From Theology To Philosophy In The Latin West - Philip Sherrard

We have spoken of a certain retrogression in Christian thought during the later Middle Ages, and this in respect of the theology of both the Latin and the Greek worlds. At the same time, it was in the Latin West that this retrogression became most clearly marked, and we have indeed noted in previous chapters how the addition of the Filioque to the Christian Creed is intimately related to it, and how this had its counterpart in changes in ecclesiastical organization in the Latin West. What, though, we have not remarked is how this same retrogression, however inevitable it may have been, yet prepared the ground for the penetration of the rational spirit to a degree that was to produce a revolution in European thought and to lead, in much the way that Plethon had visualized, to the formation of a new, non-religious, even materialist type of mentality, and to a corresponding culture and society.

How this in fact is so, and the nature of what was involved in the revolution in European thought that gave birth to the modern West, will perhaps become more clear if we once again briefly recall certain aspects of the Christian tradition with which this revolution marks a break. From the Christian point of view, the purpose of man's life is to be perfect. This perfection is to be achieved through a process of deification in which man overcomes the powers of ignorance and darkness, vanity and illusion, and becomes conscious of that spiritual principle in him obscured by the fall. Man himself is regarded as a psychophysical whole: soul and body are reciprocal, both coming into existence simultaneously and being mutually interdependent while in existence. At the same time, man is not only soul and body, for he is also endowed with a third faculty or power, which is both the image of God, or spiritual principle, in him, and the uncreated cause of his created nature. This cause, man, like every finite form, possesses in him from the beginning through the very fact of being created at all, and it remains with him, however it may be obscured, through all his temporal transformations. St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua,P.G. 91, 1340 A. The Incarnation of the eternal Logos in Christ is not thus an exception to, but a confirmation of, what man is;Ibid., 1341 A, B. and the same may be said of the Resurrection, for it is only in the effective realization of his uncreated nature that man achieves his deification and, through it, that deliverance (from the death and corruption of his merely temporal existence) in which his purpose is fulfilled.

The realization itself by man of his own uncreated and perfect nature is something beyond the reach of all natural powers of soul and body, reason and sense:

It is truly impossible to be united to God unless, besides purifying ourselves, we come to be outside or, rather, above ourselves, having left all that which pertains to the sensible world and risen above all ideas, reasonings, and even all knowledge and above reason itself, being entirely under the influence of the intellectual sense and having reached that ignorance which is above knowledge and (what is the same) above every kind of philosophy. St. Gregory Palamas, in Gregory Palamas, Twenty-Two Homilies, pp. 169-70.

This intellectual sense (αἴσθησις νοερά) is not, therefore, the consequence of any theoretical and abstract speculation; it is, on the contrary, the consequence of a long process of purification and prayer in which God is revealed in the heart. The intellect (νοῦς) is not in this context the equivalent of the mind or of any mental or rational faculty; it is of another order altogether, being, indeed, precisely the spiritual image of God in man and naturally deiform, and having its seat not in the mind but in the heart. It is the heart which is the intellectual, or spiritual, centre of the whole psychophysical nature of man, and the intellectual sense spoken of above, and the spiritual discernment and enlightenment which go with it, can only be achieved through a bringing of the mind itself into the heart; for it is only in this treasury of thought St. Gregory Palamas, P.G. 150, 1108 A. that the intellect purified and illuminated, having manifestly entered into the possession of the grace of God and perceiving itself ... does not contemplate only its own image, but the clarity formed in the image by the grace of God ... that which accomplishes the incomprehensible union with the Supreme, through which the intellect, surpassing human capacities, sees God in the Spirit. Man then being himself light, sees the light with the light; if he regards himself, he sees the light, and if he regards the object of his vision, he finds the light there again, and the means that he employs for seeing is the light; and it is in this that union consists, for all this is but one. St. Gregory Palamas, cited pp. 202-3 of J. Meyendorff, Le Thème du "retour en soi" dans la doctrine palamite du xive siècle, in Revue de l'Histoire des Religions, vol. 145, 1954, pp. 183-206. In such a union, man does not merely contemplate what is outside and beyond himself; he becomes himself what he contemplates, the uncreated centre of his own proper being in which the whole of himself, body and soul, participates, and through which he is deified, not by the way of ascending from reason or from the visible world by the guesswork of analogy, but by mingling unutterably with the light which is above sense and thought and by seeing God in himself as in a mirror. St. Gregory Palamas, in Gregory Palamas, Twenty-Two Homilies, pp. 170-1.

What such a realization presupposes is, of course, a recognition of its possibility. Unless it is admitted, first, that God is the actual immanent hypostasis, or spiritual cause, of man's being, and second, that man possesses some faculty superior to the reason and all other natural and created faculties, through which he can know that cause, then the idea of his deification is meaningless. For this deification proceeds from God and from man's direct intuition of His transfiguring light. In that light, man knows, in an absolute sense, both his own divine cause, and the causal energies of all created things. If, therefore, either the immanence of God in man, or the possession by man of such a faculty as that indicated, is denied, then the realization in question will be regarded as impossible; and the effect will be to shift attention from it, and to substitute for it the idea that the purpose of man's life, and the nature of the knowledge he may possess of God, himself, and other created things, are conditioned by, and proceed from, the relative and natural faculties, whether mental or sensory, which he has at his disposal.

Yet precisely the possibility of this realization was, if not denied, at least obscured by the main conceptions of much Latin theology, particularly in its Augustinian and Thomist forms. While I am aware of the dangers of isolating, as I do in what follows, certain more purely philosophical aspects of Augustinian and Thomist thought, this does nevertheless make it possible to indicate how these aspects are inextricably intertwined both with St. Augustine's and St. Thomas's fundamental views and with that whole transition from theological thought to secular philosophy which is the theme of the present chapter. We have seen that in this theology what came to hold a central position was the notion of God as essentially identical with absolute and perfect Being: God's Essence and His Being are one. Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theol. i. 11. 4. This does not mean, it may be repeated, that God is said not to be infinite; rather, His Infinity is regarded as totally absorbed by His ontological nature, Ibid., i. 7. 1 and this in such a way that no potentiality may be admitted in Him at all. Ibid., i. 25. 1 ad 3 On the other hand, it does mean that Latin theologians tend to apply to the Being of God those names, such as simplicity, indivisibility, and so on, which the Fathers reserve for His pre-ontological nature. For if God is essentially identical with absolute and perfect Being, no distinction may be recognized in Him, since if there were such a distinction, then what is distinguished would necessarily be other and less than absolute and perfect Being, and God cannot be other or less than Himself. The Being of God is therefore of an absolute simplicity and indivisibility, and any qualities or properties attributed to God, such as those St. Augustine calls the principial forms, or stable and immutable essences of things, St. Augustine, De diversis quaestionibus, 83, qu. 46. 1-2. and the Fathers His uncreated powers and energies, must be indistinguishably identified with His Being. Cf. St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, ii. 10. But if this is so—and it is here that we approach the subject of how the realization in question is obscured by the main conceptions of Latin theology—if this is so, and if no distinction is recognized in God such as that made by the Fathers between the absolute simplicity and indivisibility of His preontological Essence and the multiplicity and divisibility of His ontological powers and energies, what relationship can there be between God and the world? Or what knowledge can man possess either of God, of himself, or of other created things?

It was in seeking to answer such questions as these that St. Augustine was led to posit the idea of a soul which, in relation to the body, is not only superior to it, but also entirely independent of it. See É. Gilson, Introduction à l'étude de Saint Augustin (Paris, 1931), pp. 56, 67. Man is a rational soul using a body Homo igitur, ut homini apparet, anima rationalis est mortali atque terreno utens corpore. St. Augustine, De Moribus ecelesiae, i. 27. 52. But this soul, although thus specified as a rational soul, has a faculty superior to the reason, which Augustine calls sometimes the intelligence and sometimes the intellect. It is important to remark here that the Augustinian intelligence or intellect cannot be said to correspond to that spiritual intellect, the deiform νοῦς, mentioned earlier, for this latter is, as we saw, an uncreated and divine faculty centred in the heart and superior to the psychophysical whole of man, while the Augustinian intelligence or intellect is but a superior mental faculty of the soul itself. According to Augustine, this intellectual soul discovers and knows all things in the eternal essences—in, that is, the immutable truth which is in God. But here precisely one comes up against a difficulty.

For if the eternal essences of things—their creative, but uncreated, causal energies—are conceived, as they were by St. Augustine, as gathered up in the immutable mind of God and as one with His non-participable, and unknowable, nature, in what sense can the intellectual soul discover and know all things in them? The distinction made by the Fathers between the Essence and the uncreated energies provided a satisfactory and adequate answer to this question: the spiritual intellect can know things through participation in their paradigmatic and creative energies; or, just as a stone becomes a stone through participation in its own uncreated energy, or cause, so the intellect would know the stone through participation in that same causal energy. But Augustine could not admit such an answer, for he regarded the eternal causes, or essences, as one with the Essence itself, and there cannot be, at least during earthly life, any direct participation in, or intuition of, that Essence by the intellectual soul: the soul, even if, for Augustine, it is independent of, and superior to, the body, is yet a created faculty, and there cannot be any direct relationship between what is created and the Essence, for this would imply an essential identity of the two; which is an impossibility. All that is possible, from the Augustinian point of view, is for the intellectual soul to be illuminated, so to speak, from above, and in this light, which remains separate from it, and outside it, and in no way becomes its own nature, to perceive the rightness or wrongness of its own rational conclusions.

These rational conclusions are not, however, abstractions in the Aristotelian sense. The Aristotelian abstraction is by definition derived from the sensible world, and this implies that there is some way through which sensible things can react on the soul and so provide it with the data from which the abstractions can be drawn: Aristotle's sensitive soul, in so far as it is sensitive, is not superior to the sensible body, in so far as it is sensible, and it is for this reason that there can be a relationship between the one and the other which allows sensible objects to act on the soul and the soul to abstract from them its knowledge. Such a process, according to Augustinian thought, is impossible. The soul is absolutely transcendent with regard to the body, and there can be no such relationship between them as that envisaged by Aristotle—the sensible object cannot, that is, act on the soul or modify it through the sensations of the body. Hence Augustine is led to regard the soul as possessing a sensation of its own—est enim sensus et mentis St. Augustine, Retractationes, 1, c. i, no. 2.—distinct from, and impervious to, that of the body. This view of things is essential to Augustine because, any direct participation of the created in the uncreated being considered impossible, he is compelled to regard the soul as created immortal, for otherwise it could possess no immortality; at the same time, the soul cannot have any dependence on, or reciprocal relationship with, the body or other sensible things, for such things are corruptible and mortal, and this the soul, naturally incorruptible and immortal, cannot be.

For Augustine, then, man is neither able to know things, himself included, through participation in their spiritual essences, or causes, nor able to derive knowledge from sensible things. What knowledge he has, or can acquire, is therefore in himself. Man, for Augustine, is essentially his own thought, his mens. St. Augustine, De Trinitate, xii. 1 and 2. This mind, in itself and a priori, contains the reflected and created copies of those immutable spiritual essences according to which it itself and everything that is are made; and although man can choose between following his lower reason—ratio—into a kind of illicit and voluptuous connexion with natural forms, or following his higher reason—intelligentia—into a contemplation of those copies of eternal things which pre-exist in his mind—his mind contemplating its own innate and created contents Ibid., xii. 8. 13; 10. 15—he can transform neither that mind itself nor, a fortiori, the whole of himself, soul and body, through a realization of his own uncreated spiritual principle. There is, in fact, very little fundamental difference between man as envisaged by Augustine and man as envisaged by Descartes, and the cogito ergo sum, implying not only the primacy of thought over all else where man is concerned, but also its self-sufficient nature, is, if not actually stated, at least inherent in the very conditions that St. Augustine lays down as governing man's life and determining his relationships with himself, the world, and God. See St. Augustine, Soliloquies, ii. 1. 1; É. Gilson, op. cit., pp. 50-51.

St. Thomas Aquinas, although he starts, like St. Augustine, with the presupposition of a God who is essentially perfect Being, St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theol. i. 3. 4. is yet led, in seeking to answer the question what and how man can know, to conclusions which in a certain sense reverse those of St. Augustine. For in spite of defining the soul as a form not susceptible to any admixture of matter, See É. Gilson, The Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (Cambridge, 1924), p. 160. Aquinas none the less follows Aristotle in denying that forms as such (except those indistinguishably contained in the transcendent and essential nature of God) can subsist apart from matter. Ibid., p. 191. It is therefore impossible for Aquinas to admit even the Augustinian notion that the soul, or intellect, possesses in itself and a priori the created copies of the principial and eternal essences, and derives its knowledge from them. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theol. i. 88. 3 ad Resp. The intellect is, at first, tabula rasa. But in that case, from where, and by what means, may the intellect obtain any knowledge?

What must first be remarked in this connexion is that for Aquinas, as for Augustine, the intellect cannot derive its knowledge from a direct intuition of the forms, or essences, of things as they exist in God. God is essentially pure Being. But if God is essentially pure Being, He is also essentially pure Act: since God always is, He cannot not be; and since He cannot not be, it follows that there is nothing in Him which is merely in potentiality; for whatever is in potentiality can either be or not be, and in proportion as God contained in Himself some passive power, He could either be or not be. Consequently there is nothing in God which is only in potentiality, and this means that He is, exclusively, pure Act. St. Thomas Aquinas, Contra Gentiles, i. 16. Thus, all principial forms, the divine and uncreated causes of things, being, as they are, indistinguishably contained in God's essential nature, are also purely in act. Ibid. Man, on the other hand, possesses a corporeal body, and thus shares in the pure potentiality of matter. Hence, he cannot apprehend or intuit spiritual or supernatural realities in themselves, for the latter are of God's purely active nature, and there can be no immanence in God of, or of God in, anything that shares in potentiality. Therefore the direct apprehension, or intuition, of these realities, since it would imply precisely such an immanence, is entirely beyond man's reach. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theol. i. 88. 3 ad Resp. It could only be within man's reach if he did not possess what he does possess, a corporeal body, and was, consequently, what he is not, an angel. St. Thomas Aquinas, Contra Gentiles, i. i6.

