Etienne Gilson: An Intellectual and Political Biography

"Florian Michel's welcome book offers a wider perspective on Gilsonhis presentation of Gilson as a political thinker and activist is certainly one of the most valuable elements in a valuable book."?Times Literary Supplement

"Florian Michel has written a masterpiece - not solely for afficionados of Gilson, but for anyone who cares about the history of Catholicism in the twentieth century and, in particular, about the sudden collapse of Catholic ideas and influence in post-concilar Europe. Michel focuses on Gilson the political thinker, but Gilson the medievalist, historian, and metaphysician is also on display in controversy with the leading Catholic minds of his time. Why did European Catholicism collapse so fully, and what can be done to revive its awareness of the metaphysical and theological tradition that Gilson plumbed? Gilson the thinker was a lover of the real; he invites us to turn again to reality's (and history's) depths."?Matthew Levering, James N. Jr. and Mary D. Perry Chair of Theology, Mundelein Seminary

"Florian Michel has accomplished a remarkable feat. Many readers will know Gilson as a Catholic philosopher and medieval historian, but Michel shows us that he was also deeply engaged in the tumultous political debates of the twentieth century. The portrait of Gilson that emerges from these pages is of a centrist in the richest sense of the word - a man hostile to all forms of extremism, whether political or theological, who was able to move organically between Catholic intellectual circles and the secular university, between Europe and North America. Now, for the first time, English readers have access to this impeccably well-researched biography of one of the great Atlantic intellectuals of the twentieth century."?Sarah Shortall, author of Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics