Joseph Kleugten, S.J., Pre-Modern Philosophy Defended

Imagine my surprise when, asked his opinion on Joseph Kleugten, S.J. (1811– 1883), a self-professed Neothomist of my acquaintance replied, Simon Peterlike, that he knew not the man. Nonplussed, I first assumed his ignorance feigned. One could scarcely blame him—Kleutgen’s story gives considerable scandal. As the conversation developed, however, my Thomist friend’s ignorance proved bona fide. He’d honestly never heard tell of Kleutgen, much less read him. Which would be entirely understandable were he not, again, a selfprofessed Neothomist. So how could it be, I puzzled, that so prolific an architect of Neoscholasticism—so beloved of Pius IX, so influential behind Vatican I’s Dei Filius and Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris, so instrumental to the Congregation of the Index—could be consigned to oblivion, forgotten by his own intellectual heirs? Within this gloom of forgetting shines William H. Marshner’s translation of the second edition of the first volume—and not, as the translator claims, the whole—of Kleutgen’s Philosophie der Vorzeit verteidigt (1860–1863; 1878). Marshner’s translation reads bright, clean, precise. Readers who have braved Kleutgen’s nineteenth-century, fraktur-crabbed German will admire the skill requisite to render it into readable, even beautiful, English. Let’s hope against hope that Marshner intends to render its second volume too. And, so long as we’re hoping, Kleutgen’s three-volume Theologie der Vorzeit (1853–1860) also. Kleutgen’s Pre-Modern Philosophy elaborates what his Pre-Modern Theology only hinted at: a philosophical defense of Thomistic realism as salve for post-Enlightenment subjectivism. Thus Kleutgen’s goal for Pre-Modern Philosophy is “to answer the attacks which even Catholic scholars make against the philosophy of pre-modernity” (p. 15). The “Catholic scholars” he 952328 PRE0010.1177/1063851220952328Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical Theologybook review book-review2020