With no innate knowledge, and unable to derive knowledge from a direct intuition of the Divine, man can in fact, according to Aquinas, only know anything by a process of abstraction from sensible objects. This leads Aquinas to his conception of an active and a passive intellect. The intelligible forms of sensible objects, that which may be known, although they cannot subsist apart from, cannot at the same time be said to reside in, matter: what is intelligible is immaterial and cannot be participated in by what is material. There is no intelligible nature of the creature. Thus, these forms can only be said to reside in sensible objects in potentiality, and in such a state they are unintelligible and cannot be known. They can, however, become intelligible, and hence knowable, if, through something which is itself in act, they too are reduced to act, and in the process abstracted from their sensible objects. Thus, the soul, if it is to know anything, must possess an active virtue which makes the intelligible form, contained potentially, not actually, in the sensible object, actually intelligible; and this virtue is the intellectus agens, or active intellect. St. Thomas Aquinas, De Anima, qu. un. art. 4 ad Resp.; Summa Theol. i. 79. 3 ad Resp.

At the same time, this active intellect, since it possesses no innate knowledge, in itself lacks all determination; it is, as we said, tabula rasa, a light by which it is possible to see, but in which there is nothing to see. Hence it requires sensible objects from which to derive something to see, and thus some determination, and without which it would die of inanition. But it can only derive this determination from sensible objects if there is also in the soul a passive virtue on which the sensible objects, directly or indirectly, can react. This virtue is the passive intellect. The soul is intelligibility in act, but lacks determination; sensible objects have determination in act, but lack intelligibility. The soul, therefore, confers intelligibility on sensible objects, and in this respect it is an active intellect; and in its turn it receives determination from sensible objects, and in this respect it is a passive intellect.

The actual process through which this exchange between the soul and sensible objects is achieved is, briefly, as follows. The sensible object first impresses its image (phantasm) on the human senses (it is for this reason that the soul is given, and united to, a body: it is only through the bodily senses that it can come into contact with sensible objects, and thus obtain any knowledge at all). St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theol. i. 89. 1 ad Resp.; and i. 55. 2 ad Resp. Such an image impressed on the human senses is the image of a particular thing—similitudo rei particularis Ibid., i. 84. 7 ad 2.—impressed on, and preserved in, bodily organs—similitudines individuorum existentes in organis corporeis. Ibid., i. 85. 1 ad 3. Therefore it is still, from the point of view of both subject and object, in the sphere of the sensible and, as such, still particular and unintelligible, and not universal and intelligible. The operation of the active intellect is, then, by abstraction, to separate the form, or proper species, of each particular sensible object from all individual sensible characteristics, even from those still present in the image of the object. From this point of view, its activity is not merely one of separating the intelligible from the sensible, the universal from the particular, but also of actually producing the intelligible and the universal. For the sensible species of the thing to become the intelligible form of the intellect, there has to be a kind of transformation in which the active intellect is turned upon the sensible images impressed on, and preserved in, the bodily organs, in order to illuminate them, and it is in this illumination that the abstraction may be said properly to exist. Through it, whatever intelligible element is contained in the sensible object is abstracted from it, and this produces in the passive intellect, and hence determines it, the knowledge of what the images represent when considering in them what is only universal and is quite apart from any particular or material characteristic. Ibid., i. 85. 1 ad Resp. Such knowledge is conserved in the memory of the active intellect, a faculty which Aquinas has to posit in order to account for the fact that man can retain this knowledge after his immediate observation of sensible things has come to an end. The condition of this whole process is, of course, that the abstraction of the active intellect which determines the passive intellect is preceded by the impression of the sensible object on the human senses. At the base of all knowledge accessible to man is the sensible world, and he can possess no knowledge which does not derive from it.

From this, two things are at once apparent. The first is that the nature and function of what Aquinas regards as man's supreme faculty, his intellect, are not, any more than those of the Augustinian intellect, equivalent to the nature and function of the spiritual intellect, or heart, of the Christian Fathers; and consequently, as in the case of Augustine, it is clear that what is regarded as man's supreme purpose, since it depends on what is considered as within his possibilities, will also, and correspondingly, differ from that envisaged by the Fathers. In effect, the intellect, as visualized by Aquinas, is no more than a kind of extension of the discursive reason: intellect and reason describe one and the same power. Ibid., i. 79. 8 ad Resp. There is no intellectual power in man distinct from his reason, and the mode of knowledge proper to man is reasoning or discursive knowledge. Man is a reasoning being by definition: the form of man is his rational soul, and every act in conformity to the reason is good, while every act which is contrary to the reason is evil. Ibid., ii. 18.5 ad Resp.; Contra Gentiles, iii. 9. The intellect is nothing but the reason itself in so far as it participates in the simplicity of the knowledge reached by the reason proceeding from one object of knowledge to another, from one abstraction to another: nude et potentia discurrens et veritatem accipiens non erunt diversae sed una ...; ipsa ratio intellectus dicitur quod participat de intellectuali simplicitate, ex quo est principium et terminus in ejus propria operatione. St. Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate, qu. 15, art. 1 ad Resp.

The second thing which is apparent follows naturally from the first, and is that the type of knowledge which Aquinas regards as the highest accessible to man is of quite a different order from that of the gnosis of the Christian Fathers. As we have seen, Aquinas regards the direct intuition of divine essences as beyond man's reach: St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theol. i. 88. 3 ad Resp. the human intellect as it works in this earthly life can know only by turning to the material and the sensible: Ibid., i. 87. 1 ad Resp. Cognitio Dei quae ex mente humana accipi potest, non excedit illud genus cognitionis quod ex sensibilibus sumitur, cum et ipsa de seipsa cognoscat quid est, per hoc quod naturas sensibilium intelligit. St. Thomas Aquinas, Contra Gentiles, iii. 47 What knowledge man can have is that which he extracts from the sensible, and this is a created, and human, intelligible knowledge, which resembles uncreated and divine intelligible knowledge only by comparison. Man's intellect, the highest faculty he possesses or can possess, is, for Aquinas, physical and created, and there can be no direct intuition by it of what is metaphysical and uncreated. All that man can know of the latter, the limit of his knowledge of the Divine, himself, and other sensible things, amounts, after he has gathered together and meditated on the abstractions he has derived from these things, to a mere collection of concepts which may be said to have an analogical likeness to the Divine, but nothing more. And if the supreme end of man is beatitude (there can be no question of a deification such as that envisaged by the Fathers), this beatitude is also, where man is concerned, created and human, St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theol. i. 26. 3 ad Resp. and in any case can only be attained by man after death. All that is accessible to man on earth is an imperfect and secondary beatitude which consists in the study of the speculative sciences, whose proper object is the sensible; for just as natural forms are analogous to supernatural forms, so the study of the speculative sciences has a sort of analogical resemblance to the perfect beatitude Ibid., ii. 3. 5 ad Resp.; and 3. 6 ad Resp. To what extent this is a limitation of the full perspective of Christian thought there is here no need to emphasize.

That, however, Aquinas regarded the knowledge extracted by the reason from the sensible world as the only knowledge accessible to man, and hence considered that in the acquisition of such knowledge man's highest purpose in mortal life is fulfilled, does not mean that he rejected the supra-rational truths of the Christian Revelation. On the contrary, he was most careful to acknowledge them, and even, as he thought, to protect them from the sphere of reason. But now the whole attitude to, and understanding of, these truths has undergone a change. According to the more complete forms of Christian thought, the truths of the Revelation, although revealed precisely in the historical life of Christ, nevertheless correspond to eternally present divine realities: they are a revelation of the true nature of things and hence, even though man may not realize it, are in no way exceptional, but, on the contrary, entirely normal. Although they are truths which are revealed, they are, from another point of view, truths which conceal realities always present, realities which man, through following the pattern given to him through the incarnation of the eternal Logos in the life and actions of Christ, should himself realize and live. From this point of view then, they provide the theoretical basis of a knowledge which man, through progressive stages of realization in the mystagogical life, should make actual and effective for himself.

There is thus, in this view, no problem of the relationship of the truths of revelation to those of the reason: the first are to be accepted as the theoretical ground-plan, if one can put it like that, of a supra-rational knowledge which is to be realized gradually through penetration into, and participation in, the spiritual reality of the Christian Mysteries. The Christian Mysteries, and human participation in them, witness to, and protect, the living and continuous operation and incarnation of the truths of the Revelation; and not only can the truths of the Revelation not be realized apart from such initiation into them, but also on them is dependent any genuine knowledge man can possess. The conclusions of the reason in itself do not constitute a genuine knowledge. The conclusions of the reason may only constitute a genuine knowledge, and this of a relative kind, provided that the reason first conforms itself to the truths of a supra-rational order. There is, as we have pointed out, an absolute, and not merely a relative, distinction between the spiritual intellect, in the full sense, and the reason; and while the function of the first is the direct intuition and experience of the truths of a supra-rational, order, the function of the second is to derive from that intuition and experience the content of the knowledge necessary for dealing with the practical affairs of human and social life. The idea that the reason in itself may attain to anything more than a most relative kind of knowledge does not occur; nor does the idea that the reason may operate independently of the truths of revelation or faith, its conclusions being valid in one sphere, while the truths of revelation are valid in another. Unless the reason first conforms its conclusions to the truths of a supra-rational order; unless it is transformed through participation in the spiritual knowledge of the intellect, it is still, like the rest of man, captive to the powers of ignorance and illusion, and its conclusions must be regarded accordingly.

Once, however, it is accepted that man can have no direct knowledge of realities of a supra-rational order, and once that distinction, central to Christian anthropology, between the spiritual intellect and the reason is lost sight of and the intellect is regarded as a mere natural extension of the reason, the understanding of the relationship between the truths of revelation and the conclusions of the reason outlined above cannot be maintained. For, on the one hand, the truths of revelation will now be regarded as beyond the capacity of man to realize in a direct fashion; and, on the other hand, since the reason takes the place of the spiritual intellect as man's supreme faculty, its conclusions in themselves will be thought to represent the most complete knowledge of the Divine accessible to man during his earthly life. A purely natural faculty—the reason—which is, while untransformed through participation in the spiritual knowledge of the intellect, necessarily subject to diabolic activity, is now regarded as the instrument of human beatitude.

This curious reversal of attitude gave rise to problems which occupied the attention of generations of Western thinkers. As was inevitable, the truths of revelation were frequently found to conflict with the conclusions of the unsanctified reason: what is revealed by God is not likely to agree with what is simulated by the Devil. Having, however, permitted, in the way we have seen, a too rational approach to things to obscure certain fundamental aspects of the full Christian doctrine, these Western thinkers were committed to regarding the reason as a valid instrument, for the discovery not merely of a natural and relative truth, but even of a divine and absolute truth. They were therefore compelled by their premisses to seek for some adequate justification both for the conclusions of the reason and the truths of revelation, even if the former seemed to contradict the latter—some justification for believing what their reason told them could not necessarily be so. The only way they could do this was to divide the sphere of revelation from that of reason, to divide faith from philosophy. Aquinas, following on the Jewish Maimonides and such philosophers as Alexander of Hales, Bonaventura, and Albert the Great, clearly indicates this distinction: See É Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages (New York, 1939), pp. 74-75. on the one hand there is faith, which is the assent to something because it is revealed by God; and on the other hand there is science, which is the assent to something because it is perceived as true in the natural light of human reason. These two departments are separate, the truths of one being valid in one sphere, the truths of the other in another sphere. Man cannot believe what he sees is true; he believes something which he cannot see is true because God has said it. What God has said that can be seen is not a matter of faith. Faith is the reason's assent to that which the reason (or the intellect, the two being identified by Aquinas) does not, and cannot, see to be true, to first principles or one of their necessary conclusions; the reason's function is to acquire through its own activity what knowledge it can through abstraction from sensible things, and, though this knowledge has no necessary connexion with the things of faith, it is nevertheless the highest of which man is capable.

Thus, the truths of revelation, although still regarded as absolute (since God has revealed them to man at a particular time in the historical life of Christ), are also regarded as beyond human capacity to know; they are not thought of as continuously revealed in the developing mystagogical life of individual Christians, but remain as it were in heaven, the objects of angelic, but not of human, knowledge. The things of faith, which must be believed by all, are equally unknown by all, and there can be no knowledge about them. At the same time, and in a way that appears contradictory, rational proof is demanded for these things, and even for God Himself. Such a proof is found in history—in, that is, the miracles of God, the life and growth of the Church, and so on, as also in the fact of human and other existence. This is, in effect, to reverse the point of view of the patristic or, generally speaking, the full Christian tradition, according to which man's knowledge proceeds from his direct intuition of the Divine and Its qualities, his conclusions about his own nature and that of other created things being derived therefore from this primary intuition of what is supra-rational and supernatural. For St. Thomas, as for other Scholastics, the existence of God and His qualities must be inferred, directly or indirectly, from man's rational and natural knowledge of sensible things and of empirical facts. St. Thomas Aquinas, Contra Gentiles, iii. 1.

This almost idolatrous attitude to creation and to natural and human history is demanded by the premisses we have been discussing: the assumption that the eternal and extratemporal nature of the truths of revelation is entirely beyond man's intuition, and that the only knowledge he can possess of it is the analogical and conceptual knowledge derived by the reason from the data provided by the sensible world, will automatically have the effect of shifting the focus of attention away from the contemplation of these truths on to the sensible world, from the supernatural to the natural, from vision to observation; and hence the sensible and natural world, and history as part of it, will acquire an interest quite out of proportion to that given them in normal times. The facts of nature, just as the facts of history, are the starting-point of that process of abstraction through which the intellect receives its determination, is brought from potency to act, and thus, to the extent possible to man, knows God and achieves beatitude. In the case of both nature and history what is sought for is rational proof of the Divine. For since the direct intuition of, and participation in, what is supra-rational is now regarded as impossible, not to believe that such proof is valid would be tantamount to condemning man to a state of insurmountable ignorance concerning his life and destiny, and hence to open the door to all manner of doubts; and it was precisely in order to frustrate such a development that it became necessary to insist, in a novel way, on the validity of the rational proofs for such things as the existence of God and His essential attributes, the existence of the human soul and its immortality, and even, at a later date, for the Roman See to issue an official anathema against all who shall say that the One true God, our Creator and Lord, cannot be certainly known by the natural light of human reason through created things. In this treating of a relative knowledge, what Plato would call opinion, as if it were absolute, not only is a purely natural and individual faculty, and one which, like the rest of natural man, is subject to the prince of this world, regarded as capable in its own right of demonstrating the existence of the Divine; but also the Divine Itself appears to be considered as subordinate in certain respects to rational and natural categories.

