Ralph McInerny (1929-2010)
Philosophy and Policy Lecturer 1999
by John Haldane
The death of Ralph McInerny on Friday January 2010 at the age of 80 was anticipated with more than personal sadness by his many friends and admirers. For with him also passed away a part of an intellectual world of literate, humane, historically-informed philosophy.
McInerny was outstandingly gifted. Like many of his background and intellectual promise he was drawn to training for the Roman Catholic priesthood as offering an entry into the spheres of medieval philosophy, religion, culture and art. He attended seminaries in St Paul, Minnesotta but realised that he did not have a vocation and turned in the direction of professional philosophy racing through three higher degrees, including a doctorate, in the space of as many years between 1951 and 1954.
After a year at Creighton University in Omaha he was appointed in 1955 to the University of Notre Dame where he remained in post for the following fifty four years. During that time he published very extensively within and beyond philosophy.
Surprisingly to those not already aware of the fact, his greatest output by number of books was of detective stories. These were grouped by series, most famous of which were the Fr Dowling Mysteries featuring a world-wise Chicago priest and his street-wiser nun assistant. Through McInerny’s invention this diocesan-duo solved thirty books’ worth of crimes, from Her Death of Cold (1977) to Stained Glass (2009). The series was very successful and several book into it McInerny sold the title, character and theme to NBC who then employed the team that had scripted Murder She Wrote to produce over forty TV episodes.
One of McInerny’s own Dowling stories was entitled Getting a Way with Murder which might also have referred to his own occasional escape from the rigours of plot construction. It also hints at a fondness for punning titles which was also indulged in his other series of detective stories as in the Andrew Broom tales (Body and Soil, Law and Ardor) and the series based at Notre Dame (including The Book of Kills, and his most recent Sham Rock). Such was the scale of his production of entertainments that having tiring of inventing characters he began to introduce the names of real figures. I only learned from a reader that I appeared in one of the Notre Dame ‘whodunits’ under my own name as someone with whom a young American philosopher had come to study philosophy in St Andrews, only later to be murdered in the competition for a tenured position back in the US.
It was a mark of Ralph’s capacity for innocent amusement and self-deprecation that he deployed witless punning in the titling of his whodunits, for he was otherwise a quite masterful stylist with a deep knowledge of the literature of several European cultures as well as of modern American prose and poetry. He was also capable of great psychological and moral insight and used imaginative writing to explore the human condition as well as to provide featherwight entertainment. His 1969 book A Narrow Time arose from the experience of losing a 3 year old child to illness, and other novels took up the theme of moral and spiritual conflict.
It was, however, for his promise as a philosopher, historical scholar and teacher that McInerny was employed at Notre Dame - roles he occupied with style and distinction. He held the Michael P. Grace chair of Medieval Studies, and he directed, in turn, the University’s Medieval Institute and Jacques Maritain Center. The appeal to him of Western Latin medieval culture was aesthetic and spiritual as well as philosophical. He read deeply in Dante and Petrarch as well as in Aquinas and Bonaventure.
The French philosopher, poet and public intellectual Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) though quite different in background and culture to McInerny was a figure with whom he naturally empathised in part because of the shared philosophical ideas, but also because of the common conviction that ideas are most extensively lived when they are embedded in cultural forms. As well as overseeing the project of producing a uniform edition of Maritain’s Collected Works, McInerny produced an intellectual biography of the French neo-Thomist, again finding it difficult to resist word play in his choice of title: The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain (UND Press, 2003). Happily he completed and published a modestly short (and wryly titled memoir) I Alone Have Escaped to Tell You: My Life and Pastimes (UND, 2006).
The principal focus of his intellectual work, however, was on the writings and ideas of Thomas Aquinas. McInerny produced fluid and sympathetic translations as in his massive volume Thomas Aquinas Selected Writings.(Penguin, 1998). He also provided knowledgeable and insightful commentaries as of De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas published as Aquinas Against the Averroists: On there being only one intellect (Purdue University Press, 1993). Beyond working to understand and evaluate Aquinas’s ideas McInerny also sought to develop them within a contemporary philosophical context.
