I

One of the latest works of Etienne Gilson, the eminent historian of the philosophy of the Middle Ages, is entitled L’esprit de la philosophic medievale. Its subject, however, is much more comprehensive than one would assume from the title. Here, indeed, he speaks not only as a historian of philosophy but as a philosopher. Utilizing the rich historical and philosophical materials gathered in the course of long years of fruitful work, he raises with rare mastery and solves one of the fundamental and most difficult of philosophical questions: Was there a Judeo-Christian philosophy and—this is particularly important—how was such a philosophy possible and what novelty did it bring to human thought?

At first glance it seems that the expression “Judeo-Christian philosophy” contains an inner contradiction, especially in the sense that Gilson confers upon it. According to Gilson, the Judeo-Christian philosophy is a philosophy which has as its source the biblical revelation. At the same time he believes that every philosophy worthy of the name is a rational philosophy which is based on evidence and leads, or at least tends to lead, to demonstrable, indisputable truths. But all revealed truths, Gilson insistently and even, one might say, joyously emphasizes, have disdained demonstrations. “Greek thought,” he says, “did not attain the essential truth that the biblical word ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one’ with one blow and without a shadow of proof1 proclaims.”² And further, “Here again not a word of metaphysics, but God has spoken, the matter is settled, and it is the Book of Exodus that sets up the principle on which the whole Christian philosophy will henceforth be suspended.”³ And for the third time: “Nothing is better known than the first verse of the Bible, ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.’ Here again not a trace of philosophy. God no more justifies in a metaphysical way the statement of what He does than the definition of what He is.”⁴ And so it is throughout Scripture: God does not justify Himself, does not prove, does not argue, that is, He delivers His truths quite otherwise than does metaphysics. Nevertheless the truths that He proclaims are as convincing as those that our natural reason succeeds in producing and, above all, they are self-evident. Gilson repeats this with the same insistence when he declares that the biblical truths are not at all concerned about their demonstrability. “The first of all the commandments is this: ‘Hear, O Israel,’” he quotes Mark 12:29 and adds immediately, “But this ‘I believe in one God’ of the Christians, the first article of their faith, appeared at the same time as a rational, irrefutable self-evidence.”⁵ And then also: “In delivering in this simple formula—‘in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’—the secret of His creative action, it seems that God gives to men one of those puzzling words long sought, of which one is sure in advance that they exist, that one will never find them unless they are given to us, and whose self-evidence nevertheless forces itself upon us with an invincible power as soon as they are given to us.”6 He quotes Lessing: “Without doubt, as Lessing profoundly said, when the religious truths were revealed they were not rational, but they were revealed in order to become rational.” To be sure, he has to restrict Lessing’s thought, and this is extremely significant: “Not all, perhaps, but at least certain ones—and here lies the meaning of the question to which the chapters that follow will try to find the answer.” It is with this sentence that he finishes the first chapter of the first book.

I could multiply quotations on this matter from Gilson’s book, but this seems to me unnecessary. The sentences that I have already quoted show the reader in what direction Gilson tries to orient our thought: the revealed truth is founded on nothing, proves nothing, is justified before nothing and—despite this—is transformed in our mind into a justified, demonstrated, self-evident truth. Metaphysics wishes to possess the revealed truth and it succeeds in doing so: this idea, which constitutes in a way the leitmotif of Gilson’s beautiful book, permits the author to establish a strict bond between medieval philosophy, on the one hand, and ancient and modern philosophy, on the other. Just as in Hegel, philosophy, in the course of its millennial history, remains one: the Greeks sought what the scholastics sought and what the father of modern philosophy, Descartes, sought; and all who followed Descartes never could and never even wished to escape the influence of the philosophy of the Middle Ages. Gilson quotes the phrase of Clement of Alexandria which shows that Christian thought in its beginnings already admitted two “Old Testaments”—the Bible and Greek philosophy;⁷ he indicates that the philosophers of the Middle Ages believed that the Delphic “know thyself” had “fallen from heaven.” It is therefore wrong, according to him, to believe with Hamelin that Descartes reasoned as if nothing had been done in the domain of philosophy after the Greeks. Not only Descartes but all of his successors, up to the most eminent representatives of modern philosophy, were strictly bound to the scholastics: Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant and all the German idealists followed the way traced by scholastic thought; they also considered Greek philosophy as a kind of second “Old Testament.”