This divorce of revelation and reason, metaphysics and science, implicit in the philosophy of St. Augustine and fully recognized in that of the Scholastics, both indicates to what extent the theoretical basis of the Christian realization was weakened in the West by the nature of much Western medieval theology itself, and also prepared the ground consequently for the whole revolution of thought which was so to modify Western society and culture. In fact, already in the work of Aquinas was a complete restatement of an Aristotelian theory of knowledge. With it went the conception that the sensible world, that of nature, possesses a logical structure in and for itself, the observation of which could lead—was indeed the only method that could lead—to man's acquiring a notion of divine realities; for these, it is thought, are indicated in the logical order of the created world. God is entirely simple, eminent, and transcendent; as such, in the ontological order He surpasses the whole created world, and, consequently, the whole logical order of things; and since human knowledge is limited to the logical order, He entirely surpasses our knowledge and is incomprehensible. At the same time, although participative and intuitive knowledge of God is thus beyond our scope, we can nevertheless know God in the logical order, that alone to which our knowledge refers, by analogy. Causes are in a certain manner reflected in their effects; therefore, since God is the cause of the created world, of the logical order, we can in a certain manner know Him in it: those logical characteristics we can discern in nature, such as measure, form, and order (modus, species, ordo), St. Augustine, De natura boni, iii. which reflect what our reason tells us must necessarily be the ontological perfections of a God who is perfect Being, will give us an analogical knowledge of God. We can know the analogy, the logical characteristic of the created effect, without knowing the cause, the ontological perfection of the transcendent God. The analogy is the means through which a thing is indicated; what is indicated is itself unknowable.

These assumptions, that we can have no participative and intuitive knowledge of God and that, consequently, our only possible knowledge of Him is an analogical knowledge derived from the sensible world, had the effect, as we remarked, of shifting attention from vision to observation, from the inward presence to the outward present: as another philosopher, Adelard of Bath, could put it: I do not detract from God, for everything that is, is from Him, and because of Him. But [nature] is not confused and without system, and human science should be given a hearing on those points which it has covered. Adelard of Bath, Quaestiones Naturales, c. 4. The metaphysical question, about why things happen, gradually gave place to the physical question, about how things happen, and this, it was felt, could be answered by a correlation of the facts—by any means, logical or mathematical, that was convenient. Indeed, what became important now was precisely a systematic theory according to which the sensible world could be observed, and through which the validity of the conclusions derived from such observation could be demonstrated; and this already in the Middle Ages was achieved by uniting the experimental habit of the practical arts long present in the West with the rationalism of Scholastic philosophy. Before the end of the Middle Ages—before, that is, the opening of the fourteenth century—the ways of thought we have been noting had made possible the formation of a systematic theory of experimental science understood and practised by enough philosophers for their work to produce the methodological revolution to which modern science owes its origin. See A. C. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste (Oxford, 1953), passim. And it did not involve a great step for Descartes and the buccinatores novi temporis of the seventeenth century when, adding fresh confusion to old misunderstanding, they took the new science out of the now purely theoretical and abstract framework of Christian metaphysics and reversed the situation by placing metaphysics within the framework of science itself.

For if Descartes may be called the father of modern scientific rationalism, he owes this title to the fact that tendencies long present in the West, and which had already produced such manifestations of their presence as the philosophical developments of which we have been speaking, find through him their full expression. Seen in the perspective of these developments, the chief step taken by Descartes consisted, first, in formally according to the mind the independence of the Divine which it had in fact long since in all but name exercised; and second, and more important, in attributing to its norms an absolute prerogative in the matter of truth and knowledge. There is, indeed, a curious inner dialectic linking the thought of Augustine, Aquinas, and Descartes. Augustine had asserted the independence of the mind in relation to sensible things, regarding its knowledge as innate, but had insisted that it was only in the light of the eternal essences themselves that it could perceive the rightness or wrongness of its ratiocinations. Aquinas, on the other hand, asserted the independence of the sphere of human knowledge from that of what he called angelic knowledge, but had insisted that, while the latter is entirely transcendent in relation to the former, human knowledge itself is dependent on sensible objects, and cannot exist without them. Finally, Descartes not only reasserted Augustine's claim that the mind and its knowledge are independent of sensible things, but he also carried to its extreme the independence attributed by Aquinas to human knowledge in relation to angelic knowledge by dismissing the latter altogether and by attributing the characteristics of angelic knowledge, those of the spiritual intellect, to the human reason itself.

This last remark needs perhaps to be made more clear, especially as it throws into relief the whole change in understanding produced in the West as a result of the developments we have been considering. We have seen that, according to the Christian tradition, the knowledge of the spiritual intellect is intuitive, innate, principial, and independent of external things. It is a knowledge which comprehends things in a truly universal sense, not through knowing their abstractions, which is what constitutes universality for Aristotle and Aquinas, but through knowing them as it were a priori by knowing their divine principles, and this not in an abstract or conceptual way, but by participation. These divine principles, in the light of which the intellect knows external objects, are creative or operative energies, causes through which things are made; and what is seen in such a cause is not something drawn from external objects and transported into the knowing mind, but is the creative Spirit itself according to which things are brought into, and sustained in, existence. Such knowledge is entirely supra-rational and, what amounts to the same thing, supra-individual; where natural, rational, and individual man is concerned, in whom the spiritual principle is obscured, and who is thus subject to the darkness and illusion of his psychophysical self, its acquisition presupposes the awakening, through struggle, purification, and prayer, of the spiritual principle: it is dependent on the grace of God. Rational and natural knowledge, that of which man is capable without such spiritual grace, is not merely a lower and relative kind of knowledge it is also unregenerate in the sense that it will reflect the influence of the powers of darkness and illusion to which unregenerate man himself is subject.

When, for reasons we have seen, it was held to be a theoretical impossibility for man to acquire such spiritual knowledge of the kind just indicated, it was as an immediate and necessary consequence also assumed that the only knowledge accessible to him was precisely that of the rational and natural order; and since this is a mental knowledge, the mens, or mind, considered as a rational faculty, came to be regarded as man's chief organ of knowledge. Or to put this another way: from the point of view of Christian metaphysics, man is regarded as a trinity of spirit, soul, and body, of which the last pair form a composite of the created order, while the first belongs to the divine and uncreated order; from this other point of view, however, man is regarded solely as a duality of soul and body, of which it is said that the soul is created naturally immortal and the body mortal, the first sometimes opposed to the, second, sometimes thought to be independent of it, but joined to it during mortal life, or sometimes superior to it, but using it for its own purposes. Moreover, this soul is described as a rational soul, and as the equivalent of the mind; and if a third faculty is attributed to man, and this is given the name of intellect, what is signified is not a spiritual intellect of a supra-rational and uncreated order, but merely a higher aspect of the rational soul itself, and hence still something which is created and which operates only within the logical and natural order. In other words, it is implied that man possesses no spiritual intellect, and that the mode and type of knowledge proper to such an intellect—intuitive, innate, principial, and independent of external objects—is not therefore within his reach; for what is within his reach is limited to the rational and logical order only. Where Aquinas is concerned, this supra-rational mode and type of knowledge is attributed to the angels, and it is said that man does not, and cannot, possess an angelic intellect.

What, consequently, is meant by the remark that Descartes attributed to the human reason itself the characteristics of the angelic intellect may now be gathered: he attributed to the human reason itself a mode and type of knowledge that is intuitive, innate, principial, and independent of external objects. On the one hand he no longer demanded that a condition of understanding what is true, even in the rational and logical order, is the mind's conformity to the truths of a supra-rational order; and on the, other hand he no longer asked that the external object should first impose on the mind its own law before the mind can acquire knowledge about it. On the contrary, he regarded rational propositions, the clear ideas which the reason grasps through its own innate powers, as in themselves axiomatic; it is these that for him form the principles of scientific explanation, and provide the measure and rule of the external world itself. The object grasped in the concept itself is what is real, independent of both the divine and the sensible world; reality is reduced to the predestined scale of scientific conceptual explanations. Thus, thought breaks with everything but itself, and forms as it were a closed world no longer in contact with anything but itself. And if its concepts, opaque effigies interposed between it and both divine and sensible things, are still for Descartes representations of a real world, it only remained for these concepts themselves to be mistaken for reality—and in the end not even all of them, but only such as were capable of direct application in the practical and material sphere—and the revolution in the intellectual life of the West which, seen in its most general terms, consists in replacing the values of the Christian tradition by those of a purely rational outlook, is complete.

It would be out of place in this context even to try to indicate all the multiple consequences of the formation of this scientific and rational mentality. Two of them, however, it is relevant to observe. The first, and most immediately apparent, is the growth of individualism. Again, it is by reference to Thomist thought that this process can best be perceived. For Aquinas, the active principle of individuality is the form, and this, where man is concerned, is the individual human soul. It is the constantly renewed succession of individual human souls which assures the continuity of the species and makes it possible for the degree of perfection corresponding to man to be continually represented in the universe. Matter is the passive principle of individuation and, while it exists only in view of the forms and has no real being without them, without it there could be no multiplicity of these forms. Thus, the individual is unique by definition: where man is concerned, each human soul is unique. This means that the intellect, which Aquinas identifies with both the reason and the soul, is also particular to each man: there is, for instance, no single active intellect common to all men. At the same time, the Thomist intellect, being merely an extension of the discursive reason and not corresponding to the spiritual intellect, or heart, cannot participate in what Herakleitos calls the Logos common to all: it cannot surpass its particularity and individuality through the intuition and realization of the realities of a supra-rational and supra-individual order, of a metaphysical and uncreated order, and hence become universal. It remains confined to its particularity and individuality, and such universality as it can achieve derives, as has already been remarked, from the abstractions it makes from the sensible world. In other words, the individuality of the knowing subject is not transcended through the realization of a supra-individual reality, but is limited by its dependence on the sensible world for any knowledge it may acquire: a condition of its knowing anything is that it remains open to external objects and allows those objects to communicate their own images to it.

Thus, while for Aquinas there can be no question of surpassing individuality from, so to speak, above, there is the necessity of restricting it from below: the individual human mind, if it closes itself within itself, will die of inanition, since a very condition of its determination is its capacity to receive from the outside world impressions that provide it with the material upon which to act and allow it to make those abstractions which determine it. When, however, with Descartes, the human mind was declared independent of external objects for its knowledge, even this restriction from below on individuality was removed. The individual human mind is now regarded not only as the arbiter of knowledge, but also as entirely self-sufficient; it possesses its own conclusions within itself, and it is these which determine not only its own reality, but also that of everything else. There is no principle of truth or judgement higher than the entirely subjective and self-sufficient individual human reason. What this reason grasps most easily and most clearly is true. What we, as individual rational human beings, understand is valid. And here is to be found the assumption on which Protestantism, the Enlightenment movement, modern democracy, and much else besides, are based.

The second of the consequences of this new mentality which it is relevant to observe in this context is the complement of the first: the growth of the quantitative collective spirit, principally in a national and, more recently, an international form. To begin with, however, it may be remarked that the principles of Christianity are quite incompatible with such a spirit, being neither national nor international, but, which is an entirely different matter, universal. The Christian doctrine is rooted in realities which are independent of any quantitative collective organization in the temporal sphere, and although their realization, from the human point of view, can be only at a particular time and place—whenever, and wherever, the Spirit is effectively present in real beings—such realization has nothing to do with categories of a social, ethnological, racial, international, or any other similar character. To put this in other terms: where the chief end of life is held to be that achieved through participation in the Divine locally manifested in the mystagogical life of the Church, loyalty is primarily to the Church, and hence to what is essentially of a spiritual nature, and there can be no question of substituting for this loyalty, or of subordinating it to, purposes of a collective nature in the sense indicated. The self-assertive and centrifugal tendencies of local temporal powers will be held in check and neutralized through the common recognition of principles and values of a spiritual and qualitative order, and the unity which is a consequence of this will derive, not from material interests, such as property, but from a sense of sharing in a common framework of spiritual values. And it was to such a sense of sharing in a common framework of spiritual values, in this case embodied in the Christian tradition, that medieval Christendom owed its unity, of the significance and nature of which we have spoken.

The rational mentality, on the other hand, is quite incapable of realizing a principle of unity through inner communion in a spiritual order, for the simple reason that, as we have seen, it cannot surpass the natural and logical order. It is therefore compelled to substitute for this inner principle an external principle of unity that is no more than an abstract representation of the former. Yet not only are such abstract representations ultimately subjective in nature, since the reason which makes them is a purely individual faculty; but also there can be no spiritual or qualitative difference between one such representation and another. Hence, what will determine the acceptance of one rather than of another on the historical plane will be of a temporal and quantitative nature only. From one point of view, the assumption by the medieval Papacy of a temporal power, resulting in the organization, along quasi-secular lines, of the Western episcopate into a system of government, centrally directed and controlled, concerned to preserve the unity of Christendom, is already a manifestation of this mentality which seeks a principle of unity, not through inner communion, but in an external, and abstract, representation of unity; and, as such, it was bound in time to give rise to other manifestations of the same nature. For the fact that the Papacy had become the representation of the principle of unity in the temporal sphere, and that that of which it was conceived to be the principle of unity was a temporal Christian society, meant that its claims would be challenged by other such representations claiming to unite under their control other such temporal collectivities; and these latter claims could be considered quite as valid or invalid as those of the Papacy, both, from the exterior and only point of view accessible to the rational mentality, being merely temporal and therefore quantitative in nature. The revolt of the various temporal rulers in the later Middle Ages against the Papacy was not so much a revolt against the spiritual power as the consequence of the fact that the Papacy, having assumed a temporal power, was, as such, invading the spheres of authority of other temporal powers, and claiming to rule, in the name of its own larger and more general collectivity, their smaller collectivities; and this revolt in its turn was to introduce others in keeping with the further advance of the rational and individualist mentality, essentially centrifugal and self-assertive.

