When it comes to 20th Century thomism, two names immediately come to mind, who best express the whole movement of neothomist revival: those of Étienne Gilson (1884-1978), and of Jacques Maritain (1882-1973). Maybe Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange (1877-1964) too, for the dilettante online theologians (of course, not only them); “integralists” may even know about Charles de Koninck (1906-1965) for his polemics on the common good1, but those without a particular interest in philosophy usually do not know any other names — do they really need to?

How could, not even one but two masters be forgotten — their names not even named in the indexes of current thomists’ works?

By master, we meant to say not chief of school (even if they very well could be that too) but rather teacher, guide and counselor. And both Louis Jugnet and his friend Marcel De Corte were made of this particular, solid and concrete fabric.

Louis Jugnet (1913-1973)

Born in 1913 in Villefranche-sur-Saône, near Lyon, on the Rhodanian axis, Jugnet was raised in a family torn between the narrow piety of his Catholic mother and the anticlericalism of his free-thinker, relativistic Protestant father, a combination common under the Third Republic. Not really a believer during his first years, he converted after reading a solid apologetics a friend of her mother lent her, around the age of fifteen. “Do not imagine that conversion leads to some sort of immobilism, excluding adventure; it is indeed an adventure to try staying faithful to the Truth during your whole life”, he said to a student of his. He kept a profound, incarnated — concreteness could have been his war cry — attachment to his natal region, the pays of the Saône river, between the Dombes and the Beaujolais, to the chapels he prayed in, where his ancestors — and the daughter he lost to a car accident, Anne — are buried.

During his time in Lille, where he graduated in 1935 with a Memoir on the relationship of suarezian philosophy of the matter with the thought of Leibniz, he discovered prominent monarchist Charles Maurras — whose portrait he always kept in his wallet — and, most importantly, “by chance”, Saint Thomas Aquinas, through Jacques Maritain especially:

“In a way, I owe him a lot, since his great works at the time were both my source and my guide, jointly with those of the late fathers de Tonquédec2 and Garrigou-Lagrange (whose God, His Existence and His Nature [1914] stays an insurpassable masterwork). I have met Maritain several times, and he was always welcoming to me. I hold him as a highly worthy man.”

This lifelong high esteem provoked a bit of discontent from the more reactionary. Yet, he was far from aligning with Maritain on all things, considering himself to be, contrary to him, “a thomist of the hard core species”:

“Besides a certain number of points, where I do not accept his views (for example, on the relationship between art and morals3, between natural ethics and theology4, or on his existential conception of thomism, and finally on the famous “breakable motion” of his Short treatise), I am also deeply opposed to all of his political philosophy (…)”

After becoming an agrégé, he worked near Châteauroux, and went to Toulouse in the Southwest — Toulouse, seat of the Dominican order, where the main relics of the Common Doctor are exposed —, in 1945. There, he lived and taught — in the classes préparatoires of the renowned Lycée Pierre de Fermat, and in the Political Science Institute, since he considered it to be more impactful than University — until his death in 1973.

From then, he deployed constant efforts in both teaching and intellectual debate, leading his Saint Pius X study group, writing many leaflets, articles in Catholic magazines, giving lectures, carrying on an enormous correspondence with lays, clerics, monks, building concrete networks in France and abroad. Meeting with students and peers, keeping track of culture (not only philosophy, but also art and literature), of specific and quite niche topics he liked (such as psychiatry, or Eastern Orthodox theology, as he read Russian5; he was also fond of mathematics, to which he wanted to devote himself), taking trips to Francoist Spain: in all such enterprises he was embodying a bulwark against the ills of modernity, the renascent theological modernism, and then against the aftermath of the Vatican II Council in his later years.

His work could be considered part of a specific current of thomism, not always common in “traditional Catholic” circles, that we could call not just antimodernist, but anti-supernaturalist too. As we’ll see, De Corte (and others: the name Gustave Thibon, a common friend of theirs, the friend of Simone Weil, comes to mind) shared many of its principles, hence why it seems appropriate to present them jointly — not to mention their friendship, of course. Not that it rejected the existence of Grace, the real action of God with His Providence or miracles, or the existence of suprasensible beings, in the way of philosophical naturalism; rather, it simply took very seriously the word of the Aquinate, that the Church so many times recalled against successive heresies. “Gratia non tollit naturam, sed perfecit”: Grace does not destroy or suppress nature, but perfects it.