But modern philosophy could not have accomplished what it did without the scholastics, who succeeded in joining to the Bible and to the truths revealed by the Bible the self-evident truths discovered by the Greeks. The very title of Descartes’ basic work, “Meditations on metaphysics, wherein the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are demonstrated” and “the kinship of his proofs for the existence of God with those of St. Augustine and even those of St. Thomas” are already sufficiently persuasive in this respect. It is especially important to indicate that all the Cartesian system “rests on the idea of one omnipotent God who somehow created Himself, even more naturally created eternal truths—including those of mathematics—, who created the universe ex nihilo.” No less significant is the conclusion of Leibniz’s Discours métaphysique that Gilson quotes in its entirety and of which he says: “These are not the words of a man who believed himself to have come after the Greeks as if nothing had been between them and himself.” According to Gilson, one could say the same of Kant, “if people did not so often forget to complete his Critique of Pure Reason with his Critique of Practical Reason. One could even say as much of our contemporaries.” So he finishes his introductory remarks on the role of medieval philosophy in the history of the development of modern philosophical thought. And he declares no less categorically in the final chapter of the second volume of his work, “It will not suffice for a metaphysical thesis to have forgotten its religious origin to become rational. It would then be necessary to expel from philosophy as well as from its history—along with the God of Descartes—the God of Leibniz, of Malebranche, of Spinoza and of Kant, for no more than the God of St. Thomas would these have existed without the God of the Bible and the Evangelist.”

At the same time Gilson is not at all inclined to minimize the importance of the influence Greek philosophy exercised on medieval philosophy, as a less learned historian and one more preoccupied with apologetic than with the philosophical problems he has raised would have tried to do. I do not mean by this that Gilson does not have his own clear and determinate conception of the meaning and importance of the work accomplished by the Judeo-Christian philosophy and that, under the cover of historical questions, he tries to avoid the heavy responsibility that falls necessarily on one who must express himself openly on the very essence of the matter. On the contrary, I repeat, he attacks with noble audacity questions of principle and, if for this he utilizes historical materials, it is only insofar as he can count on finding in history data that will permit us to bring into clarity an extremely complex and confused situation—the situation in which European thought found itself when it recognized the necessity of incorporating into the truths drawn at the price of long and painful effort by the ancient world the “revelations” which suddenly fell on the world from the heavens when the Bible was disclosed to it. Gilson declares unhesitatingly, “Philosophy, in making itself more truly philosophy, becomes more Christian.” Here finally is the basic thought of his work and, far from hiding it, he sets it in the foreground. “The conclusion which results from this study or, rather, the axis that traverses it from end to end, is that everything happens as if the Judeo-Christian revelation had been a religious source of philosophical development, the Latin Middle Ages being, in the past, the testimony par excellence of this development.”8 And yet he shows himself so objective and at the same time so convinced of the correctness of the conception he defends that he declares with the same assurance: “One could legitimately ask if there would ever have been a Christian philosophy if Greek philosophy had not existed.”⁹ And again: “If it is to the Bible that we owe a philosophy that is Christian, it is to the Greek tradition that Christianity owes the fact that it has a philosophy.”¹⁰ Whereas Plato and Aristotle have sunk into the past of history, “Platonism and Aristotelianism continued to live in a new way by collaborating in a work for which they did not know themselves destined. It is thanks to them that the Middle Ages could have a philosophy. It was they who taught the idea of ‘the perfect work of reason’; they pointed out, along with the master problems, the rational principles which govern their solution and the techniques through which they are justified. The debt of the Middle Ages to Greece is immense. . . .”¹¹

