91����

Editor’s Statement
By Dr. Anthony Andres
Editor, The Aquinas Review
Vol. 20, 2015 Edition

 

Ronald P. McArthur, the founding president of 91���� and the founding editor of this journal, died October 17, 2013, and, as we promised last year, this issue and the next of The Aquinas Review are dedicated to his memory. He was a man of great accomplishments in the academic world, but most fundamentally he was a man of faith. By that I do not mean that he was what we now call an optimist, a man who believed in himself or in the goodness of his fellow man; he would have considered such sentiments nonsense. Dr. McArthur was a man of The Faith, a man who believed that the all powerful, all knowing God became a man, Jesus Christ, that He founded His Church upon the Rock, Peter, and that this Church even now teaches the whole truth about God and man, a truth revealed by the God who can neither deceive nor be deceived.

That faith informed the two events that marked the turning points in Dr. McArthur’s intellectual life. He was born in 1924 and raised in the San Francisco Bay area. After little more than a year in the Army towards the end of World War II, he enrolled at a local Catholic college, St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California, planning to become a lawyer. But there he read Plato’s Apology and for the first time realized that there was more to the life of the mind than practical training. “It changed my mind,” he later said. “I saw then that ideas were important.”

But an even greater revolution occurred in his thinking when he met the great Thomist, Professor Charles DeKoninck, during the latter’s visit to St. Mary’s in 1947. In an interview given in 2007, Dr. McArthur said, “When I saw DeKoninck, I was amazed. I heard him giving a lecture on the fall of the angels according to St. Augustine, and I said to myself, ‘Does he know that? Does he actually know what he is talking about?’ It sounded to me like he did know what he was talking about, and I thought that was just amazing. He was one of the greatest men I’ve seen in my life and he had one of the strongest intellects … Those things had a terrific effect on me.” And so, after graduation from St. Mary’s, Dr. McArthur moved to Quebec in order to study with DeKoninck at Laval University.

At Laval, Dr. McArthur immersed himself in the study of St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, not merely because he was attracted by their intellectual achievements, great as those were, but because their thought had been so strongly commended by the Church. Again, although his encounter with DeKoninck moved him to bring his intellectual powers to bear on his faith, faith always came first. As he often said to his students, “We can be surer that Christ is God than that two and two is four.” For Dr. McArthur faith was the measure of reason, not vice versa.

And so it is fitting that the relation between faith and reason, and the primacy of faith, should be the theme of the first two articles in the present issue of this journal. The first article, , an adaptation of a lecture Dr. McArthur delivered many times throughout his years teaching at 91����, argues that the Church is an indispensable guide for the intellectual life of man. The next, , by fellow founding tutor Dr. Jack Neumayr, explores in more detail the roles that faith and reason play in the science of Sacred Theology. Mr. Peter DeLuca, also a founding tutor, then looks at the relation between learning and political life in . The final two articles are by longtime colleagues of Dr. McArthur. Dr. Thomas Kaiser asks, while Dr. Ronald Richard examines an aspect of the relationship between modern science and Aristotelian natural philosophy in .

Our next issue will feature Dr. McArthur’s article, “The Natural Law: A Perennial Problem,” as well as articles by two of his former students, Dr. John Francis Nieto and Dr. Glen Coughlin. The Editor’s Statement will look at Dr. McArthur’s role in the founding of 91���� and The Aquinas Review.