Such a position, coupled with his thomistic principles and a great knowledge of ongoing scholarly debates, made him remind his readers interested in social issues, that politics are not morals, and then fight against what could be called political moralism:

“There is no doubt that the exercise of political science, just like that of medicine, ought to be subordinated to morals. But in itself, Politics is not morals, and is differentiated from it by its end (that is not directly virtue) as well as by its means. (…)

A regime absurd in its structure will risk missing its goal, however virtuous its citizens and political leaders are, just as a bad weapon in the hand of a skillful and well-intentioned man. It is therefore completely false to say, with Brunetière or the Sillon6, that the social issue is a moral one. Of course, good intentions and moral efforts can limit the damage caused by a politically inept regime, but nothing more. (…) It was not a machiavelian but a Pope with a high sense of the supernatural, Pius X, who said that the peoples are what their governments want them to be, which is entirely in harmony with Aquinas, who declares that if private example can give a positive impetus to men, only the law can lead them efficiently to virtue.7”

When fighting against modernist currents, he underlined many times that they rely upon false principles, their main error being the negation of the gratuity of Grace, usually deriving from mixing up the natural and supernatural orders; the disastrous effects of Vatican II were not seen as if the Council was the root of all evil, but as the result of earlier issues, already existing during the modernist crisis, that cristallised at this moment: weren’t authors from the Nouvelle Théologie8 current disciples of Blondel, who was already being fought by Tonquédec in 1913 and then in the 1930s9 — and by Saint Pius X in his masterful Encyclical, Pascendi? Wasn’t there a profound issue behind the visibly questionable choices of Maritain and Gilson, lying in the way they conceived the relationship between natural and supernatural orders, or in their conception of being? Weren’t their errors akin to those of Sangnier10, and even of Lamennais?11

An interesting point in Jugnet’s life is how concrete his Faith and piety were, how these seemingly abstract philosophico-theological matters were applied to real life and were lived; how respectful of Tradition and Church teachings he was — for contrary to others, he took great interest in learning about them. Of course, one can believe that angels exist, but how many do try to reflect and meditate upon their existence, upon their evocation in the Scriptures, their presence in the Liturgy12, or in popular piety? Who even takes the time of praying the Angelus today — who knows what these three sets of three strokes of ringing bells in the morning, at noon and in the evening mean? —, the rosary? He did and was attached to these concrete, fruitful practices.13

Coming back to the problem of supernaturalism, thanks to this common sense and to his solid thomistic principles, Louis Jugnet did not fall into the aberrations that can be sadly seen too many times among traditionalists. Against the mania for private revelations, against all forms of apocalyptism and messianism, he invokes the “salutary pessimism of the Fathers”, “the realism of prayer”, the “sufficiency of Scriptures and magisterium” after the Doctors, and puts this weird kind of “trads” back to back with the modernists and judaizers they always boast about abhorring, a paradox making him laugh as much as error infuriates him. As for the political views linked to such a mindset, it can be considered like the rightist counterpart of the above-mentioned political moralism of the Christian democrats:

“Let us not pretend that a moral fault is necessarily the source of political catastrophes. This was certainly not the authentic thought of Saint Thomas.

In fact, this view relies on a false conception of sin and its consequences. A moral fault gets punished on the spiritual level (by the deprivation of Grace in this world, and by either temporal or eternal retribution in the other). (…) Sometimes God punishes us using worldly suffering as His means, and He can do so both individually or collectively; but this is not a universal rule. To think the contrary would be having a foolish and simplistic view of retribution, both judaic and unchristian, when it was entirely overcome by the New Law.14”

Such issues are still relevant to this day, and so can Jugnet’s way of adressing them. He took great interest in crossing swords with later, fashionable authors such as Teilhard du Chardin15 and Claude Tresmontant16, but also with Congar17, Balthasar18, not to mention of course Maritain and his personalist politics. Even Lévi-Strauss and structuralism took some hits. A more literary author like Léon Bloy was also sharply criticized from a theological point of view19, as many of these New Theologians were building theology out of literature, treating authors as if they were some kind of new Fathers of the Church.

Unfortunately, Louis Jugnet published very few “real” books during his lifetime, preferring booklets, articles, notes and letters — not to mention personal meetings —: only his monographies on Saint Thomas Aquinas (1949), a deep and masterful introduction that was praised by the Pope — the letter from the Vatican faced Maurras in his wallet! —, and on Rudolf Allers, the anti-Freud: a Psychiatrist-philosopher (1950) could be considered to be so, if not for a booklet on Catholicism, Faith and the religious problem (1951); but the notes given to his students and later published, on Philosophical doctrines and political systems (1965) and on Great currents and problems in Philosophy (1970) are sharp, written in a combative style, and contain great insights, an evident will to look into the authors and currents not on the program (for example the politics of the Spanish Siglo de Oro, of Bossuet, of Counter Revolutionaries, of Comte and Maurras) and bibliographic advice, despite some obvious issues:

Written for young students before University, these works lack the exhaustivity of more scholarly ones; while showing openness and nuance towards authors he disagrees with (he valiantly defends Descartes’ Catholic beliefs against accusations of impiety, for example), others such as Hegel are very much caricatured — in his defense, probably due to the context and to the French hegeliano-marxists. But this can be easily overcome by the very method he teaches us, for which we can only be grateful.

