A Parenthetical Kalam Argument

This post will be of interest to very few people.  Spoiler: I found an endorsement of the Kalam cosmological argument in a 19th Century thomist.  This was really quite surprising to me though for thomists tend to denigrate the Kalam argument (Bonaventure, an almost exact conemporary of Aquinas, was a Franciscan and they didn't always get along with the Dominicans). 

During the post-Leo XIII Thomist revival there were a lot of new scholastic manuals published.  One of my favorite things to do is to read them.  I was reading _Logic and Mental Philosophy_ today by one Rev. Charles Coppens, S.J.  My copy is dated 1891.  There is this passage in the middle of a demonstration of God's existence, note the parenthetical remark. 

But besides the fact that such a series is absurd (because an infinite series in the past could never have come to a particular effect, since the infinite can never be passed through or left behind), even if it were not absurd, it would be inadequate to produce such an effect. For a multitude of contingent beings without a necessary cause could not have a sufficient reason for existence; since contingency is the want of an intrinsic reason for existence. Therefore no contingent being can exist unless there exists a necessary being which is its first cause.

So, there you have it you historians of the first Thomist revival (the second was the one with Gilson, Maritain, Pegis, Regis, et al.).

The Coppens text is available here at the Maritain Center website at Notre Dame (which also has a huge collection of online scholastic texts here).