The loss, therefore, in the West of a universal and qualitative unity deriving from participation in a common framework of spiritual values was to result in the end in the substitution of a multitude of abstract and quantitative unities. Each unity was of a different and rival character, since each was based on varying and mutually exclusive ideas not only of what represented the principle of unity, but also of what was to be achieved through the unity: this latter might be, for example, the consolidation under a single rule of all the churches, or of peoples inhabiting a particular geographical area, or possessing a common language, or even merely sharing common cultural, political, economic, or class interests. Loyalty was now to such quantitative concepts, and these would themselves reflect more and more entirely individual, selfish, and material interests, whatever the ideal guise they might assume. Individualism and collectivism are opposite sides of the same coin, and their growth in the West can be traced back to the same rationalizing spirit which led to the break-up of the medieval Christian ethos and to the formation of modern Western society and culture. And if that growth has been marked in the West by a progressive alienation from the Papacy, at least one of the reasons for this is that the Papacy is the sole authority in the West which, in the name of principles of a supra-individual and supra-collective nature, is in a position to absorb all lesser individualistic tendencies under the rule of a single impersonal individual, all lesser collectivities into a single and allembracing collective whole.

On the Necessity and Possibility of New Principles in Philosophy (1856) - Ivan Kireyevsky

From Volume 2 of An Introduction to Nineteenth Century Russian Slavophilism: A Study in Ideas, translator: Peter K. Christoff; revised, TRV

Not so long ago, the predilection for philosophy held sway in Europe. Even political questions were of secondary importance, subordinated to solutions of philosophical systems, borrowing from them their ultimate meaning and inner significance. But lately, the interest in philosophy has perceptibly diminished, and, since 1848, the relationship between philosophy and politics has completely changed. Now, political questions engage the attention of thinking people; philosophical works have almost ceased to appear; few are concerned with philosophical systems any more, and justifiably so. There is no room for abstract, systematic thinking within the narrow confines of today’s tremendous social developments, developments pervaded with universal significance and that follow sequentially with the speed of theatre sets.

Moreover, the philosophical development of Western Europe has reached such a degree of maturity that the appearance of a new system no longer agitates people’s minds as vigorously and as obviously as before; it no longer staggers people with the contrast between new conclusions and old concepts. The philosophical orientation towards autonomous rational thought which began in the West about the time of the Protestant Revolution, and whose first representatives in philosophy were Bacon and Descartes, has steadily grown and spread in the course of three and one-half centuries, sometimes proliferating into numerous separate systems, sometimes combining to produce their great summations, thus passing through all the stages of possible progress, and has finally attained the last, all-inclusive conclusion beyond which European man’s mind cannot aspire without completely changing its basic orientation. For when man rejects every authority except his abstract thinking, can he advance beyond the view which presents the whole existence of the world as the transparent dialectic of human reason, and human reason as the self-consciousness of universal being? Obviously, in this case, the ultimate goal which can be conceived by abstract reasoning separated from other cognitive faculties, is the goal he has been approaching for centuries, has now attained, and beyond which is nothing further to seek.

Lacking opportunity to move forward, philosophy can only expand in breadth, developing details and giving all individual disciplines a common basis. Therefore, we see that almost all contemporary Western thinkers, however they may differ amongst themselves, proceed from the same level of basic principles. Hegel’s followers speak in a more pedantic language; those who have not read him use a more everyday language; but almost all, even those who have not heard his name, express the principal conviction which is the basis and the final conclusion of Hegel’s system. This conviction is, so to speak, in the air of contemporary culture. Even though few works are published on philosophy, there is little debate on philosophical questions, and interest in philosophical systems has waned, we should not conclude interest in philosophical thought itself has diminished. On the contrary, more than ever it has penetrated all other spheres of reason. Every phenomenon in social life, every discovery of science, transcends in the mind the boundaries of its apparent sphere, and, joined to universal human problems, assumes rational-philosophical significance. The very universal nature of social developments contributes to this turn of mind. Interest in academic system-building is dead; however, greater are the efforts by which every educated person seeks to draw the guiding strand of his abstract thought through all the labyrinths of social life, through all the marvels of new scientific and scholarly discoveries, and through the infinite variety of their possible consequences. New philosophical systems are no longer appearing, but the supremacy of rationalism continues.

This rational thought, which received its final consciousness and expression in modern German philosophy, combines all phenomena of contemporary European culture into a single common character. Life’s every movement is permeated by the same spirit and every intellectual phenomenon prompts the same philosophical convictions. The discrepancies between these rational-philosophical convictions and the tenets of faith have caused several Western Christians to attempt opposing them with philosophical views based on faith. The most brilliant efforts of Western Christian thinkers have served only as additional proof of the lasting supremacy of rationalism. For the opponents of philosophy, in their efforts to refute its conclusions, are unable to detach themselves from the foundation from which philosophy naturally developed, and from which no other results could be obtained, without doing violence to that foundation. Thus, many pious men in the West, staggered by the irresistible tendency of thought towards unbelief, and wishing to rescue faith, completely reject all philosophy as something incompatible with religion, and condemn reason in general as something contrary to faith. But these pious men in the West fail to note that by persecuting reason they do even greater harm to religious convictions than the philosophers themselves. For what kind of religion is it that cannot stand in the light of science and consciousness? What kind of faith is it that is incompatible with reason?

Thus, it appears a believer in the West has almost no means of rescuing faith except by preserving its blindness, and by timidly guarding it against contact with reason. This is an unfortunate — but unavoidable — consequence of the inner dichotomy of faith itself. For whenever the teaching of faith deviates even a little from its basic purity, the deviation, growing little by little, cannot help becoming a contradiction to faith. The lack of wholeness and inner unity of faith compels one to seek unity in abstract thinking; and reason, having received equal rights with Divine Revelation, first serves as the ground of religion, and subsequently replaces it.

When I speak of the division within faith and of the abstract-rational basis of religion, I refer not only to the Protestant confessions, where the authority of tradition has been replaced by the authority of individual understanding. We see abstract reason as the very foundation of religious doctrine in the Latin confession no less than in Protestantism, despite that, in its struggle with Protestantism, the Latin confession denied rationalism solely on the basis of tradition. For it was only in its opposition to Protestantism that the Latin confession placed its tradition above human reason. However, on matters of faith in relation to the Church Universal, Old Rome gave preference to abstract syllogism over Holy Tradition, which is the repository of the common consciousness of the whole Christian world and holds it together in a living, indissoluble unity. Actually, this preference for syllogism over tradition was the only condition for the separate and independent rise of Old Rome. For how else could the Latin confession have become divorced from the Church Universal? It defected from it only because it wished to introduce new dogmas into the faith, dogmas unknown to Holy Tradition, born of arbitrary deductions of the logic of Western peoples. From this root comes the initial division in the very basic principle of Western religious doctrine, from which first developed Scholastic philosophy within faith, then the Reformation in faith, and finally, philosophy outside faith. The Scholastics were the first rationalists; their progeny are called Hegelians.

However, the orientation of Western philosophies differed according to the various religious confessions from which they arose; for every particular confession inevitably assumes a special attitude of reason towards faith which determines the particular character of the thought from which it derives.

The Latin confession separated from the Church Universal as a consequence of a deduction of formal-logical reason which sought a superficial connection of concepts and derived from it its conclusions about their essence. It was only such superficial reason, only this placing of syllogisms above the living consciousness of all Christendom, that could wrest Old Rome from the Church. Having deprived itself of the support of Holy Tradition and the common, unanimous sympathy of the Church, the Latins were compelled to seek support in some sort of theological system. But, since human reason — particularly the rationalistic type — may comprehend the Divine variously, according to each individual’s conceptions, and since the contradictions in theological arguments could no longer be resolved through the inner agreement of the whole Church — visible and invisible, the Church of all ages and all peoples — the unanimity of thought of the Western Christians had to be safeguarded by the external authority of the hierarchy. Thus, external authority, independent of any inner authority, became the ultimate basis of faith. Thus, the relationship between faith and reason assumed a character where reason had to submit blindly to religious doctrine affirmed by the external authority of the hierarchy. I say blindly, because no inner cause could be sought for a given theological opinion when the truth or falsity of opinion was determined by the arbitrary opinion of the hierarchy. Hence, we had Scholasticism, with all its speculative refinements, which sought endlessly to reconcile the demands of reason with declarations of the hierarchy, and in so doing consistently drifted from the demands of reason into a countless multitude of heretical systems and interpretations.

Meanwhile, leaving the ultimate decision concerning Divine truths to the reason of the hierarchy which acted without reference to tradition and the Church Universal, the Latins had to recognise its hierarchy as the source of all truth, and to subject the whole realm of human thought and the whole development of the mind in the field of science and social life to the verdict of the hierarchy. For everything is concerned to a greater or lesser degree with questions of Divine truth, and once the reason of the hierarchy transgressed the boundaries of Divine Revelation, what was to stop it? The example of Galileo is no exception; it expresses the constant law of the general relationship of the Western confessions to human thought. Therefore, the Protestant Revolution was necessary for reason to be rescued from complete blindness or complete absence of faith; it had to grow out of the same principle from which the Latins derived their right to reason’s uniqueness and universal interference. The only difference was this: the right of judgment over Divine Revelation, preserved in the [Western] tradition, was transferred from the reasoning of a temporary hierarchy to the reasoning of all Protestants. Instead of a single external authority equally binding on all, each individual’s conviction became the basis of faith.

This constituted the other extreme of the same deviation from truth. The boundaries between man’s natural reason and Divine Revelation were equally violated by the Latin and Protestant confessions, only in a different manner; thus their respective attitudes towards culture were different. In the former, the basis of faith was tradition subjected to the sole judgment of the hierarchy, which controlled the general development of reason with its arbitrary opinions and endeavoured to compel all thinking into a single arbitrary form. In the latter, all that was left of the tradition was the letter of the Scriptures, whose meaning depended on each individual’s understanding.

These two attitudes were bound to give birth to two entirely opposite intellectual orientations. Under the influence of the Latin confession, the mind had willy-nilly to reduce all its knowledge to one system. The main truth was given, the manner in which it was interpreted was determined, and many features of its relationship to reason were indicated; it remained only to bring the whole system of thought into agreement with the given concepts and to remove from reason everything which might contradict them. In contrast, Protestantism, besides the letter of the Scriptures, had for the guidance of the mind only the individual opinions of the reformers; opinions irreconcilable in their most essential principles: the basic relationship of man to God, the relationship of free will to grace and predestination, and other, similar rational attitudes of faith, were understood by the reformers in an entirely different way from the start. Thus human reason had to seek a common basis of truth outside the traditions of faith — within each individual’s thinking. It was thus necessary that rational philosophy should come into existence: not to develop existing truth further, not to become imbued with it, not to rise to its level, but above all to find it. Besides, not having a single and firm foundation for truth in faith, could man fail to appeal to thought abstracted from faith? The very love of Divine truth compelled him to seek a rational philosophy. If rational philosophy, developing outside Divine Revelation, enticed man into unbelief, the initial blame for this misfortune lies, of course, not with Protestantism but with the Latins, who, having the truth and being a living part of the living Church, deliberately broke away from it.

More concerned with superficial unity and outward dominion over minds than with inner truth, Old Rome preserved the monopoly of interpretation for its hierarchy; it could not act otherwise if it were to avoid dividing into a multitude of contradictory doctrines. The people were not supposed to think, nor understand the liturgy, nor read Holy Scripture. They could only listen without understanding and obey without questioning. They were considered an unconscious mass upon which rested the edifice of the Latin confession and had to remain unconscious in order for it to remain standing. Therefore, almost all independent thought originating sincerely and naturally within the Latin confession necessarily turned into opposition to it, which in turn rejected and persecuted almost all outstanding thinkers. Every stirring of the mind not in accord with the hierarchy’s arbitrary concepts was heresy, for its concepts, stamped with the hierarchy’s authority, officially penetrated all the spheres of reason and life.

In contrast, the Protestant Revolution was instrumental in the development of the intellectual culture of the peoples it rescued from the intellectual oppression of Old Rome, the most intolerable of all oppressions. This constitutes its chief merit: it restored to man his dignity and won for him the right to be a rational being. Nevertheless, there was no strength in this rationalism to steadily sustain it above the natural commonplace level. Torn away from sympathetic relations with the True Church, screened from such relations by Old Rome, the Protestant peoples saw nothing divine around them but the letter of the Scripture and their inner conviction. And, in their joy at being liberated from intellectual bondage, they overlooked the truth in the deified letter of the Scripture: that God not only brought to earth a teaching, but also established a Church to which He promised uninterrupted existence to the end of time; that He established His teaching within His Church, not outside it. Protestants saw nothing save falsehoods and errors between their time and the early Christian centuries. They thought that, despite the promises of the Saviour, the gates of hell had vanquished the Church, that the Divine Church was already dying, and that it was left to them to resurrect it upon the foundation of the Holy Scripture. However, the Holy Scripture, receiving no unanimous interpretation, acquired different meaning according to each individual’s views. Therefore, in order to find a common basis of truth not only in man’s reason in general, but necessarily in that part of reason accessible to every individual, Protestant-inspired philosophy had to limit itself mainly to the sphere of logical [dianoetic] reason, of which every person was equally capable regardless of his inner capacity and constitution. The coordination of all cognitive faculties into a single force, the inner wholeness of the mind essential for the comprehension of the whole truth — this could not be within everyone’s reach. Only reason — relative, negative, logical [dianoetic] reason — could be considered a general authority; it alone could demand from each individual the absolute acceptance of its deductions.

Therefore, we observe that rational philosophy developed almost exclusively in Protestant countries. For what is called French philosophy is, strictly speaking, English philosophy transferred to France when faith was in decline. Although Descartes was French, and though in mid-seventeenth century France almost all thinking people adhered to his system, by the beginning of the eighteenth century it had spontaneously ceased to be the commonly accepted view, so little did it conform to the special nature of the people’s thought. The change which Malebranche wished to make in it had even less stability. Meanwhile, for German thought, Descartes became the fountainhead of all philosophy.

France might have produced its own positive philosophy if Bossuet’s Gallicism had not been limited to diplomatic formality, but had developed more fully, more consciously, with greater inner freedom, and had freed cultured Frenchmen from Old Rome’s intellectual oppression before they lost their faith. The elements of this possible French philosophy were contained in what was common to the convictions of the Port-Royal school and the special opinions of Fénelon. For besides dissimilarities to the official concepts of Old Rome, a feature common to both was that they strove to develop the inner life in its depth and sought the living bond between faith and reason beyond the sphere of external linking of concepts. Port-Royal and Fénelon received this orientation from the same source, from that part of Christian philosophy they found in the ancient Church Fathers and was not included in Old Rome’s teaching.

