wherever it leads?
- If there is one thing that fills the pages of St. Thomas himself it is the words of Holy Scripture and the writings of the Church Fathers about the Scriptures. In Dr. De Koninck’s writings, however, St. Thomas’s ideas appear to have been divorced from the Scriptures and from the Church Fathers. This would be disturbing in a Thomistic treatment of any Catholic doctrine but in a lecture or article on creation it is inexcusable. How can a Catholic theologian give a presentation on creation and not include a serious study of the text of Genesis 1? Such an approach would have been as unthinkable for St. Thomas as it was for the Church Fathers.
- While this is a fatal flaw in Dr. De Koninck’s treatment of creation and evolution, it only opens the way to many other errors.
- De Koninck seems to think that his vision of successive extinctions of lower life forms evolving into man is consistent with St. Thomas’s view of creation. But it is not. If Dr. De Koninck had meditated on the Summa in relation to the writings of the Fathers whose views St. Thomas synthesized, he would not have made this mistake. In reality, St. Thomas follows the unanimous teaching of all of the Fathers in holding that all of the different kinds of creatures were created for man and were present with Adam and Eve in the first created world. There is no hint in Scripture or in any of the Fathers that lower life forms became extinct to make way for higher life forms, culminating in the evolution of the human body as matter achieved its longed-for fulfillment in man.
- De Koninck also fails to make the distinction made by all of the Fathers and Doctors between the period of creation and the period of providence. Since he believes that lower life forms became extinct to make way for higher life forms, he believes that the generation of new life forms through mutations is a creative process. Moreover, he cannot deny the fact that this same “creative process” is still going on. But if man was the goal of this “creative process” of upward evolution towards man, then why is the process still going on after man has appeared? None of the fathers or doctors believed or taught anything like this doctrine. They all taught and believed that God spoke the different kinds of creatures into existence in the beginning. St. Augustine believed that the rationes seminales of certain kinds of creatures were created in the beginning and that they could be activated by God and brought to fruition after the creation period. But he never entertained the idea that the rational seed of a worm could become anything other than a worm or that the rational seed itself could be produced by anything or anyone but God.
- In reality, it is the unanimous teaching of the Church Fathers that God alone created all of the different kinds of creatures in six natural days (the overwhelming majority view) or in an instant (the Augustinian minority view). Moreover, the Conciliar teaching of Lateran IV, the Roman Catechism, and every other authoritative magisterial teaching on creation has been consistent with that view right up to modern times.
- De Koninck claims that his approach shows greater respect for creatures than the outmoded patristic teaching on creation since his approach allows creatures to participate in the creative process that culminates in man. In reality, this approach shows contempt for creatures since it denies the value that creatures have in relation to man. And it lowers the dignity of man by making it appear that his body is the result of a long series of deaths and extinctions by a curiously cruel and incompetent engineer rather than the special creation of a loving God.
- Indeed, Dr. De Koninck’s assertion that death, genetic mutations and the deformities and diseases universally associated with them preceded the sin of Adam would have been considered blasphemous by the Fathers of the Church. In their unanimous reading of Genesis the first created world before the sin of Adam was a universe in perfect harmony, completely free from disease, deformity, human death, and man-harming natural disasters. Indeed, the Eastern Fathers did not even believe that Genesis 1-3 allowed for the possibility of animal death before the Fall, although St. Thomas disagreed with them on that point. But none of the Fathers would have entertained the idea that sickness, deformity, or any of the negative realities associated with genetic mutations existed before Original Sin.
Through the prayers of the Holy Theotokos, may the Holy Ghost deliver us from all evil and error, and lead us into all the Truth!
In Domino,
Hugh Owen