Nothing could end this portrait better than the kind words of philosopher Pierre Manent, his student in Fermat, who later became the assistant of Raymond Aron — and one of the very few straussians in France:

“I had many good or even great teachers and professors. If I had to mention just one, it would of course be Louis Jugnet, who was my philosophy professor in (…) the lycée Fermat in Toulouse. To say it in just a word, he made me discover the immense field of the Catholic religion, this world about which so many people out of it — and many who believe themselves to be inside it — know absolutely nothing, and even less than nothing since, as Étienne Gilson said of his colleagues of the Sorbonne at the time, they do not even know that there is something to know.

I then started to understand that the Catholic Church was a city one had to become the citizen of — preferably a good one — through an unending education of all faculties, even the intellectual ones, and maybe these first, a point often neglected by the Catholics who think that being a Christian is only about having a good heart.20”

Outside from the Francophone SSPX milieux who cultivate his memory quite dearly (a colloquium of its Parisian Institut Universitaire was dedicated to The actual character of Louis Jugnet in 2009), some of whom republishing his works21, there seems to be no Jugnet Renaissance for now, despite very recent editions of his main works in Brazil22. The announcement of a publication of the Jugnet - De Corte correspondence this year could however change this a bit, for the latter seems to benefit from a renewed interest, both in France and abroad.23

Marcel De Corte (1905-1994)

The Belgian master was born in 1905 in the Walloon Brabant — Genappe, to be precise —, from a numerous rural middle class family, and was brought up in the Catholic faith. Thanks to a great intelligence and work ethic, he was able to graduate and earned a PhD in Philosophy and Ancient philology, in Bruxelles.

Just like Jugnet, his discovery of Maurras around fifteen was a key moment in his life, and he felt a lifelong gratitude towards the Provençal head of the Action Française; as for philosophy, he first was thrilled reading Bergson around the same age, but then, probably through Maritain’s critique of bergsonianism24, shifted towards Aquinas. He obtained a grant to spend a couple of years (1930-32) in Paris, where he met with a friendly Maritain, and then in Italy, to study the manuscripts of Aristotle’s De Anima. This led to the publication of highly technical scholarly works upon his return to Belgium: The doctrine of intelligence in Aristotle: an attempt at an exegesis (1934), his thesis, praised by Étienne Gilson who wrote its foreword, and John Philoponus’s Commentary on the Third Book of Aristotle’s Treatise on the Soul (1934). He would then teach in the University of Liège until his retirement, in 1975.

A rooted man, a father and a scholar, Marcel De Corte did not fear getting into polemics. As a contemporary of his said after World War 2,

“The man comes straight out of some medieval university. Armored with heavy-jointed logic, bursting with health and sane guts, his boots all full of mud, well-settled in the clay of life, hair never brushed, part reiter, part scholar, and part poet too, a mixture of Villon, Péguy, and Thomas Aquinas, this philosophy professor from Liège storms the Socialist Party headquarters with impetuosity, burning pitch, hard crossbows, stone cannonballs, banners embroidered with saints; in short, all the mystical, carnal, and knotty impetus of the great sieges of Orléans, Cambrai, and Paris. He’d skin a lukewarm little Catholic in less than two...25”

Writing mainly in scholarly journals in the 1930s, he also gave articles to the more religious Études Carmélitaines, to political ones such as the influent right-winged Revue catholique des Idées et des Faits, starting from 1931, but also to the regionalist La Terre Wallonne, or to non-conformists such as Esprit; but these are usually quite neutral ones, on what interests him: his country, Ancient but also contemporary French and German philosophy, poetry and aesthetics, mysticism. With friends such as Henry Bauchau (1913-2012), who taught literature and art history, he also gave lectures in a “parallel university” in Saint-Josse.

In March 1939 however, responding to Jacques Maritain’s recent Christian look at the Jewish question (1937) and discussing a point from Erik Peterson’s essay on The mystery of Jews and Gentiles (1933)26, he will provoke a break in their relationship — that was preceded by a first, less important one, caused by a divergence in opinions on the nature of poetry. This episode is considered to be highly political by scholars, and proof of antisemitic bigotry from De Corte, but the article reveals a very dispassionate approach, far above the all-too modern respectability concerns, and in fact shows a very profound difference in the way both envision Man.