Such, in a few words, are the essential ideas of Gilson’s remarkable work. Without the ancient philosophy which set out from self-evident truths discovered by natural reason, medieval philosophy would not have existed; and without the medieval philosophy, which assimilated to itself the Bible’s revelations, there would not have been any modern philosophy. It is clear that the problems raised and resolved by Gilson transcend the limits indicated by the relatively modest title of his book. It is not a matter of the spirit of medieval philosophy—in other words, of determining and characterizing in a more or less complete and detailed fashion what the most remarkable and influential thinkers of the Middle Ages did. To be sure, such a subject would have presented exceptional interest, especially treated by a specialist in the material and a writer like Gilson; his work would have been valuable even if he had held simply to the promises of his title. But the question the author has actually raised excites us even more. Revelation, he himself has told us, never proves anything, is founded on nothing, and is never justified. Now rationalism consists essentially in the fact that it founds, proves and justifies each of its assertions. How, then, could medieval philosophy discover a metaphysics in the Book of Exodus? The essential thing for metaphysics is not only to present us with truths but to do it in such a way that these truths are irrefutable and that there be no place beside them for other truths contradicting them. Can there, then, be a metaphysics where all proofs, on principle and once for all, are rejected? All the fundamental truths of revelation have come to man without “a shadow, without a trace of proof,” as Gilson has told us, speaking in his own name and in the name of medieval philosophy. Even more, we read at the end of the third chapter of the second volume: “The metaphysics of the Book of Exodus penetrates to the very heart of epistemology, in that it makes the intellect and its subject dependent on God, from whom both draw their existence. What it brings us here that is new is the notion, unknown to the ancients, of a created truth, spontaneously ordained to the Being who is at the same time the end and the beginning, for it is by Him alone that it exists, as He alone can perfect and fulfill it.”

That the metaphysics of the Book of Exodus is precisely such is beyond doubt: the God of Scripture is above the truth as well as the good. When Descartes says this he is only expressing what every line of the Bible asserts. But can this “new thing” which the Bible brought find any place in that conception of metaphysics that the ancient world had elaborated? And can Greek philosophy help the medieval thinker participate in such a truth? Greek philosophy set as its task the searching out of self-evident truths which, being self-evident, are also irrefutable. When Kant wrote at the beginning of his Critique of Pure Reason (First Edition), “Experience indeed teaches us what is but it does not say that what is must be precisely so and not otherwise; that is why experience does not give us true universality, and reason, which aspires avidly to this kind of knowledge, is irritated rather than satisfied by experience,” he was only summing up in a few words what modern philosophy had inherited from ancient philosophy. Aristotle expresses himself similarly in his Metaphysics: “For the practical man well knows the ‘that’ but not the ‘why’; but the theoretical man knows the why and the causal relationship.”12 Empirical knowledge consists in knowing how things happen in reality (to hoti) but it is not yet the knowledge why (to dioti kai hê aitia) what happens must happen precisely so and could not happen otherwise.¹³

Among the Greeks the idea of knowledge was indissolubly bound to the idea of necessity and constraint. And this is also true in the case of St. Thomas Aquinas: “The meaning of knowledge is that, of what is known, it is believed impossible for it to be otherwise.”¹⁴ Is it to be assumed that one can succeed in subjecting to the fundamental principles of Greek thought, or to reconciling with them, the metaphysics of the Book of Exodus which makes truth dependent on the will (the Greeks would have said—and rightly—the arbitrariness) of God? And then, how does one know to whom it is given to resolve this question: must we submit to the metaphysics of the Book of Exodus and accept its epistemology or, on the contrary, must we verify and correct the epistemology of the Book of Exodus by making use of the rational principles that Greek philosophy has transmitted to us? Descartes, we know, wholly accepted the “new thing” that the Bible had brought men: he declared that the self-evident truths had been created by God.

I shall return to this later, but I believe that it is well to recall in this connection now that Leibniz, who had quite as much right as Descartes to the title “Christian philosopher” and whose philosophic genius was no smaller than that of Descartes, was horrified to see Descartes abandoning truth to “arbitrariness” even if it were the arbitrariness of God. This fact alone shows us the tremendous difficulties that are met by every attempt to force on the Biblical philosophy the principles on which the rational philosophy of the Greeks was founded and on which the rational philosophy of modern times is still founded. Who will settle the argument between Leibniz and Descartes? The philosophy of the Book of Exodus tells us that truth, like everything that exists, was created by God, that it is always in His power and that it is in this precisely that its high value and its superiority in relation to the uncreated truths of the Greeks consists. Descartes acknowledged this, Leibniz was indignant over it. The situation seems to have no way out and we, it seems, are then obliged forever to renounce any Judeo-Christian philosophy. No one can settle the argument between Descartes and Leibniz. For Leibniz, who all his life tried to reconcile reason and revelation, it was absolutely clear that the Cartesian solution radically denied the rights of reason: Descartes, however, who was no less perceptive than Leibniz, did not even suspect that he was ruining the sovereign rights of reason.

