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Recent additions to Secondary Sources



The CDK Project draws your attention to an online edition of the Itinéraires special issue of Sept-Oct 1962 dedicated to De Koninck’s work. It includes:

  • Jean Madiran, “Un univers sans personne” (3–18)

  • André Clement, “Charles De Koninck,” (19–40)

  • Ralph McInerny, “Un philosophe de l'ordre” (41–74)

  • Marcel De Corte, “Morale et politique,” (75–89)

  • Aline Lizotte, “Méthodologie scientifique,” (90–103)

  • Marcel Clement, “Sciences sociales,” (104–115)

  • Alphonse Saint-Jacques and Robert Labrie, “Primauté du bien commun” (116–138)

It also includes an early edition of Gagné’s bibliography of De Koninck, as well as four texts by De Koninck:

  • “L’être principal de l'homme est de penser” (163–167)

  • “Le cosmos comme tendance vers la pensée” (168–188)

  • “Sur la tolérance: la bénignité du chrétien” (189–196)

  • “Liberté des consciences et droit naturel” (197–215)

Among other the recent additions to the Secondary Sources on Charles De Koninck include Oscar Beltrán’s “Charles de Koninck y La Epistemología de Santo Tomás de Aquino,” as well as Susan Waldstein’s essay “Did the Blessed Virgin Mary Die?” at Church Life Journal.


Beltrán’s essay argues:

Faced with the challenge of the dialogue between Thomistic philosophy and the scientific culture of his time, De Koninck produced several contributions that show the relevance and assimilability of Aquinas's doctrine. This paper focuses particularly on the revaluation of sensitive knowledge, of direct and colloquial experience, as the principle of all scientific reflection on nature. In this way, it is about avoiding the abuse of mathematical formalisms applied to the physical world. Secondly, it highlights the importance of proceeding in the investigation according to the path of a progressive determination of the object. The transition from the generic to the specific field is not achievable a priori but once again requires the empirical instance. Finally, the contribution of a perspective on the universal that does not take into account only the order of predication but that of causality is considered. Philosophy is the science of first causes in the sense of the most universal and transcendent causes.

Waldstein considers’s De Koninck’s theology of the Assumption of Mary:

Charles De Koninck, in his book of essays on the Assumption, The Piety of the Son, adds a further reason for the lack of fittingness to Mary being dead. Since she is the Mother of God as a person, through her body, by which she bore Jesus in her womb, death would be the revoking of that maternal relation for an interval of time. She would no longer be the Mother of God, but the soul of the one who was the Mother of God. She would no longer have that blessed relation if she were to cease being a person.
In support of this, DeKoninck points out that when St. Thomas argues that Christ’s divinity remains united to his body as well as to his soul after his death, he gives as an argument that God’s grace is irrevocable except for fault. The hypostatic union being the greatest grace ever given, it should not be removed from Christ’s body even when he is dead. Similarly, DeKoninck argues, the relation of maternity to her divine Son should never be removed from Mary, as it would be if Mary were dead for any interval of time. . . . Yet, at the same time, DeKoninck argues against Fr. Maré that Mary did indeed die. How can he argue both that Mary died and that she underwent absolutely no corruption nor ever ceased to be the Mother of God? He first argues that she died with a careful exegesis of the Bull from the words of Pope Pius XII as well as from the many citations the pope gives from the Fathers and saints. Second, he argues that while Mary did die, as is sufficiently clear from the authorities cited in the Bull, she did not remain dead for any period of time.
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