De Corte considers that Maritain’s Look is

“partially flawed, we believe, by a fundamental confusion, of the strictly objective order, on which we would like to briefly insist. We say briefly, because this confusion involves a whole conception of the philosophy of history, a whole interpretation, essential to the Catholic philosopher, of the relationships between the temporal and spiritual, between nature and grace, which we cannot expose here in detail. We can nevertheless note that the position adopted by Jacques Maritain, when he interprets history philosophically, is subject to criticism.

We believe it to be insufficient because it leaves only a limited, if not non-existent part to the development of human nature taken as such: the man who is swept away in the historical flux is not only a being called to a supraterrestrial destiny, he is also a natural being, the possessor of a nature, undoubtedly wounded by the original sin, but nevertheless unaltered in its constitution, and who, by natural vocation (let us dare such a pleonasm) must realize his nature down below. Saint Thomas did not understand it otherwise, and that is why his morality is imbued with what Mr. Étienne Gilson rightly calls a Christian naturalism.

It is impossible to reduce the part of nature: either we accept it as it is, in its own ontological structure which Grace comes to consolidate and elevate, or, if we remove the slightest part of it, whether it is the flesh or the spirit, we eliminate it. Mr. Maritain, who so vigorously fought Cartesian angelism, is not unaware of that. Without nature, Grace is deprived of any real foundation: grafted onto a being of reason, it withers and disappears.”

In the end, he reproaches the confusion of the religious issue Judaism poses to Christians, whose eminently mysterious aspect he does never deny, with the socio-cultural, economical or political — concrete — problems that can exist due to this community. In this, Maritain is, talks as a supernaturalist, and any attempt at interpreting this question — and so many others — with an exclusively supernaturalist view can only be false.

“If economics, politics, and even culture do not have a natural object of their own, if they are subjectively polarized in a mystical spirit — however well-intentioned it may be — that blinds itself on their strictly natural aspects, then there is nothing left to do but sit back and hope for the solution to the distressing problems of our time to come from holiness alone. If one replies to us that an active holiness can energetically tackle these problems and solve them in a Christian spirit, we of course agree with them, but we’ll have to note that a condition may be necessary without being sufficient: one can have a developed Christian mindset and lead the economy, politics, and even the culture of a country to perdition.

One can be holy and mediocre in these areas: the most generous love has never been able to replace the exact consideration of reality. To claim the opposite is to make the objective disappear into the subjective and, ultimately, to join the Protestant determinism of Grace: some say that it doesn’t matter how the economy and politics of the City are conducted, provided they are regulated by Christian love, the result will be perfect, both supernaturally and naturally.27”

In this lies a great exposition of this debate, on which De Corte will come back endlessly with his friends. Already in May 1939, Catholic writer François Mauriac, who was considered by De Corte as representative of the times in his “deaf, tenacious and diabolical hatred of the human nature” would strike back in the Figaro28, ironically calling him the discoverer of unknown heresies.

At the end of the War — it should be noted that both Jugnet and De Corte were ferociously nationalist, and like Maurras, quite opposed to National Socialism —, he wrote two disenchanted and massive volumes, outlining some of his works to come, and showing his talent as a penetrating moralist: Incarnation of Man: Psychology of contemporary morals (1943), and Philosophy of contemporary morals (1944).

“Their [of the Ancients] morality, when thought, expressed, discussed, probably wasn’t higher than ours. But their superiority was shining in the inconscious practice of morality. It is an undeniable fact, that imposes itself as a global intuition to the historian of morality [mœurs]. One could of course adress many critiques in the details, but the fact is that morality used to be sane then. The moral environment was harsh, with sudden and sharp variations, but it was still healthy. Men were normal, up to their excesses. […]

Most of their faults and their sins came from an exaggeration of their vitality, of a rough tension in their human organism, with all biological and quasi animal meaning it contains, but also of concrete, undoubtedly objective life. They sinned in the very line of their sin, without doubling their fault with a more or less intelligent spiritual delectation, or with a theoretical justification, trying to make the whole world in accordance with their fall. As one of our best contemporary moralists, comparing the “paganism” of a Montherlant to the true paganism of the Pagans says: A bed was enough to them. They did not feel the need to hang a ceiling mirror above it!29”

He went on with his teaching office, contributed to the postwar Belgian Press in La Libre Belgique, in the Catholic debates with many French and Belgian magazines, both local and wider-audienced. Many more books he published, on both strictly national and civilisational issues, due to debates on the Belgian monarchy, on colonization — he made a famous comment in a journal, calling for a “manly gesture” against Lumumba in order to bring back order in the Congo —, for example On the Death of a Civilization in 1949, but also on a more personal topic: his 1956 Become who you are, written with his wife, shows the moving life of their son Léon, who died of sickness aged eighteen, after having faced, very Christianly, poliomyelitis for six years.