The situation becomes still more complicated by the fact that when medieval philosophy—which tried to draw from Scripture, according to the principles elaborated in Greece, the metaphysics of which it had need—found itself faced with the epistemological problem (I prefer to say, the metaphysics of knowledge), it appeared completely to have forgotten the passages of the Book of Genesis which relate directly to this problem. I am thinking about the story of the fall of the first man and the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If we wish to participate in the biblical epistemology or, to speak more exactly, in the metaphysics of knowledge, we must above all else realize as precisely as possible the meaning of this story.

II

This task is much more difficult than might appear at first blush. Gilson is certainly right: like the men of the Middle Ages we have inherited from the Greeks both the fundamental philosophical problems and the rational principles for their solution, and also the entire technique of our thought. How shall we succeed in reading and understanding Scripture not according to the teaching of the great Greek masters, but as they who have transmitted to us, by means of the Book of Books, that which they called the word of God wished and demanded of their readers? As long as the Bible was exclusively in the hands of the “chosen people,” this question did not arise: it could at all events be assumed that men, when they listened to the words of Scripture, did not always find themselves under the dominion of rational principles and of that technique of thought which has somehow become our second nature, which we consider—without even realizing it—as the immutable conditions for the grasping and possession of truth. Gilson sees correctly also when he says that the medieval thinkers always tried to retain the spirit and letter of Scripture. But is good intention sufficient in this instance? Is a man educated by the Greeks capable of preserving that freedom which is the condition of the right understanding of what the Bible says?

When Philo of Alexandria undertook to present the Bible to the cultivated world of the Greeks, he found himself obliged to have recourse to the allegorical method: it was thus only that he could hope to persuade his listeners. Impossible indeed to contradict before educated people the principles of rational thought and the great truths that Greek philosophy, in the person of its most remarkable representatives, had brought to mankind! Furthermore, Philo himself, who had assimilated Greek culture, could not accept the Bible without first verifying it through the criteria which the Greeks had provided him for distinguishing truth from error. The result of this was that the Bible was “raised” to such a philosophic plane that it could amply satisfy the demands posed by the Hellenistic culture. Clement of Alexandria assumed the same role as Philo; it is not for nothing that Harnack calls him the Christian Philo. He set Greek philosophy on the same plane as the Old Testament and not only obtained the right to affirm (as we recall) that knowledge (gnôsis) is inseparable from eternal salvation but that if they were separable and if he, Clement, were offered the choice, he would have given the preference not to salvation but to gnosis. If one takes account even only of Philo and of Clement of Alexandria, it is clear in advance that neither the Fathers of the Church nor the philosophers of the Middle Ages could accept the account of original sin as it is found in Genesis, and that, in the face of this account, the thought of believers was placed before the fateful dilemma: either the Bible or the Greek “knowledge” and the wisdom founded on this knowledge.

Indeed, what is the content of these chapters of Genesis that concern the fall of the first man? God planted in paradise the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and He said to man: “From every tree of paradise you may eat; however, from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for on the day that you eat thereof you shall surely die.” While God ordinarily proclaims His truths “without any trace of proof,” this time His prohibition is accompanied not by His sanction, as we have tried to believe in order to simplify the problem, but by His motivation: the day you taste the fruits of the tree of knowledge you shall surely die. A relationship is thus established between the fruits of the tree of knowledge and death. God’s words do not mean that man will be punished for having disobeyed, but that knowledge hides in itself death. This appears beyond doubt if we recall the circumstances in which the fall took place. The serpent, craftiest of the animals created by God, asks the woman, “Why has God forbidden you to eat of the fruit of all the trees of paradise?” And when the woman replies to him that God had forbidden them only to eat of the fruits of a single tree that they might not die, the serpent answers, “You shall not die, but God knows that the day you eat of these fruits your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” “Your eyes will be opened,” says the serpent. “You shall die,” says God. The metaphysics of knowledge in Genesis is strictly tied to the metaphysics of being. If God has spoken truly, knowledge leads to death; if the serpent has spoken truly, knowledge makes man like God. This was the question posed before the first man, and the one posed before us now.