Pascal’s thoughts could have been a fruitful embryo for this philosophy new to the West. His unfinished work [the Pensées] not only revealed new grounds for the understanding of the moral order of the world, for the comprehension of the vital relationship between Divine Providence and human freedom, but also contained profound suggestions in the direction of a different manner of thinking, differing equally from Latin Scholasticism and rational philosophy. If the sparks of his ideas had united in the common consciousness with those which inspired Fénelon — when, in defence of Guyon, he collected the teachings of the Church Fathers on the inner life — then from the combined flame there would surely have arisen a new, original philosophy which might have saved France from unbelief and its consequences. Of course, such a philosophy would not have been pure truth, since it would have remained outside the Church, but it would have come closer than any rational speculation. However, the machinations of the Jesuits destroyed Port-Royal and its group of recluse-thinkers. With them also perished the nascent, life-giving orientation of their thought. The cold, solemn logic of Bossuet failed to grasp what was vibrant and warm in Fénelon’s deviation from the official thought of Old Rome, and with self-satisfaction [Bossuet] invoked papal authority to compel him [Fénelon] to renounce his cherished convictions out of respect for papal infallibility. In this manner, France’s indigenous philosophy was stillborn, and educated French society, demanding some sort of intellectual relaxation, had to submit to Voltaire’s raucous laughter and to the laws of an alien philosophy, which was all the more hostile to French religious convictions for having nothing in common with them. In England, Locke’s system could still be somewhat reconciled with faith, under which it grew up; but in France, it assumed a destructive character and, passing from Condillac to Helvetius, destroyed the last vestiges of faith by its dissemination.

Thus, among those nations whose intellectual life was subject to the papacy, an indigenous philosophy was impossible. But, meantime, the growth of learning demanded thinking capable of comprehending and assimilating it. Between the thriving science of the world and the formal faith of Old Rome, lay a chasm the thinking Latin had to cross with a leap of desperation. Human reason could not always manage this leap, nor was it always in agreement with the conscience of the sincere Christian. Hence, rationalistic philosophy, born in Protestant countries, spread to Latin lands as well, permeating all European culture with one common character, and replacing the former unanimity of faith of the Western nations with the unanimity of abstract reason.

But man’s thought did not arrive at its final conclusion all at once. Only gradually did it cast aside all irrelevant data, finding them insufficiently reliable for the basic affirmation of the original truth. Initially, its activity split in two directions. Among Romance nations, which by their historical character strove to combine inner self-consciousness with external life, arose an empirical or sensuous philosophy, starting with separate observations and moving to general conclusions, deducing all the laws of being and thinking from the order of external nature. Among Germanic nations, which as a result of their historical distinctiveness bore within themselves the constant sense of the separation of external and inner life, arose the desire to deduce laws for external being from the very laws of reason. Finally, both philosophies merged into one intellectual view based on the identity of reason and being, developing out of this identity the form of thought which encompassed all other philosophies as separate rungs of an unfinished ladder leading to the same goal.

However, deriving from the totality of Western European culture and accommodating the general result of the intellectual life of Western Europe, contemporary philosophy, like all contemporary European culture, in its last flowering has been completely severed from its roots. Its conclusions have nothing in common with its past, towards which it maintains an attitude not of a culminating, but of a destructive force. Entirely independent of its past, it now appears as a new indigenous element and is birthing a new epoch in the intellectual and social life of the West. It is still very difficult to determine the true nature of its effect on European culture, for its characteristic influence is just beginning to be discerned; its ultimate fruits are concealed in the future.

Moreover, this new system has dominated earlier European philosophical convictions too briefly to give us the right to think its fundamental assumptions and its dialectical thought-process are the exclusive property of our time. In the general life of humanity, recent philosophy is not as new as is generally assumed. It is new for modern history, but for human reason in general it is familiar, and hence, the future consequences of its supremacy over the minds of men have already been more or less indicated. For the same spirit of thought dominated the educated world several centuries before the birth of Christ. Aristotle’s basic views — not those attributed to him by his mediaeval interpreters, but those which emerge from his works — are identical with Hegel’s views; and the manner of dialectal thinking which is ordinarily deemed the exclusive characteristic and particular discovery of Hegel was, even in the days of Aristotle, the unmistakable attribute of the Eleatic school. This is so true that, when we read Plato’s Parmenides, it seems that in the words of the student of Heraclitus we are listening to the Berlin professor himself, arguing that dialectics is the chief function of philosophy and its real goal. He sees in it a miraculous force which transforms every determinate thought into its antithesis, and from this he produces a new definition. He makes abstract notions about being, non-being, and becoming the foundation of the thinking process which embraces all being and knowledge. This is why the difference between the new and ancient philosophers is neither in the basic point of view attained by reason, nor in the special manner of thought discovered by the former, but entirely in the ultimate completeness of the former’s systematic development and in the wealth of intellectual acquisitions which man’s curiosity has managed to amass in the course of his two thousand year search. Now, reason stands on the same level — not higher — and perceives the same truth, not a more distant one. Only the contours of the horizon are clearer.

The Western mind seems to have a special kinship with Aristotle. Appreciation for his thought goes back to the birth of Western European culture. However, the Scholastics utilised his system merely as the groundwork for a new truth not directly derived from it, but taken by them from tradition. When, with the Renaissance, Aristotle’s unlimited authority declined, it seemed all appreciation of him would be forever lost. Europe celebrated its liberation from him with a certain enthusiasm, as a great and redeeming event for the human mind. Hegel travelled a different road, which stood outside Aristotle’s system, but nevertheless came to a meeting point with him, both in his final conclusion and regarding the relationship of the mind to truth. He constructed another system, but as Aristotle himself would have constructed it if Aristotle could have been reborn in our time and if, without changing the level on which human reason stood in his day, he could simply reduce present-day problems of thought to his point of view. Hegel’s pupils, replacing Aristotle’s terminology with their own, recognised in his system the faithful though incomplete reflection of their teacher’s system. The voice of the modern world echoed the world of the past.

Classical Greek philosophy originated not directly from Greek religious beliefs, but under their influence and parallel to them; it arose from their inner disagreement. The inner disagreement of faith necessarily led to abstract reasoning. Abstract reasoning and the tangible and active diversity of the contradictory teachings of faith, standing in essential opposition to each other, could be reconciled in the Greek mind only in the contemplation of the beautiful, and perhaps in the hidden meaning of the mysteries. That is why the Greek sense of the beautiful stands between the tangibility of Greek mythology and the abstract reasoning of Greek philosophy. To the Greek, the beautiful was the focus of all intellectual life. The unfolding of the meaning of the beautiful, one might say, comprises the whole essence of Greek culture, both inner and outer. But the limits of its development were contained in the very nature of the beautiful: the growth of one of its elements meant the destruction of the other. To the extent that reasoning developed, mythological faith weakened, and Greek beauty withered with it. For the beautiful, like the true, disappears in abstraction when it does not rest on the essential. Rising on the ruins of [mythological] beliefs, philosophy undermined them and thereby destroyed the creative wellspring for the development of Greek culture. Philosophy, initially the expression of Greek culture, at the stage of its full development became the contradiction of that culture, and though it still bore the outward signs of mythology, it actually had its own independent existence. It was born in and grew from Greek concepts, but in its maturity it became the legacy of mankind as the separate fruit of reason, maturing, and eventually separating from its natural root.

It may be said that the dominance of pagan beliefs over human thought came to an end with the last phase of Greek culture, not because believing pagans were no more, but because advanced culture now stood outside the limits of pagan faith, transforming mythology into allegory. Only cultural laggards (who were consequently impotent) could remain pagan; but as they developed they fell under the dominance of philosophy.

From this negative view, in the history of mankind, Greek philosophy appears to have been useful in educating the mind, freeing it from the false teachings of paganism and, through intellectual guidance, bringing it to that neutral condition in which it became capable of accepting a higher truth. Philosophy prepared the soil for Christian seed.

But, between the time of Aristotle and the general submission of world culture to Christian teaching, many centuries elapsed, during which many different and contradictory philosophical systems nourished, consoled, and disturbed man’s reason. Few of these systems, however, were characterised by extremes; in general, culture grew out of what was common to the extremes, out of middle ground. Between the Stoics’ virtuous pride and the Epicureans’ sensual philosophy, between the alluring heights of the lofty mental constructions of the Neoplatonic school and the unfeeling, implacable, all-uprooting plough of scepticism, stood Aristotle’s philosophy, to which men’s minds constantly returned from extreme deviations, and which cast the logical snares of its impartial system into the most biased forms of thought. This is why it may be said that, whereas in the ancient pre-Christian world there were several different philosophies and several mutually contradictory sects, the vast majority of thinking humanity and all of culture’s moral and intellectual power belonged to Aristotle. Precisely what influence did Aristotle’s philosophy have on culture and the moral dignity of man? The solution of the problem is important, and not only for past history.

It would seem the clearest and briefest answer to this question may lie in the moral and intellectual mood of the centuries when this philosophy dominated. The Roman citizen at the time of the emperors bore the living stamp of its principles. For the ultimate meaning of any philosophy lies not in individual logical or metaphysical truths, but in the relationship in which it places man with respect to the ultimate truth he seeks — in the inner imperative to which the mind imbued with it turns. Every philosophy in the final stage of its development produces two results, or, more correctly, a single result with two aspects: the total product of thought and the preponderant imperative which derives from this product. The latter truth, which sustains the mind, points to the treasure which man will seek in science and in life. At the end of a philosophical system, between its primordial truth and its cherished goal, is not thought possessing a specific formula, but only, so to speak, the spirit of the thought, its inner power, its sacred inner music which accompanies all the stirrings of the soul of the man convinced by it. This inner spirit, this living force, is characteristic not only of higher, mature philosophical systems. A philosophical system belongs in the academic domain, but its power, its ultimate imperative, concerns the life and culture of all mankind.

However, one must admit Aristotle’s philosophy, when it did not serve to support an alien system but acted independently, had a very lamentable influence on mankind’s culture, an influence in direct contrast to the influence it exerted on its first student, the great conqueror of the Orient [Alexander the Great]. The striving for the better within the limits of the commonplace, for the reasonable in the everyday sense of the term, for the possible as determined by external reality, were the final conclusions of the kind of rationality suggested by Aristotle’s system. There was but one pupil who did not find these teachings to his liking; all others found them perfectly congenial. It seems the more Alexander listened to them, the more energetically he developed his own original ideas antithetical to them — as if in defiance of his teacher’s counsel. It may even be that without the stimulus of prudent mediocrity, all the extremism of his imprudent genius would not have developed. But the remainder of humanity submitted to the influence of dry and abstract philosophy all the more willingly, because, in the absence of loftier convictions, the tendency towards the mundane and prudently commonplace automatically becomes the predominant characteristic of the moral world.

Aristotle’s system broke the wholeness of man’s intellectual self-consciousness and transferred the root of man’s inner convictions from the moral and aesthetic sphere into the abstract thought of rationality. The means by which it sought to know the truth were limited to the logical activity of the intellect and to the detached contemplation of the external world. External existence and the expressible verbal aspect of thought constituted the only data from which it derived whatever could be derived by the logical concatenation of concepts, and one must admit it derived from them all that could be derived in this manner at the time. In Aristotle’s view, reality was the complete embodiment of supreme reason. All the discord in the physical and moral world was only imaginary, and not only was lost in the total harmony, but actually provided essential tones for its eternally changing diapason. In his opinion, the world never had been nor ever would be better. It had always been sufficiently beautiful, for it had no beginning and would have no end. It would remain eternally whole and unchanged in its totality, while constantly changing and experiencing destruction in its parts. But he conceived this integral and satisfying world in the cold system of abstract unity. He saw the highest good in thought which comprehends this unity through the diversity of individual phenomena accompanied by an external life of contentment and tranquility, i.e., physical and intellectual comfort.

Aristotle said that only when man’s worldly needs are satisfied can he begin to love wisdom, whereas the Stoics were convinced that only wisdom can free man from worldly wants and burdens. In Aristotle’s opinion, virtue does not demand the highest realm of existence, but consists in finding the golden mean between evil extremes. Virtue derives from two sources: from the abstract deductions of the mind (which, being abstract, lend no strength to the spirit and have no essential compulsory force), and from habit (which is partly the product of the abstract wish to reconcile will and the dictates of reason, and partly arises from the accidental nature of external circumstances).

Obviously, this pattern of thought could produce very intelligent spectators among human beings, but only extremely insignificant men of action. In fact, Aristotle’s philosophy had a destructive effect on man’s moral dignity. By undermining all convictions which existed above the level of dry and abstract logic, it destroyed all motivations capable of elevating man above his personal interests. The spirit of ethics declined and the mainsprings of inner originality weakened. Man became the obedient tool of surrounding circumstances, the deliberating but unwilling result of external forces, intelligent matter obedient to the power of mundane motives: personal advantage and fear. The few examples of Stoic virtue are rare exceptions, striking contrasts to the general frame of mind, which confirm rather than deny the notion of the general absence of inner independence. For Stoicism could arise only as an intense contrast, a depressing protest, and a desperate consolation for the few in the face of the knavery of the many. Nevertheless, even those thinkers who did not exclusively follow Aristotle, and who only studied his system, unconsciously introduced the results of his teaching into their understanding of other philosophers. Thus, Cicero, in the struggle between the ruin of his fatherland and his own personal safety, sought justification for his pusillanimity in Plato. However, he only saw in Plato that meaning in accord with Aristotle. Thus, he consoled himself with the thought that Plato did not counsel useless resistance to force and intervention in the affairs of a senile people. Moral insignificance was generally stamped on everyone, and if, in the time of the Caesars, with the complete decline of man’s inner dignity, external culture had been even more highly developed, if there had existed railroads and electric telegraphs and peksany [a type of artillery], and all the other discoveries which now subject the world to the authority of heartless calculation, it is difficult to say what would have become of poor humanity.

Such was the influence of ancient philosophy, primarily Aristotelian philosophy, on human nature. There was no salvation for man on earth. God alone could save him.