Like Jugnet, he had sympathy for the Spanish regime, and was even invited to teach during the summer of 1950 in Santander University. The neighbouring Portugal of Salazar also was of great interest to him: he gave lectures there, and Salazar asked to personally meet him. De Corte would write praisingly of him in articles and in a collective book, Salazar and his work (1956), in which he called him “a Genius of measure”. Another trip he took was to Québec, in 1959: there, he met with Charles de Koninck30, a fellow Belgian (not from Walloon but Flemish stock) and a fellow thomist scholar who settled far from the Old Continent, and had the pleasure of encountering a healthy society, “based on a good and beautiful, mystical race”. This experience gave birth to I love the French Canada (1960).

During the sixties, he wrote two new ones, first published in the form of articles in Catholic magazines, and in the same moralist vein that gave the earlier volumes of the 1940s: Man against himself (1963), and Intelligence in Danger of Death (1969), which he considered his spiritual testament. His contributions to magazine Itinéraires — probably the most important traditional Catholic magazine at the time — went on for many years, during which he commented the Council and its effects harshly, but also gave core reflexions on the Cardinal Virtues of Justice (1973), Prudence (1974), Fortitude (1980) and Temperance (1982). In the late 1980s, his health started declining, and he passed away in 1994.

“It is with the simplest and most elementary values that we will have to start. Morality can only be such if it is lived, if it requires us to embody our human nature […]. Among these values, none is deeper than the affirmation of self. None other can better suit a humanity so deeply rotten by anarchic individualism. Neither is it a mere realization nor a vain display of self, nor is it that of a so-called sincerity — always suspect —; rather, it is on the one hand about spontaneity, the willful rejection of all kinds of masks, camouflages, deceptions and interior lies; on the other hand, it is about recognizing what we really are, which is humility.

The modern world considers humility to be a weakness, a failure of life, a refusal of being. It is in fact the contrary, and Nietzsche, despite his genius, failed to see that it is an explosive force, containing unlimited power. Humility does not consist in operating some sort of ontological substraction on our selves, in diminishing ourselves through a submission to the lamination of an antinatural asceticism, but instead consists in exactly fulfilling our true potential, as it is given to us. Humility coupled with capacity strangles both tartuffery and the ever-present seedlings of vice: humility and the capacity of acting in the direction of evil, of lesser-being, repel each other.31”

In the last couple of years, some editors began publishing anthologies of his articles, a movement that seems to be taking more importance lately32; some thomists in traditionalist circles try to make his “anti-surnaturalist” legacy live on33; and the international public can now access more and more English34 and even Polish35 translations of his main works — let us be grateful to all such efforts.

One can notice many common biographical elements, and a certain common character too, between Louis Jugnet and Marcel De Corte: they were pious men, simple men, realistic due to being truly rooted in life despite working as thinkers, not just fathers but patriarchs, who knew the joys of service and the pains of the crosses, in both personal and civic life; patriots and reactionaries, who shared a disillusion with modernity, but also a love for truth, for Christ, that enabled them to go on and fight, and to share their wisdom with their students, readers, networks; men who kept a filial piety towards their masters, while becoming masters themselves.

There are also striking differences, which are already present in the topics they chose to study during their youth.

Jugnet was more of a Baroque, whose love for the Middle Age was coupled with one for the posttridentine scholastics, for the French Grand Siècle, for the Monarchy, mother of Richelieu, Bossuet and Louis XIV; not just a Baroque, probably more of a Classic, not very fond of what came afterwards. He focused on teaching younger students, and stayed away from University.

On the other hand, the scholar and philologist Marcel De Corte was a true Hellene, he who said somewhere that one needs to be a Pagan first in order to be truly Christian, who was interested in Aquinas heir of the Ancients, and Aristotle especially36 — his scholarly legacy is composed of important French-speaking Aristotle scholars, such as André Motte37 and Richard Bodéüs.

This could explain why, contrary to Jugnet, De Corte had such love and respect (not exempt from criticism, far from that) for the German romantics and for Nietzsche38. But both were working for restoring the philosophia perennis, and in the end, towards He who is the way, the truth and the life.