It is not necessary to say that the pious thinkers of the Middle Ages could not even for a moment admit the thought that truth was on the side of the tempting serpent. But the Gnostics declared openly that it was God and not the serpent who had deceived man. In our age Hegel was not at all embarrassed to say that the serpent had spoken the truth to the first man and that the fruits of the tree of knowledge became the source of philosophy for all time. If we ask on what side the truth is, and if we admit in advance that our reason is called to pronounce the final judgment in the argument between God and the serpent, no doubt is possible: it is the serpent who triumphs. And as long as reason remains “prince and judge of all,” we cannot expect any other decision. Reason is the source of knowledge: how can it then condemn knowledge? On the other hand—we must not forget this—the first man possessed a certain knowledge. In the same book of Genesis it is said that when God created all the animals, He led them to the man in order that he might give a name to each.

But the man, seduced by the serpent, was not content with this knowledge: the “that” (hoti) did not suffice for him; he desired the “why” (dioti); the “that” irritated him just as it irritated Kant. His reason aspired avidly to universal and necessary judgments; he could not feel satisfied as long as he had not succeeded in transforming the truth that was “revealed” and situated above both the universal and the necessary into a self-evident truth that certainly deprives him of his freedom but protects him against the arbitrariness of God. Certain conscientious theologians, concerned no doubt with defending man against the arbitrariness of God, have tried to derive the Greek word alêtheia (truth) from a-lan-thanô (to open up, to reveal). In this way revelation was inwardly related to truth: revelation consisted in opening up the truth, and so there was no reason to fear that God could have abused His limitless freedom: the universal and necessary truth dominates God as well as man. It came finally to the same result as in Hegel: the serpent did not deceive the man. But it ended there not explicite but implicite. The theologians avoided Hegel’s frankness.

The situation of the medieval philosophers who found themselves placed before the obligation of transforming the truths received from God “without any shadow of proof” into proven truths, into self-evident truths—as the principles of the Greeks demanded of them—differed in no way basically from that in which the first man found himself standing before the tree of knowledge. Gilson admirably shows us the almost superhuman efforts made by the philosophers of the Middle Ages to overcome the seduction of “knowledge” and also how this seduction took stronger and stronger hold on their minds. The thought of Anselm, he writes, “was long obsessed by the desire to find a direct proof of the existence of God, one that was based on the single principle of contradiction.”15 In another place he speaks of the emotion of the same Anselm, of St. Augustine and St. Thomas at the memory of these moments when “the opacity of faith suddenly gave way in them to the transparency of intelligence.”¹⁶ And the “most subtle intellect” of Duns Scotus himself who, with an incomparable daring, declared the total independence of God in relation to the highest and most immutable principles was even for him incapable of tearing out of his soul the concupiscentia irresistibilis (irresistible desire) which impelled him to replace faith with knowledge. Gilson quotes from his De rerum prima principia the following confession that is truly worthy of being reproduced in full: “Lord our God, when Moses asked you, as of a very truthful teacher, what name he should give you before the children of Israel, you replied: ‘I am who I am.’ You are then the true being, you are the total being. This is what I believe but it is this also—if possible—that I would wish to know.”

One could, in this connection, reproduce still many other passages from scholastic thinkers quoted or not quoted by Gilson: the “knowledge” by means of which the serpent succeeded in seducing the first man continued to attract them with an irresistible force. “Experience” does not satisfy but rather irritates them, just as it was later to irritate Kant; they wish to know—in other words, to be convinced that what is not only is but cannot be other than it is and must necessarily be what it is. And they seek guarantees not from the prophet who brought God’s word to them from Sinai nor even in God’s word itself: their intellectual longing will be satisfied only when the word of God brought by the prophet will have obtained the blessing of the principle of contradiction or some other principle that is as immutable and impassive as the principle of contradiction. Now this is precisely what the first man wished when he stretched forth his hand to the tree of knowledge; it is this by which he let himself be tempted. He also wished “to know,” not “to believe”; he saw in faith a kind of diminution, an injury to his human dignity, and he was certain of this when the serpent told him that after he had eaten of the fruits of the forbidden tree he would become like God—knowing.