However, Christianity, which altered the spirit of the ancient world and resurrected the lost dignity of man’s nature, did not unconditionally reject ancient philosophy. For the harm and falsehood of philosophy lay not in the development of the mind it produced, but in its final conclusions, which depended on the fact that it considered itself the highest and only truth, conclusions eliminated as soon as the noetic faculty recognised a superior truth. In Christianity, philosophy took a subordinate position, appearing as a relative truth; serving as the means for the confirmation of the highest principle in the realm of a different culture.

Although engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the falsehood of pagan mythology, Christianity did not destroy pagan philosophy; rather it took it and transformed it in accordance with its own superior knowledge. The brightest lights of the Church — Justin, Clement, Origen (insofar as he was Orthodox), Athanasius, Basil, Gregory, and most of the great Holy Fathers upon whose work, so to speak, Christian teaching became established in the midst of a pagan culture — not only were thoroughly versed in ancient philosophy, but utilised it for the rational construction of the first Christian gnosiology, which combined the development of science and reason into an all-embracing vision of faith. The true part of pagan philosophy, pervaded with the Christian spirit, was the intermediary between faith and external human culture. Not only while Christianity was still combating paganism, but in the whole subsequent existence of the East Roman Empire, we see that thorough study of the Greek philosophers was the common legacy of almost all Church teachers. For Plato and Aristotle could only be of use to Christian culture as great scholars; they could not endanger it as long as Christian truth occupied the summit of culture. For it should not be forgotten that, in its struggle with paganism, Christianity did not concede superiority in knowledge to it, but, permeating paganism, placed in its own service the whole intellectual activity of the world, past and present, to the extent to which it was known.

If there was any danger that a Christian people might deviate from the true teaching, the danger lay primarily in ignorance. The growth of rational knowledge, certainly, does not offer salvation, but guards against false knowledge. It is true that where the mind and heart have once been permeated by Divine truth, there the degree of learning becomes a side issue. It is also true that consciousness of the Divine is equally compatible with all stages of rational development. But, in order that Divine truth might permeate, enliven, and guide man’s intellectual life, it must subordinate external reason to itself and dominate it, not remain outside its sphere of action. Divine truth must stand above other truths in the general consciousness as the sovereign principle pervading all culture. For each separate Divine truth must be supported by the like-mindedness of cultivated society. Ignorance, by contrast, keeps minds from vital intellectual interchange through which truth among men and nations is sustained, advanced, and enlarged. An ignorant mind, even when accompanied by the most righteous convictions of the heart, gives birth to irrational jealousy, from which in turn springs the deviation of both mind and heart from true convictions.

Such was the case of the West before its defection. The ignorance of the peoples exposed their intellectual life to the irresistible influence of the lingering traces of paganism, which communicated to their thought the rationalistic nature of Old Rome’s superficial logical abstractness; this deviation of reason in turn compelled them to seek superficial unity in place of spiritual unity. Ignorance also enticed them into excessive jealousy of the Arians, so that, not satisfied with the rejection of the heresy, they created a new theological dogma of the Godhead [the Filioque] in direct opposition to the Arians under the influence of this same superficial logical thought — a dogma they regarded as true only because it was the direct opposite of one form of heresy, forgetting that the direct opposite of an error is generally not the truth, but only the other extreme of the same error. Thus, as a result of the Western peoples’ ignorance, their very striving for church unity divorced them from unity, and their very striving for orthodoxy caused them to break away from orthodoxy.

Of course, it was not ignorance alone that caused the West to separate from the Church. Ignorance is only a misfortune. Humanity could not be torn from saving truth without moral guilt. But the possibility and the basis of this guilt lay in ignorance; without it, even the popes’ love of power could not have succeeded. Only through the combined action of papal love of power and the ignorance of the people could the illegal addition to the Symbol of Faith come to pass; and this initial triumph of rationalism over faith, together with the unlawful recognition of the supremacy of the popes, is the permanent obstacle to the return of the West to the Church. But, having broken away, the Latin confession descended, as though sliding down a smoothed mountain slope, to all those deviations which continuously increased its alienation from the truth and produced all the destructive features of Western culture with all its consequences for itself — and for us. I say for us, for the fate of all mankind is in a state of living and sympathetic reciprocity, not always noticeable, but real nevertheless. The defection of Old Rome deprived the West of the purity of Christian teaching, and, meantime, halted the development of culture in the East. What should have been accomplished through the combined efforts of East and West was now beyond the power of the East alone, which was thus condemned only to preservation of Divine truth in its purity and holiness without opportunity to embody it in the external culture of nations.

Who knows? Perhaps this external impotence of the East was destined to continue until another people, a nation enlightened by true Christianity, would grow and mature in place of declining Old Rome, when the West was separating from the East. Perhaps this nation was destined to arrive at intellectual maturity just when Western civilisation, by virtue of its own development, would destroy the power of heterodoxy and would pass from false Christian convictions to indifferent philosophical convictions, returning the world in due course to pre-Christian thought. For Christian heterodoxy is less capable of receiving the truth than a doctrine from which Christian conviction is entirely absent. In the latter case, there would exist at least the external possibility of true Christianity gaining supremacy over human culture. For there is no doubt that all actions and endeavours of private individuals and nations are subject to the unseen, barely audible, and often completely imperceptible current of the general moral order of things, which sweeps before it all general and particular activity. But this general order of things consists of the concert of personal wills. There are moments, there are situations, when the state of things is, so to speak, in balance and a single movement of the will can determine its direction.

The West faced such a situation at the time of its defection. For, although popular ignorance weighed heavily upon the actions of the popes, there is no doubt that the firm and decisive will of one of them at that time might yet have overcome the error of the people and might have preserved truth in the West. There was such a fateful moment, a moment in which the Lord seemed to place the fate of the whole world in the hands of one person. Had he been firm in the truth, the world would have been spared centuries of errors and misfortunes. Peoples would have developed in sympathetic communion of faith and reason, jointly destroying pagan remnants in the mind of man and in the life of society. The East would have given the West the light and strength of intellectual culture, the West would have shared with the East the development of public life; and everywhere culture would have been established upon the firm rock of Divine Revelation. The best spiritual forces would not have been wasted in useless upheavals, with the new evil of destruction demolishing the old evil of false construction. The flower of the nations’ manhood would not have perished from the deadly incursions of alien barbarians or from the unchecked oppression of internal pagan violence, which continued to triumph over the culture of the Christian peoples. Social life, developing harmoniously, would not have destroyed earlier acquisitions with every new success and would not have sought the ark of salvation in the mundane calculations of industry or in the starry-eyed construction of utopias. Universal civilisation does not rest on a dream or on an opinion, but on truth itself, which affirms it harmoniously and steadfastly. All this depended on one moment and was perhaps in the power of one man. But that man did not stand firm, and Western culture, deprived of sympathy for the Church Universal, was directed towards earthly goals. The Church in the East, incapacitated by the violence of still predominant paganism and deprived of the aid of its Western brethren, took refuge in the monastery.

Incidentally, it appears there was still another moment, in the sixteenth century, when the Western world could have returned. The writings of the Holy Fathers, brought from Greece after its fall, opened the eyes of many Europeans, showing them the difference between Christian teaching and that of Old Rome. Meanwhile, the abuses of the Latins reached such tremendous proportions that the peoples became clearly convinced of the necessity of reforming [what they perceived to be] the Church. But how to accomplish this reform, no one had yet been able to decide.

I am now studying the papal decrees, Luther wrote to Melanchthon, and I find so many contradictions and so much falsehood that it is beyond my power to believe they were inspired by the Holy Spirit, and that we were to base our faith on them. After this, I shall take up the study of the Ecumenical Councils and will see whether the teaching of the Church should not be affirmed upon them in conjunction with the Holy Scripture (certainly bypassing the papal decrees).

If Luther had only remembered that fully one half of the world calling itself Christian recognised seven Ecumenical Councils, not sixteen [as did the Latins], and that this half of the Christian world was innocent of the Latins’ abuses which agitated his soul with righteous indignation, then perhaps, instead of composing a new confession according to his personal notions, he might have turned directly to the Church Universal. He might have still done this, because the convictions of the Germanic nations had not yet led them to a final decision, except to hatred of the pope and the desire to escape the arbitrary rule of Old Rome. All the nations which he had roused would have followed him, and the West could have again been united with the Church, especially since the remnants of the Hussite movement were one of the most important causes of Luther’s success, and the Hussite movement, as is well known, was imbued with recollections and reflections of the Orthodox Church [e.g., the Hussites did not use the Filioque in the Creed]. However, Luther refused to remind himself of the Orthodox Church, and studied not only the seven Councils, but all those the Latins called Ecumenical. As a result of this comparison, he wrote to Melanchthon: I have been studying the definitions of the Councils. They also contradict each other like the papal decrees. It is obvious we have no choice but to take as the basis of faith the Holy Scripture alone. Thus, the Protestant Revolution was accomplished; its fate decided by a misunderstanding, whether deliberate or unwitting, God alone knows. When, in the seventeenth century, the Protestants addressed to the Eastern patriarchs an enquiry about faith, it was too late. Protestant opinion had already solidified and were aflame with all the heat of new convictions and new, untested hopes.

In mentioning these relations between the beliefs of an entire people and the accidental nature of the moral arbitrariness of private individuals, we are not deviating from our subject. On the contrary, we would obtain a false impression of the development of human thought if we separated it from the influence of moral and historical chance. There is nothing easier than to represent every fact of reality as an inevitable result of supreme laws of rational necessity, but nothing would so distort the actual understanding of history as these imaginary laws of rational necessity, which are actually only laws of rational possibility. Everything must have its own measure and its proper place. Of course, every moment in the history of mankind is the direct consequence of the preceding moment and in turn gives birth to the moment that follows. But one of the elemental forces of these moments is man’s free will. Failure to recognise this is to deliberately deceive oneself and substitute the external symmetry of the concept for the actual knowledge of the living truth.

From these two moments in the life of Western Europe — when it could have reunited with the Church but did not only because of the accidental action of human will — we see the culture of Western Europe, although completely different from Orthodox culture, is, nevertheless, not quite as far from it as it first appears. In its very essence lay the necessity of separate periods of development, between which it was free from preceding influences and therefore was capable of choosing between orientations.

If, however, at the beginning of the Protestant Revolution, two solutions were possible, after its full development there was no longer any way out except the one actually taken. Constructing the edifice of faith on the personal convictions of the people is like building a tower according to the notions of each worker. All that was common to believing Protestants were certain distinctive beliefs held by their first leaders: the literal reading of Holy Scripture, and natural reason, upon which the teaching of faith was to be erected. Today, one would hardly find many Lutheran pastors who would agree on everything in the Augsburg Confession, although when ordained, all promise to accept it as the basis of their religious doctrine. Natural reason, upon which Protestantism was to be affirmed, outgrew the faith of the people. Philosophical concepts increasingly replaced, and are still replacing, religious concepts. Passing first through the period of doubting unbelief, then through the period of fanatical unbelief, man’s thought finally went over to indifferent unbelief and together with it to the consciousness of an inner barrenness and the search for a living conviction, something which would bind man to man, not by means of cold agreement on abstract convictions, not through superficial connection of external advantages, but through inner sympathy of an integral existence pervaded by one love, one reason, and one aspiration.

But where can the West find these living convictions? To return to what it formerly believed is impossible. Forced conversions, artificial faith — these are like the attempts of some lovers of the theatre to convince themselves that theatre sets are reality itself.

Having shattered the wholeness of the spirit, and having left the highest awareness of truth to detached logical [dianoetic] thinking, man lost in the depth of his self-consciousness all connections with reality, and himself appeared on earth as an abstract being, as a spectator in the theatre, capable of equal sympathy, love, and aspiration for all things only on condition that he was free from anxiety and physical suffering. For the only thing his logical abstractness did not allow him to do was repudiate his physical being. Therefore, not only was faith lost in the West, but also poetry, which in the absence of living convictions became transformed into a barren amusement; and the more exclusively poetry sought imagined pleasure alone, the more tedious it became.

Only one serious thing was left to man, and that was industry. For man, the reality of existence survived only in his physical person. Industry rules the world without faith or poetry. In our time, it unites and divides people. It determines one’s fatherland; it delineates classes; it lies at the base of state structures; it moves nations; it declares war, makes peace, changes mores, gives direction to science, and determines the character of culture. Men bow down before it and erect temples to it. It is the real deity in which people sincerely believe and to which they submit. Unselfish activity has become inconceivable. Industry has acquired the same significance in the contemporary world as chivalry in the time of Cervantes.

Incidentally, we have not yet witnessed everything. One may say we are seeing only the beginning of the unlimited domination of industry and of the recent phase of philosophy. Proceeding hand in hand, they have yet to run the full course of the modern development of European life. It is hard to see what European culture may come to if some sort of inner change does not occur among the European peoples. It is obvious this possible transformation could consist only of a change in basic convictions, or, in other words, in the change of the spirit and orientation of philosophy, for this transformation now constitutes the entire focus of human self-consciousness.

But, as we have seen, the character of the dominant philosophy depends on the character of the dominant faith. Philosophy may not derive directly from faith; it may even be in contradiction to faith; but it is still born of the peculiar orientation of mind given it by the peculiar character of faith. The same intelligence which enabled man to understand the Divine also serves him in the understanding of truth in general.

Under the influence of the Latin confession, this intellect found expression in logical rationality which, however, acted only sporadically; it lacked the capacity to create its own unity, for the wholeness of its activity was destroyed by the intervention of external authority. Under the influence of the Protestant confessions, this rationality reached complete development in its separateness and, conceiving itself supreme in the completeness of its development, called itself reason (die Vernuft), in contrast to its former fragmentary activity, to which it left the term understanding (der Verstand).

But for us, brought up outside the Latin and Protestant spheres of influence, neither manner of thinking could be completely satisfactory. Although we submit to Western culture — for we do not yet have our own — we can submit to it only as long as we are unaware of its one-sidedness.