In 1961 he published a book entitled The Logic of Analogy which is a detailed and technical treatment of Aquinas’s account of analogical signification and of Cajetan’s fallaciously derived application of this to ontology. In taking issue with Cajetan (1469-1534) McInerny was opposing himself to one of the most highly regarded and influential of the Thomistic commentators. This was done, however, with care and respect and in defence of the great truth that he believed lay within Aquinas’s original writings. In a later volume Studies in Analogy (1968) he gathered subsequent essays on the same subject, and in 1996 he published a fresh analysis of the whole topic, Aquinas and Analogy (CUA Press) though maintaining the original opposition to Cajetan.
This book is essential reading for those interested in Aristotelian-Thomistic ideas of analogical signification and for philosophers working on general accounts of meaning, on cluster and family resemblance theories, or interested in particular applications of the idea that conditions of application of terms may vary without being altogether distinct.
Other areas in which he developed Thomistic thought were in relation to ethical theory: Ethica Thomistica: The Moral Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (CUA, 1982), action theory: Aquinas on Human Action: A Theory of Practice (CUA 1992) and natural theology: Character in Search of Their Author (UND Press, 2001). In each case the presentation is marked by preciseness of construction and clarity of expression, qualities that made him a superb teacher and public lecturer; by wit and lack of professional aggrandisement and by a willingness to engage without fear or favour with ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary thinkers.
McInerny’s facility with ancient and modern languages, and with religious and poetic as well as philosophical writings, opened him to a far greater diversity of traditions and cultures than can be found among the collective membership of a typical philosophy department. Such knowledge made him sympathetic to serious and sincere questing, but impatient of professional posturing and pouting.
His awards and distinctions were many and varied, including Fulbright fellowships, fellowships of the National Endowments for the Humanities, and for the Arts, six honorary degrees, membership of the Pontifical Academy of Thomas Aquinas, and of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. One of the last occasions on which I spent time with him was in the Casino Pio IV, a sixteenth century Villa in the Gardens of the Vatican. Decorated with frescoes and kept cool by thick marble walls, the villa serves as the home of the Pontifical Academies. At that point Ralph was en route back to America from an official visit to China reprentinmg the President’s Committee, and he was taking the opportunity of having to break his extensive travels to spend a day or two with like-minded scholars from Europe and North America, and to refresh himself with the colour and sounds of renaissance Rome. Such was the range of his enagements.
In 1999 he was honoured with a festschrift Recovering Nature: Essays in Natural Philosophy, Ethics, and Metaphysics in Honor of Ralph McInerny (UND) with contributions from David Burrell, Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Alvin Plantinga, and many others including one of his six living children Daniel McInerny whose essay is entitled ‘Deliberation about Final Ends: Thomistic Considerations’.
It has often been said of analytical philosophers that they focus on arguments and conceptual distinctions for their own sake without regard to historical and cultural context or existential significance. Of Continental philosophers it has been observed that they favour poetic imagination and political disposition over analysis and reasoning. Historians of philosophy are still accused of preferring to know who said what and when rather than to evaluate the quality of the ideas or the arguments for and against them. By education, intelligence and sensibility Ralph McInerny transcended these party distinctions and managed to engage in serious philosophical argumentation, conscious of the prejudices of past and present, and directed towards the goal of determining the nature of human beings and the ends of human thought and action.
In his final weeks conscious that his journey was nearing its end, he set aside further therapies and treatments and prepared himself for death, enjoying final meetings with family and friends and recollecting himself. His outstanding combination of intelligence, wit and grace, was rare enough, but he was also heir to traditions of broad cultured learning and aesthetic refinement that served to lift a gifted man to a quality of excellence that now seems unattainable. Those he taught whether formally or by influence and example know that he was indeed a master of masters.