I repeat: The medieval philosophers who aspired to transform faith into knowledge were far from suspecting that they were committing once again the act of the first man. Nevertheless it is impossible not to agree with Gilson when he writes, regarding the attitude of the Scholastics toward faith: “Faith as such suffices for itself, but it aspires to transmute itself in the understanding of its own content; it does not depend on the evidence of reason but, on the contrary, it is faith that engenders reason.” And further, “This effort of the truth that is believed to change itself into the truth that is known is truly the life of Christian wisdom; and the body of rational truths that this effort gives us is the Christian philosophy itself.”17

It may be supposed that the first man, when he heard the tempter’s words, thought likewise: it seemed to him, too, that there was nothing dangerous or condemnable in his desire to know, that this desire was good. It is a remarkable thing: most of the great scholastic thinkers (there were, however, some exceptions: Peter Damian and his followers of whom we shall speak later) never wished to see and never came to understand that the original sin consisted in the fact that man had tasted of the fruits of the tree of knowledge. In this respect the mystics hardly distinguished themselves from the philosophers. The unknown author of the famous Theologia deutsch declares openly: Adam could have eaten twenty apples—no evil would have come of it; the evil was in his disobedience to God. St. Augustine says the same thing but in a less trenchant way: “For in that place of so much happiness God did not wish to create and plant evil. But obedience was inculcated by the commandment—a virtue that in the rational creature is, so to speak, the mother and keeper of all virtues, for the creature was so made that it is useful for it to be subjected to God but injurious for it to do its own will and not the will of Him by Whom it was created.”¹⁸ And so perceptive an eye as that of Duns Scotus did not succeed in distinguishing (or perhaps did not dare to distinguish) the true significance of the biblical account. “The first sin of man . . . according to what Augustine said, was an immoderate love of union with his wife.” In itself Adam’s act, the eating of the fruits of the tree of knowledge, was not evil.

Gilson very finely characterizes the attitude of the Middle Ages toward the biblical account of the fall: “This is why the first moral evil receives in the Christian philosophy a special name which extends to all the faults engendered by the first: sin. In using this word a Christian means always to signify that—as he understands it—moral evil, introduced by free will into a created universe, puts directly at stake the fundamental relationship of dependence which unites the creature with God. The prohibition, so light and—so to speak—gratuitous, which God imposes on the perfectly useless use by man of one of the goods placed at his disposal19 was only the sensible sign of this radical dependence of the creature. To accept the prohibition was to recognize the dependence; to break the prohibition was to deny it and to proclaim that what is good for the creature is better than the divine good itself.”²⁰

The medieval philosophers never stopped reflecting on sin; moreover, they were not content with reflecting on it, they suffered from it. But they could never resolve to connect the fall of man with the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. How could they resolve to do this since all—and we also, for that matter—have at the bottom of our hearts only one thought, only one care: “I believe, Lord, but if it is also possible, it is this that I would wish to know.” They knew well that “obedience is the mother and keeper of all virtues,” but they did not for an instant admit that the knowledge to which they aspired so eagerly could conceal sin within itself and were only astonished that the first man should have been incapable of submitting himself to a prohibition so insignificant, so easy, as not eating the fruit of one of the trees that grew in Eden. Yet the biblical story spoke to them clearly and distinctly of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, while only the truths that had come to them from the Greeks testified to obedientia.

