Creation, Nature, and Political Order In the Philosophy of Michael Foster (1903-1959): The Classic Mind Articles and Others, with Modern Critical Studies.

Platt, Michael

Wybrow, Cameron, ed. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1993. x + 347 pp. Cloth, $27.95--Given its prevailing analytic concerns and limitations, readers of Mind, receiving their issues in the mid-1930s must have been surprised to find an extended discussion, stretching over three years, of the relation of modern mathematical physics to Christian supernatural theology, especially as the relation discerned by the author was not the familiar one of opposition, animated by dogmatic disapproval of Christianity and complacent approval of modern science, both its claim to know the whole and its satisfaction of the human desire to soften the human condition. According to the author, the relation was one of indebtedness: there cannot be a mathematical science of material particulars in motion, such as that of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and above all Newton, without the thought of a willful Creator God who knows such particulars, down to numbering the hairs on their head (yea, sent His Son to be one such particular in motion). Ancient science, though rational, like its highest being, was not so empirical. Nay, it could not be empirical because it was rational and rational only. The Nous of Metaphysics A has no interest in anything but itself.

That the author of these articles, one Michael B. Foster, was English, that he came out of Oxford, though his Ph.D. was from Germany; that he wrote in the dry English manner; that he had returned to Oxford; and that, at about the same time (1935), he published a worthy book on The Political Philosophies of Plato and Hegel at the Clarendon Press, did not suffice to draw serious attention to the author's arguments or to the author--no reviews, no refutations, no significant citations, no generation of students or independent younger minds ready to revere Foster as the pioneer of their own ambitious endeavors, and no academic advancement for Foster based on a just appreciation of the rare virtues of his very rational mind (nor any advancement based on an unjust or ignorant appreciation either).

At last, here in this volume, adequate response to Foster's thesis and his arguments has arrived, in the contributions of Rolf Gruner, Ian Weeks & Struan Jacobs, Samuel Ajzenstat, Stanley Jaki, and Francis Oakley, President of Williams (whose Creation: The Impact of an Idea, ed. with Daniel O'Connor [New York: Scribner's, - 19691 kept Foster's essays from sinking out of sight entirely). All of the commentaries respect Foster's essays as worth thinking about, even if they end up critical, and all save perhaps Jaki's are respectful in tone, though in indignation there be a kind of respect. Added to them is an account of the Oxford theological scene by James Patrick, President of the College of Thomas More (Fort Worth); essays by Temple Kingston and Robert Peck addressing Foster's later work; and Samuel Ajzenstat's thoughtful criticism of Foster's Plato and Hegel book. Long, informative, and judicious is the introduction by the editor. The volume belongs in every philosophic library.

Yet if there was no immediate response to Foster's arguments, still there must have been some who took note of the man's excellence. Here was an Englishman who was aware of the serious course of philosophizing in Germany. Did no gifted student of Husserl, such as Jacob Mein, author of Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (trans. Eva Brann [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968]) and future refounder of the St. John's (Annapolis) curriculum, notice these articles concerning the central question of his own research? Did no serious student of political philosophy, either that of Plato, such as Leo Strauss then a refugee in England shepherded by Sir Ernest Barker, or that of Hegel, such as Alexander Kojeve, the friend of Strauss, teaching Hegel to a generation of Frenchmen, engage Foster's thought with thought however unpublic? While the current volume's essays do not settle these questions they do advance our understanding. A reprinting, in the light of further reports elicited by the first edition, and especially by a publisher better ready to advertise the book, might add to our understanding a great deal.

Yet there remains a mystery, perhaps one never to be solved, about Foster. Having written these remarkable essays and his remarkable book on Plato and Hegel, young Foster seems to have fallen silent. What was he thinking? Did his views change? The inclusion in the Wybrow volume of some of Foster's related and later essays shows that Foster did not cease communicating, only that he addressed fellow Christians more than fellow philosophers, and it shows that the invention of the atom bomb did not prompt Foster to revise the tacit celebration of modern mathematical physics in his Mind essays. A reading of his Masters of Political Thought: Plato to Machiavelli (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941) shows that he was a very good tutor. Then in 1957 Foster published Mystery and Philosophy (London: SCM Press, 1957), a volume whose theme ought to have interested his fellow Christian Oxonian, C. S. Lewis, and whose arguments ought to have interested Leo Strauss who was treading the same ground, with similar arguments, in a series of semipublic lectures at Chicago during the same period (published posthumously, in a scattered and careless way).

A little later, this serious Christian, Michael Foster, ended his own life. Why? What editor Wybrow tells us of Foster's life makes one wonder if the willful God, whose creation cannot be understood through mind alone, but only through the mind's diligent, inquiring, skeptical, and empirical studies, may also be so inscrutable as to give grace without consideration of merit, or withhold it likewise, and thus be nearly utterly irrational and become a source of despair to a shy conscientious good soul such Michael B. Foster is reported to have been. Wybrow's essay casts some light upon this mystery, but perhaps no light can reach that darkness.