In the Church, the relationship between reason and faith is completely different from their relationship in the Latin and Protestant confessions. The difference is this: in the Church, Divine Revelation and human thought are not confused. The boundaries between the Divine and the human are transgressed neither by science nor by Church teaching. However much believing reason strives to reconcile reason and faith, it would never mistake any dogma of Revelation for a simple conclusion of reason and would never attribute the authority of revealed dogma to a conclusion of reason. The boundaries stand firm and inviolable. No patriarch, no synod of bishops, no profound consideration of the scholar, no authority, no impulse of so-called public opinion at any time could add a new dogma or alter an existing one, or ascribe to it the authority of Divine Revelation — representing in this manner the explanation of man’s reason as the sacred teaching of the Church or projecting the authority of eternal and steadfast truths of Revelation into the realm of systematic knowledge subject to development, change, errors, and the separate conscience of each individual. Every extension of Church teaching beyond the limits of Holy Tradition leaves the realm of Church authority and becomes a private opinion — more or less respectable, but still subject to the verdict of reason. No matter whose this new opinion might be, if it is not recognised by former ages — even the opinion of a whole people or of the greater part of all Christians at a given time — if it attempts to pass for a Church dogma, by this very claim excludes itself from the Church. For the Church does not limit its self-consciousness to any particular epoch, however much this epoch might consider itself more rational than any former. The sum total of all Christians of all ages, past and present, comprises one indivisible, eternal, living assembly of the faithful, held together just as much by the unity of consciousness as through the communion of prayer.

This inviolability of the limits of Divine Revelation is an assurance of the purity and firmness of faith in the Church. It guards its teaching from incorrect reinterpretations of natural reason on the one hand, and, on the other, guards against illegitimate intervention by Church authority. Thus, for the Orthodox Christian it will forever remain equally incomprehensible how it was possible to burn Galileo [Kireyevsky apparently confused Galileo with Giordano Bruno] for holding opinions differing from the opinions of the Latin hierarchy, and how it was possible to reject the credibility of an apostolic epistle on the ground that the truths it expressed were not in accord with the notions of some person or some epoch [a reference to Luther’s rejection of the Epistle of James].

But the more clearly and firmly the limits of Divine Revelation are defined, stronger is the urgency for believing thought [noesis] to reconcile the concept of reason with the teaching of faith. For truth is one, and striving for the consciousness of this unity is the constant law and the basic stimulus of rational activity.

The more free and more sincere believing reason is in its natural activities, the more fully and more correctly it aspires towards Divine truth. For the thinking Orthodox Christian, the teaching of the Church is not an empty mirror which reflects the features of each personality; it is not a Procrustean bed which deforms living personalities according to one arbitrary yardstick; it is rather the highest ideal towards which believing reason alone can aspire, the ultimate limit to the highest kind of thought, the guiding star which burns on high and, reflected in the heart, illumines the path to truth for reason.

But, in order to bring faith and reason into accord, it is not enough for the thinking Orthodox Christian to construct rational concepts in accordance with the tenets of faith, selecting the appropriate, excluding the offensive, and thus ridding reason of everything which contradicts faith. If Orthodox thinking consisted of such a negative approach to faith, the results would have been the same as in the West. Concepts irreconcilable with faith deriving from the same source and in the same manner as those compatible with it would have an equal right to recognition. Thus, the same painful dichotomy would occur in the very basis of self-consciousness and would sooner or later unavoidably deflect thought from faith.

But the main difference in Orthodox thinking is precisely this: it seeks not to arrange separate concepts according to the demands of faith, but rather to elevate reason itself above its usual level [move from dianoetic to noetic thinking], thus striving to elevate the very source of reason, the very manner of rational thinking, to the level of sympathetic agreement with faith.

The first condition for the elevation of reason is that man should strive to gather into one indivisible whole all his separate faculties, which in the ordinary condition of man are in dispersion and contradiction; that he should not consider his abstract logical [dianoetic] faculty as the only organ for comprehending truth; that he should not consider the voice of enraptured feeling, uncoordinated with other forces of the spirit, as the faultless guide to truth; that he should not consider the promptings of an isolated aesthetic sense, independent of other faculties, as the true guide to the comprehension of the supreme organisation of the universe; that he should not consider even the dominant love of his heart, separate from the other demands of the spirit, as the infallible guide to the attainment of the supreme good; but that he should constantly seek in the depth of his soul that inner root of understanding where all the separate faculties merge into one living and whole vision of the mind [integral knowledge].

And, for the comprehension of truth in this union of all spiritual faculties, the mind should not bring the thoughts present before it to a sequence of separate judgments by each individual faculty, attempting to coordinate their judgments into one common meaning. But, when the whole vision of the mind is complete with every movement of the soul, all its strivings should be heard in full accord, blending into a single, harmonious sound.

The inner consciousness, which forms the common life-forces in the depth of the soul for all the separate faculties of reason, is hidden from the usual state of the human spirit, but is accessible to the person who seeks it and is worthy of attaining the highest truth. Such consciousness constantly elevates man’s very manner of thought and, whilst humbling his rational conceit, does not constrain the freedom of the natural laws of his reason. On the contrary, inner consciousness strengthens his independence and, meanwhile, willingly subordinates it to faith. Then he looks on all thinking emanating from the highest source of rationality as incomplete and, therefore, erroneous knowledge — knowledge which cannot serve as the expression of the highest truth, although it might be useful in its subordinate position and might sometimes even be a necessary step on the way to other knowledge which stands at a still lower level.

That is why the free development of the natural laws of reason cannot be harmful to the faith of the thinking Orthodox Christian. He might be contaminated by unbelief, though only if his external indigenous culture were inadequate. He could not arrive at unbelief through the natural development of reason as thinking people of other confessions have done. His basic notions about faith and reason guard him against this misfortune. To him, faith is not a blind notion which is in the state of faith only because it has not been developed by natural reason, and needs to be elevated by reason to the level of rationality and broken down into its constituent parts as evidence there is nothing specifically in it which cannot be found could not be found without the help of Divine Revelation in natural reason. Neither is faith an external authority alone, before which reason is compelled to become blind. It is, rather, an external and an inner authority simultaneously; the highest wisdom, life-giving for the mind. The development of natural reason serves faith only as a series of steps, and going beyond the usual state of the mind, faith thereby informs reason that it has departed from its original natural wholeness, and by this communication, instructs it to return to the level of higher activity. For the Orthodox believer knows the wholeness of truth needs the wholeness of reason, and the quest of this wholeness is his constant preoccupation.

In the presence of such a conviction, the entire chain of the basic principles of natural reason [dianoia] which can serve as the point of departure for all possible systems of thought is below the reason of the believer [noesis], just as in external nature the whole chain of organic life is below man, who is capable of an inner consciousness of God and prayer at all levels of development. Standing on this highest level of [noetic] thought, the Orthodox believer can easily and harmlessly comprehend all systems of thought deriving from the lower levels of reason; he can see their limitations and their relative truthfulness. However, for the lower form of thought, the higher is incomprehensible and appears nonsensical. Such, in general, is the law of the human mind.

This independence of the basic thought of the Orthodox believer from lower systems which might reach his mind is not the exclusive possession of learned theologians, but is, so to speak, in the very air of Orthodoxy. No matter how undeveloped the reasoning faculties of the believer are, every Orthodox person is conscious in the depths of his soul that Divine truth cannot be embraced by considerations of ordinary reason and that it demands a higher spiritual view acquired through inner existence, not through external erudition. That is why he seeks true contemplation of God where he thinks he can find a pure whole life which would assure him the wholeness of reason and not where academic learning alone is exalted. That is why instances are very rare of an Orthodox believer losing his faith solely as a result of logical arguments capable of changing his rational concepts. In most cases, he is enticed, rather than convinced, by unbelief. He loses faith not because of intellectual difficulties, but because of the temptations of life, and he brings in rationalistic considerations only to justify the apostasy of his own heart to himself. Later, his unbelief becomes fortified by some sort of rational system which replaces his former faith, so that it then becomes difficult for him to return to faith without first clearing the way for his reason. But, as long as he believes with his heart, logical reasoning is harmless to him. For him there is no thought separated from the memory of the inner wholeness of the mind, of that point of concentration of self-consciousness which is the true locus of supreme truth, and where not abstract reasoning alone, but the sum total of man’s intellectual and spiritual faculties stamps with one common imprint the credibility of the thought which confronts reason — just as on Mount Athos each monastery bears only one part of the seal which, when all its parts are put together at the general council of the monastic representatives, constitutes the one legal seal of the Holy Mountain.

Therefore, there are always two activities combined in the thinking of the Orthodox believer. Following the development of his own understanding, he meantime follows the very manner of his thinking, constantly striving to elevate reason to the level at which it can be in sympathy with faith. Inner consciousness, or sometimes only a vague awareness of this ultimate limit which is being sought, is present in every exertion of his reason, in every breath of his thought; and if, at any time, the development of an original culture in the world of the Orthodox believer is possible, it is thus obvious that this peculiarity of Orthodox thought deriving from the special relationship of reason to faith must determine its predominant orientation. Only such thought could, in time, liberate the intellectual life of the Orthodox world from the distorting influences of alien culture and also from the suffocating oppression of ignorance, both equally odious to Orthodox culture. For the development of thought giving a particular meaning to all intellectual life, or, even better, the development of philosophy, is determined by the union of the two opposite ends of human thought, the one wedded to the highest questions of faith and the one where philosophy touches on the development of the sciences and external culture.

Philosophy is neither one of the sciences nor faith. It is both the sum total and the common basis of all sciences and is the conductor of thought between them and faith. Where there is faith but no development of rational learning, philosophy cannot exist. Where science and learning have developed but there is no faith or where faith has disappeared, philosophical convictions replace convictions of faith and, appearing in the form of prejudice, give direction to the thought and life of a people. Not all who share philosophical convictions have studied the systems from which they derive, but all accept the final conclusions of these systems, so to speak, on faith that others are correct in their convictions. Resting on these mental prejudices on the one hand, and stimulated by the problems of contemporary learning on the other, human reason gives birth to new philosophical systems corresponding to the mutual relationship between established prejudices and contemporary culture.

But where the faith of a people has one meaning and one orientation whilst the learning borrowed from another people has a different meaning and different orientation, one of two things must happen: learning will force out faith, giving rise to appropriate philosophical convictions, or faith, overcoming this external learning in the thinking consciousness of the people, will produce its own philosophy from contact with it, which will give a different meaning to external learning and will endow it with a different dominant principle.

The latter occurred when Christianity appeared in the midst of pagan culture. Not only science, but pagan philosophy was transformed into an instrument of Christian culture and was incorporated into the body of Christian philosophy as a subordinate principle.

As long as external culture continued to exist in the East, Orthodox Christian philosophy flourished. It was extinguished when freedom died in Greece and Greek culture was destroyed. But traces have been preserved in the writings of the Holy Fathers like living sparks ready to flare up at first contact with believing thought and again to ignite the guiding beacon for reason in search of truth.

Yet, restoring the philosophy of the Holy Fathers as it was in their time is impossible. Having grown out of the relationship of faith to their contemporary culture, it had to correspond to the problems of its own time and to the culture in which it developed. Development of new aspects of systematic and social learning also demands a corresponding new development of philosophy. But the truths expressed in the speculative writings of the Holy Fathers could serve the development of philosophy as a life-bearing embryo and a bright guiding light.

To counterpoise these precious and life-giving truths to the contemporary state of philosophy; to become imbued with their meaning as much as possible; to consider all questions of contemporary culture in relation to them, all logical truths acquired by science, all the fruits of the millennial experiences of reason acquired in its diverse activities; to derive general conclusions from all these considerations corresponding to the present demands of culture — here is a problem whose solution could change the whole orientation of the culture of a people where the beliefs of the Orthodox faith are in disagreement with a borrowed culture.

The satisfactory solution of this great problem demands the concerted action of like-minded people. A philosophy which does not wish to remain purely academic and without influence, and which must become living conviction, must also develop from the living interaction of convictions striving for the same goal in various ways but with unity of purpose. For everything essential in man’s soul is the result of social forces. Personal conviction must then encounter the problems of surrounding culture not in theory but in reality. For only out of real relationships with reality are thoughts kindled which illuminate the mind and warm the heart.

Even so, in order that we may understand the relationship which the philosophy of the ancient Church Fathers might have to contemporary culture, it is not enough to apply it to the requirements of our time. It is necessary to keep constantly in mind its connection to its contemporary culture to it in order to be able to distinguish what is essential in it from what is only passing and relative. At that time, the extent of the development of science and the character of its development were not the same as they are today, and the things that agitated and disturbed man’s heart were not the same as those that agitate and disturb man today.

The ancient world found itself in an irreconcilable contradiction with Christianity, not only when Christianity was struggling with polytheism, but even when the state called itself Christian. The world and the Church were two opposite extremes which in essence were mutually exclusive, although outwardly they tolerated each other. Paganism was not destroyed with the coming of monotheism. It flourished in the structure of the state; in the laws; in the selfish, callous, coercive, and cunning Roman government, among officials insolently venal and openly deceitful; in the law courts, which were manifestly corrupt and capable of disguising flagrant injustice as formal legality; in the mores of the people, immersed in venality and luxury; in the Roman customs and games — in a word, in the sum total of the social relations of the Empire. Constantine the Great recognised the government as Christian, but he was not able to reform it in the Christian spirit. Although physical martyrdom ended, moral martyrdom remained. The legal and public recognition of Christian truth was a great achievement, but the embodiment of this truth in the structure of the state required time. If Constantine’s heirs had been pervaded by the same sincere respect for the Church, the East Roman Empire might perhaps have become Christian. Instead, its rulers were for the most part heretics or apostates who oppressed the Church under the guise of protection, using it only as an instrument of their own power.

Meanwhile, the very composition of the Roman Empire was such that it was hardly possible for its governing authority to renounce its pagan character. Rome represented a state authority in an abstract form. Below the government there were no people whose expression it might have been, with whom it could have been in sympathetic relations for the better development of the state’s life. The Roman government constituted the external and oppressive link between many different nationalities who were alien to one another in language and, additionally, whose interests conflicted. The strength of the government rested on the equilibrium of national animosities. The people were held together by force, but they were not united. Every expression of public and local spirit which is the food and sustenance of public morality, was repugnant to the government. The various peoples had their native countries, but the common fatherland had disappeared and could not have been restored except through inner unanimity of thought.