The Greeks, indeed, placed obedience above everything else. Seneca’s phrase is well known: “The Creator and Ruler of the world Himself once commanded, always obeys.” For the Greeks there was always something suspicious in the jubere (commanding): it contained, in their eyes, the germ of limitless freedom, that is, a detestable arbitrariness, while the parere (obedience) was the principle and promise of the good. And they established on the parere the knowledge that puts an end to unbridled freedom.²¹ It is enough to recall the dispute between Callicles and Socrates in Plato’s Gorgias, which passed on to St. Augustine, the Fathers of the Church, Duns Scotus, and to all medieval philosophy the extraordinary, exclusive value that they accorded to the parere as well as to the knowledge that is based on the parere, and from which they also drew, along with this knowledge, the opposition between good and evil which, as Gilson has just told us, could not exist even for a moment without the idea of obedience. A breach occurred in the central or fundamental idea of the philosophy of the Middle Ages which aspired so passionately, so violently, to become Judeo-Christian: the Bible warned man of the horrible danger involved in tasting the fruits of the tree of knowledge, Greek philosophy considered gnôsis (knowledge) as the spiritual nourishment par excellence and saw the supreme dignity of man in his faculty of distinguishing between good and evil. Medieval philosophy was incapable of renouncing the Greek heritage and found itself obliged in the face of the fundamental problem of philosophy, the problem of the metaphysics of knowledge, to ignore the Bible.

III

It was not only the biblical account of the fall which put man on guard against the “knowledge” of the ancient world. The prophets and the apostles had risen with extreme force against the Graeco-Roman “wisdom.” The medieval philosophers certainly knew this. Gilson cites in full the famous verses of the first chapter of the first letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians (19–25) on the impossibility of reconciling the truth of revelation with human truth, and I think it well to recall the passage here: “For it is written (Isaiah 29,14): ‘I shall destroy the wisdom of the wise and I shall bring to nothing the prudence of the prudent.’ Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that, in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe . . . the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”

Gilson indicates in a footnote that these words always inspired the enemies of the “Christian philosophy,” among whom the first place is occupied by Tertullian who opposes, as is known, Jerusalem to Athens (quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis?—what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?). Yet the eminent historian does not believe that they could and should have stopped the medieval philosophers from their efforts to transform the truths of revelation into truths of rational knowledge. According to him, those who denied that a rational Judeo-Christian philosophy is possible could not base themselves either on the prophet Isaiah or on St. Paul. Indeed, to understand the true meaning of these words it is necessary, above all, to remember that for St. Paul the gospel is the way to salvation and not the way to knowledge. And then: “At the very moment that St. Paul proclaims the bankruptcy of Greek wisdom, he proposes to substitute for it something else, which is the person of Jesus Christ himself. What he intends to do is to eliminate the seeming Greek wisdom, which, in reality, is only foolishness, in the name of the seeming Christian foolishness, which is nothing but wisdom.” All this is correct, but it is a commentary on Tertullian’s opposition of Athens to Jerusalem rather than an objection to his position, for the Apostle still “proclaims the bankruptcy of Greek wisdom.” What for Athens is wisdom is for Jerusalem foolishness: Tertullian said nothing else. One cannot even say that Tertullian had denied the possibility of a Judeo-Christian philosophy. He wished only to secure freedom and independence for it, believing that it had to have its own source of truth, its own principles, its own problems—that were not those of the Greeks. According to him, if the revealed truth seeks to justify itself before our reason by means of the same procedures that the Greeks used to justify their truths, it will never succeed in arriving at this justification, or it will succeed only by denying itself, for what is foolishness for Athens is wisdom for Jerusalem and what is truth for Jerusalem is for Athens a lie. This is the meaning of the famous passage of his De carne Christi [On the Incarnation] which has long been quoted under the abbreviated and consequently weakened form credo quia absurdum (I believe because it is absurd), which even the mob repeats. In Tertullian we read: Crucifixus est Dei filius: non pudet quia pudendum est; et mortuus est Dei filius: prorsus credibile quia ineptum est; et sepultus resurrexit: certum est quia impossible (The son of God was crucified: it does not shame because it is shameful; and the son of God died: it is absolutely credible because it is absurd; and having been buried, he rose from the dead; it is certain because it is impossible).

