The Problem of the Christian Philosophy. The place of philosophy in christianity /part 9/

Finally, we have already noted that the difference is not separation. Although there are significant differences between philosophy and theology, nothing interferes with the fact that the thought in the disposition of these two disciplines only makes the only concrete movement towards each other. Which is separated from schools is united by life. Free Christian wisdom, uniting, philosophical and theological enlightenment, can thus function in accordance with the thought movement that reminds if you wish the thought movement at Malbranch but without mixing it with formal objects .

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We must not hide that the solution we propose once again brings us back to the thoughts that philosophy in the bosom of Christianity resides in the best conditions for it, in the privileged position. We can find this historical confirmation in the extraordinary metaphysical power of the medieval writers, who, as we were at the time of Leibniz for us, as it is useful to learn in this field, also in the heyday of the philosophy that has survived the West in the period after the Middle Ages. St. Thomas himself has experienced a profound sense of the advantages of this situation when he confessed that without the help of revelations the philosophers would remain unaware of the highest truth or would have noticed them with great effort.

But for mental labor the other condition is the genius, the talent. That is why the Christian philosophy, arrogantly, falls into error, just as its own history from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is enough to show modesty. When we think of the genius of Spinoza and Hegel, comparing them, of course, not with the genius of St. Augustine or St. Thomas and their students from the post-Cartesian and post-Cantobian times, we remember the words of St. Jerome about the biblical patriarchs and those primitive social-legal conditions, to the legitimate polygamy in which they lived: Abraham was wiser than I, but my situation was better.

Moreover, it is impossible to go without this notion of the qualitative difference of the situation or the conditions for the functioning of philosophy. Those who suggest that this difference may depend on a certain permeation of eternal in the temporal and superiority of the nature of the transcendent grace of God, they place it in dependence on the very movement of time and the successive course of intellectual epochs. If it seems inconceivable that thought objects can be aged or that the criteria of time measured by hours is sufficient to determine the significance of our relationship with it, then we think in return that it is necessary to recognize a certain increase in the role of history constantly creating in the power of development, in particular the positive sciences - the new conditions of being and functioning, the constantly renewing position of philosophy - privileged or not - it is another job, av case could not give it up only if you become a mummy.