The Christian Church alone remained as the inner, living bond among the people. Only love for the heavenly kingdom united them. Only unanimity of thought in faith led them to a living mutual sympathy. Only unity of inner convictions firmly established in their minds could have led them in time to a better life on earth. This is why the longing for unanimity of thought and spirit in the Church constituted the full expression of the love of God, love of humanity, love of the fatherland, and love of truth. Between the citizen of Rome and the son of the Church, there was nothing in common. Only one possibility for social action remained open to the Christian, and that consisted of complete and unconditional protest against the world. The East Roman Christian could save his inner convictions only by sacrificing his public life. He achieved this by accepting martyrdom and by fleeing into the desert, by shutting himself up in the monastery. The desert and the monastery were, one might say, almost the sole area for the Christian moral and intellectual development of man. For Christianity, instead of avoiding intellectual development, incorporated it into itself.

As a result of this state of affairs, problems of the cultural life of the time could not be of social character; hence philosophy had to limit itself to the development of the inner contemplative life. Similarly, it could not embrace an interest in history, which rests on an interest in public matters. Moral issues affected philosophy only to the extent to which they were related to the inner life of the isolated individual. It was almost oblivious to man’s external life and the laws of development of family, civic, public, and state relations. Although the general principles of these relations are to be found in the general philosophical concepts of man, they did not lead to systematic conclusions. Perhaps general moral concepts — the less interference there was by transitory, worldly influences in monastic life — were the more purely and profoundly revealed in the isolated intellectual life of the monasteries. But the inner purity and depth did not have that completeness of external development which another epoch and another state of external culture would have demanded of them.

In the questions of the inner contemplative life of those times, however, and in the problems of the socio-philosophic culture of our day, there is a common element: human reason. The nature of reason, considered from the eminence of a profound theology experienced in the highest development of inner, spiritual contemplation, manifests itself in an appearance entirely different from which it presents itself when limited by the development of external everyday life. Of course, its general laws are the same. But when reason is elevated to its highest level of development, it displays the new aspects and new faculties of its nature which shed new light on its general laws as well.

The concept of reason which has been elaborated in recent philosophy, and whose expression is to be found in the Schellingian-Hegelian system, would not unconditionally contradict the concept of reason which we notice in the works of the Holy Fathers if only it did not present itself as the highest instrument of cognition, and if, as a result of this pretension to the highest power of cognition, it did not limit truth to that aspect of cognition which is accessible only to this abstractly rational manner of thinking [dianoetic].

All false deductions of rational thought result from its pretension to the highest, complete cognition of truth. If it recognised its limitations and saw itself as one of the tools for cognition of truth — and not as the only one — it would present its deductions as provisional and referent solely to its limited point of view; it would anticipate other, supreme, and most truthful deductions from another, supreme and most truthful manner of thinking. Rational thought is accepted in this sense by the thinking Christian who, rejecting its ultimate results, can with greater benefit to his mental development examine its relative truth and accept as the lawful achievement of reason everything that is true and enlightening in the development of its speculations, however one-sided.

If, however, philosophical reason realised its limitations, it would, through its development within these limitations, adopt another orientation capable of leading it to fuller knowledge. But, awareness of its limitations would mark the death of its absolute authority. That is why it has always feared this realisation, the more so as it has always been close to it. It constantly altered its forms in order to avoid it. No sooner would its inadequacy be understood than it would evade this misunderstanding by mainfesting itself in another appearance, leaving its earlier form as a mere empty shell in the hands of its adversaries. Thus, in order to avoid charges of inadequacy, it passed from formal-logic proofs to experiential observations on the one hand, and to the inner consciousness of truth on the other, and called its earlier manner of thought dry and rationalistic, and its later — rational. But, having also discovered the inadequacy of the new form in the course of its development, philosophical reason referred to it also as dry and rationalistic and proceeded to pure reason. When Jacobi excoriated the narrowness of the theory of pure reason as expressed in the systems of Kant and Fichte, he learnt to his surprise at the end of his lengthy polemics, extending over many years, that everything he had said about reason should be applied to the understanding. The theory of Kant and Fichte proved to be rationalistic. The development of reason was to begin only with the system of Schelling and Hegel. In 1802, pointing to Schelling’s system, Hegel wrote, Only now could, strictly speaking, the philosophy of reason begin, for the cycle of development of rationalistic understanding came to an end with Fichte’s system.

Thus, reason, as understood by most recent philosophy, does not wish to be confused with logical understanding contained in the formal concatenation of concepts and impelled by syllogistic deductions and proofs. According to the laws of intellectual necessity, reason in its latest manifestation derives its knowledge not from abstract notions, but from the very root of self-consciousness, where existence and thought are united into one absolute identity. Its thinking process consists not of logical development set in motion by abstract speculations, but of dialectical development deriving from the very essence of the subject. The object of thought, confronting the mind’s eye, transforms itself from form to form, from concept to concept, constantly acquiring a more nearly complete meaning. And as the mind concentrates on the subject of its thought, it discovers in it an inner contradiction destroying its former concept. This contradictory, negative concept confronting the mind also reveals its bankruptcy and discovers in itself the necessity of a positive foundation latent in it, which now appears as the union of the positive and negative categories into a single complex (the concrete). But this new concept in turn scarcely appears to the mind as the final result of understanding, when, in this pretension to ultimate independence, it now reveals its inadequacy and displays its negative side. This negative side once again brings out its positive, which is again subjected to the same transforming process until the whole cycle of the dialectical development of thought is completed, progressing from the initial principle of consciousness towards a general and pure abstraction of thought, which constitutes at the same time general essentiality. Then, by the same dialectical process, consciousness is given full content by the entire development of being and thought, [which are understood] as the identical phenomenon of a realised rationality and self-conscious essentiality.

But, having said its last word, philosophical reason at the same time furnished the mind with an opportunity to realise its limitations. The same dialectical process which had served reason in the construction of its philosophy was subjected to the same disintegrative assumptions, whereupon it showed itself to rational consciousness as solely the negative aspect of knowledge, comprising possible truth only, not actual truth, and standing in need of another form of thinking — which would be the positively known, not the hypothetically known, and which would stand above logical self-development just as the really occurring stands above the merely potential.

This consciousness of the limitations and the unsatisfactory character of the latest expression of philosophical thought now constitutes the highest stage of the intellectual development of the West. This is not the opinion of dilettantes in philosophy, not the outcries of people attacking philosophy from some tangential motivation; it is not even the judgment of people like Krause and Baader, who with their penetrating philosophical thought did much to help in the development of recent philosophy, but who did not command sufficient authority over men’s minds for their protest against its absolute truthfulness to be able to change the direction of philosophical development — they acted powerfully in another field which lies unseen between science and life, but none of them founded a special school of philosophy.¹ The one-sidedness and unsatisfactory nature of rational thinking, and of most recent philosophy, as its fullest manifestations, were recognised and expressed with obvious and irrefutable clarity by the same great thinker [Schelling] who was first to create the latest philosophy and to elevate, according to Hegel’s confession, rational thought from formal calculation to essential rationality.

For the latest German philosophy is attributable to Schelling as much as to Hegel. It was begun by Schelling and was confirmed in its new foundation and developed in many of its separate elements by him, and he shared with Hegel the introduction of it into the general consciousness of Germany. Hegel, who was long reckoned a pupil and follower of Schelling, is responsible for the more detailed development of recent philosophy that embraces all branches of science and represents the completion of a system founded on an allegedly scientific basis. Schelling could the more clearly recognise the limitations of this philosophy because it was his own thought.²

Schelling’s authority and, even more, the obvious justice of his views with respect to the limitations of rationality, visibly shook the absolute confidence in the deductions of most recent philosophy in Germany and was one of the factors which accounted for the growing indifference to philosophy. Of course, there are still Hegelians, and they will exist for a long time, for the whole character of contemporary culture is in tune with their orientation. But when thought, at the very peak of its development, has acknowledged its inadequacy, a new orientation is possible. The majority making up the crowd may, for a long time, continue to hold obsolete views, but the conviction of the crowd cannot restore the earlier spark of confidence. The celebrated Erdmann calls himself the “last Mohican” among Hegel’s pupils. New celebrities in the field of philosophy are no longer to be seen, and they are hardly possible any longer.

But Schelling’s last system could not yet have an influence on men’s minds, because it combines in itself two antithetical aspects, one of which is almost certainly true, while the other is almost certainly false. The first, the negative, shows the inadequacy of rationality; the second, the positive, presents the structure of a new system. But these two aspects lack essential cohesion; they may be separated from each other, and perforce will be separated. Then the negative influence of Schelling’s thought will be incomparably stronger. Once he was convinced of the limitation of autonomous thought, and of the necessity of Divine Revelation preserved in tradition, and simultaneously of the necessity of living faith as the supreme rationality and as the essential element of cognition, Schelling did not deliberately turn to Christianity, but came to it naturally through the profound and correct development of his rational self-consciousness. For the possibility of the consciousness of man’s basic relationship to God lies in the very core of human reason, and in its very nature. Man’s thoughts may hover in abstract oblivion of its basic relationships only if it has broken away from this vital profundity or if it has failed to reach it. By virtue of his innate genius and the extradordinary development of his profound philosophical thought, Schelling is one of those beings who are born not once in centuries, but once in millennia.

But, in his search for Divine Revelation, where could he find its pure expression corresponding to his rational need for faith? A Protestant from birth, Schelling was, nevertheless, so sincere and conscientious in his inner convictions he could not fail to see the inadequacies of Protestantism, which rejected the tradition preserved in the Latin confession. He often expressed this view, with the result that, for a long time, rumours were rampant in Germany that he had gone over to the Latins. But he also clearly saw in the Latin confession the confusion of true and untrue tradition, of the Divine and the human.

Heavy must be the lot of the man who languishes in the grip of an inner thirst for Divine Truth, and who cannot find the pure religion which can satisfy this all-pervasive need. He has only one alternative: to seek out and obtain with his own powers from the confused Christian tradition whatever corresponds to his inner notion of Christian truth. A lamentable task — creating a faith for oneself!

Here, Schelling was guided not by speculative considerations alone, whose inadequacy he so clearly recognised. In addition to [studying] the Holy Scriptures, he sought support for his thought in the actual consciousness of God of all mankind, to the extent to which it preserved the tradition of the pristine Divine Revelation to man. In the mythology of ancient peoples can be found traces of a Revelation which, although distorted, had not been lost. The fundamental relationship of early man to God appeared in every nation in a peculiar, circumscribed form as humanity became divided into different groups in accordance with the branching out of the various peoples. This peculiar form of God-consciousness determined the very character of a people. But, inside all these more or less distorting limitations, there remained the unchangeable, permanent features of the general essential nature of Revelation. The agreement between these general inner, basic principles of each mythology, and the basic principles of Christian tradition, expressed for Schelling the pure truth of Divine Revelation.

Such a view of the history of human beliefs could be an extremely rich source from which Christian thought might draw, if the preliminary stages of that thought already rested on a firm foundation. But the vagueness of the preliminary conviction and the vagueness of the inner meaning of mythology, subject to the more or less arbitrary interpretation of the investigator, were the reasons why Schelling’s Christian philosophy was neither Christian nor philosophy. It differed from Christianity in its most fundamental dogmas, and from philosophy by the very manner of cognition.

Moreover, whilst asserting actual truth based not on abstract speculation, but on thought imbued with faith, Schelling paid no attention to that special character of the inner activity of reason which constitutes the essential attribute of believing thought. For the form of rational activity changes in accordance with the level to which reason is elevated. Although reason is one, and its nature is one, its forms of action are different, just as its deductions are different depending on the level on which it finds itself, and on the force which impels it and guides it. For this impelling and animating force derives not from thought confronting reason, but arises from the very inner condition of reason and moves towards thought, in which this force finds its rest and through which it is communicated to other rational beings.

This inner nature of reason ordinarily escapes the attention of Western thinkers. Being accustomed to abstract logical thinking where all knowledge depends on the formal development of the object of thought and where the whole meaning is absorbed by that inexpressible aspect of thought, they do not pay attention to the faculty of the soul which transcends the formal nature of logical concatenations, and which accomplishes the movement of thought and constantly accompanies it, being suspended, so to speak, above the expression of thought and communicating to it meaning incompatible with external definition and results independent of external form. Hence, Schelling sought the expression of religious dogmas in the writings of the Holy Fathers, but did not appreciate their speculative concepts of reason and the laws of higher cognition. Hence, the positive side of his system, lacking the inner character of believing thought, found little sympathy in Germany and finds even less in Russia. Russia might be enticed by the logical systems of alien philosophies which are still new for her, but with respect to the philosophy of the believer she is stricter than other European countries, having lofty examples of religious thought in the ancient Holy Fathers and in the great sacred writings of all times, not excluding the present. On the other hand, the negative aspect of Schelling’s system, embracing the inadequacy of rational thought, could scarcely be so impartially appraised in Germany, which is accustomed to its abstract and logical thought pattern, as in Russia where, after the initial youthful enthusiasm over an alien system, the Russian can return more easily to essential rationality, particularly when this essential rationality is consonant with his historical uniqueness.

Therefore, I believe German philosophy, in combination with the development which it received in Schelling’s last system, could serve us as the most convenient point of departure on our way from borrowed systems to an independent philosophy corresponding to the basic principles of ancient Russia culture and be capable of subjecting the divided culture of the West to the integrated consciousness of believing reason.

Notes

1. Holibeus [Chalybäus] cannot be included in the category of philosophers opposed to the latest orientation of philosophy. For, although his principles are basically somewhat at variance with Hegel's view of the general laws of reason, these differences do not remove him from the sphere of rational, abstract thinking. Görres, who was one of the most celebrated followers of Schelling, and who went over from philosophy to faith, also could not exert any influence on the general development of the mind because his transition was accomplished not as a result of the correct development of consciousness, but as a result of his personal peculiarity and of extraneous influences.
2. In his history of philosophy, Hegel indicates several differences between his system and Schelling's, but these differences belong to that period of Schelling’s philosophy when his thought had already begun to take another direction – which, incidentally, Hegel himself mentions. The only difference between Schelling’s first system and Hegel’s system is to be found in the method by which the basic thought is expounded. That inner contradiction of thought which Schelling presents in the combined manifestation of the two polarities and of their identity appears in Hegel in the consecutive movement of consciousness from one definition of thought to its antithesis. With respect to intellectual intuition of which Schelling spoke and which was not encompassed by Hegel's system, it may be said that it had no essential significance in Schelling’s first system either. Schelling mentions it, but he does not develop it. This was only a harbinger of the future direction of his thought.