GNPR 338: The Other Refugee… Recently two of my colleagues from my years at the University of Toronto have reminded me that in addition to Emil Fackenheim, there was another refugee from Nazi Concentration Camps who became a philosophy professor at the University. I have several times profiled the work of Rabbi Fackenheim in these pages: he was a rabbinical student in Germany, interned in a concentration camp in 1938, permitted a leave to complete his rabbinical studies, and used his freedom to escape the country, winding up completing his doctorate in Toronto, and remaining on the faculty for almost forty years. Thomas Eschmann was born in 1898, served as a German soldier in World War I, became a Dominican priest and Professor at one of the Pontifical Universities in Rome, but in 1937 returned to Germany to preach the Papal Encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge against Nazism until he was arrested and sent to Concentration Camp where he remained until he was hospitalized a year later, and used his departure from the hospital as an exit visa, emigrating to Canada, where he too joined the Philosophy Faculty at the University of Toronto. Fackenheim was famous for beginning his “Philosophy of Religion” classes by writing four sentences on the board: “God is All-Powerful.” “God is All-Loving.” “There is evil in the world.” “One of those statements cannot be true.” This would set the tone for the semester’s discussions, centered on the problem of evil. Eschmann would begin his classes on “The Ethics of Aristotle” by saying: “I am going to make you think about virtue, and its absence in your life, in a way you never have before.” Eschmann thought of himself as a “theologian,” and thought of philosophy as a necessary tool for doing theology. He commented that Aquinas had no need to write a separate text on Ethics, because Aristotle had produced a “definitive” text on Ethics, known as the Nichomachean Ethics. It is a treatise on the virtues, and the text is still widely used in graduate and undergraduate classes, so Eschmann must have been right about Aristotle, and Aristotle must have been right about Ethics. Eschmann was a scholar of the highest order, a major part of the Golden Age of Philosophy at the University of Toronto in the middle of the last century, and of course, like many great people, laden with contradictions. He used to take books from the library without signing them out, and the librarian would wait for him to leave his rooms, and then would retrieve some of the missing books. He smoked a pipe fairly continually, which led to his death from lung cancer in 1968. But he had an immense impact on his students, and many of them, to this day, continue in one way or another to teach, and presumably to practice, the vision of an ethical life first enunciated so long ago by Aristotle. Fr. Eschmann and Rabbi Fackenheim kept alive the vision that religion benefits from the practice of good philosophy, and that philosophy is never devoid of religious dimensions. Both were refugees from a Germany that had entered its own dark night, but they brought a glorious era of Enlightenment to the University of Toronto. Full Disclosure: My Master’s Thesis at the University of Toronto in 1963: “On the Distinction Between Theoretical and Practical Wisdom in Aristotle’s Ethics.” And I owe a lot to the memory of Rabbi Fackenheim and Fr. Eshmann….
Posted on: Fri, 21 Jun 2013 17:46:11 +0000
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