Here is the same thought as in Isaiah and St. Paul but adapted to the Scholastic philosophical terminology. And yet it rebels to such a degree against the wisdom of the world that Leibniz, who reproduced these words, did not believe it necessary to stop and examine them; they are only a “religious phrase,” says he. And he drops completely the beginning clause which ends with the words non pudet, quia pudendum est [it does not shame because it is shameful]. His hand, one may believe, did not have the power to reproduce words so immoral. Yet if Isaiah and St. Paul are right, Tertullian’s declaration must serve as the introduction or prolegomenato the organon of the Judeo-Christian philosophy, which was called to proclaim to the world the new notion, completely ignored up until then, of “created truth.” We must, before everything else, reject the basic categories of Greek thought, tear out from our being all the postulates of our “natural knowledge” and our “natural morality.” Where the educated Greek opposes to us his imperious pudet, we shall say it is precisely for this reason that it is not shameful. Where reason proclaims ineptum (absurd), we shall say that it is precisely this that preferentially deserves our complete trust. And finally where it raises its impossible, we shall oppose our “it is certain.” And when reason and morality will call before their tribunal the prophets and the apostles and along with them Him in whose name they dare defy the Greek philosophy, do you think that Tertullian will be afraid of the judgment, as Leibniz was?

I have already more than once had occasion to speak of Tertullian and of his violent attacks on Greek philosophy. But before passing on to an examination of the results to which the attempt of the medieval philosophers to establish a symbiosis between Greek knowledge and the revealed truth led, I would wish to dwell on two moments of the history of the development of European thought. I believe this will permit us to see more clearly into the question that concerns us here: what the essence of the Judeo-Christian philosophy was.

The history of philosophy is ordinarily divided into three periods: the ancient which ends with Plotinus, the philosophy of the Middle Ages which ends with Duns Scotus and William of Occam (after whom comes “the decay of Scholasticism”), and the modern which begins with Descartes and continues up to our own time and of which it is impossible to know where it will lead us. Now there is here an extraordinary fact: the philosophy of Plotinus is not only the culmination of the almost thousand-year development of Greek thought; it is also a defiance of this thought. Zeller was right: Plotinus lost confidence in philosophic thought; the fundamental principles and eternal truths of his predecessors ceased to satisfy him, and it seemed to him that these principles and these truths do not liberate the human spirit but enslave it. And this after he had held to them all his life and had taught others to follow them. His Enneads present, indeed, a puzzling mixture of two divergent streams of thought. If Zeller is right that Plotinus had lost confidence in thought, then this modern historian of philosophy is also right in greatly valuing Plotinus precisely because the latter, as the Greek tradition demanded of him, based all of his searchings for truth on the dei (must) and on ex anankês (necessarily); or in other words, he tried to obtain judgments rigorously proven and controlled, judgments that constrain. But he tried to obtain them, obviously, only to reject them despite himself. The “knowledge” which his predecessors had transmitted to him and which was founded on the necessity that constrains became unbearable to him precisely because it constrained him. He perceived in knowledge chains from which he had, at all costs, to escape. Knowledge does not liberate; it enslaves.

Plotinus seeks, then, a way out; he seeks salvation outside of knowledge. And he who had taught “the beginning was the logos, and everything is logos,” felt suddenly that the meaning of philosophy—“the most important thing,” as he put it—consisted in the fact that it delivered from “knowledge”: this was the meaning of his “ecstasy.” Above all, one must “soar above knowledge” and awaken from the enchantment of all the dei (you must) and ex anankês (necessarily). Whence came this “must,” whence came this “necessary” that has permeated human thought? On what does their force and power rest? The supreme principle—what Plotinus calls “the One”—knows neither the “must” nor the “necessary” and has no need of their support. “It requires no support, as though it could not carry itself” (ou gar deitai hidryseôs, hôsper auto pherein ou dynamenon). It lies “beyond reason and thought.” It is free of all the limitations which the nous that “came after us” has invented.22 And just as the One has need neither of support nor of foundation, likewise the man “awakened to himself no longer feels the need of any support, of any foundation whatsoever. He feels himself to belong to a higher fate (praestantioris sortis), throws far from himself all, the heavy “musts” and “of necessity,” and like the gods of Greece does not touch the earth with his feet. It is hardly necessary to say that Plotinus, insofar as he tried “to soar above knowledge,” did not leave any trace in history. The “to soar above knowledge” and the “it requires no support” were a break with the tradition of ancient thought which always sought knowledge and solid foundations. Rare are those who have had the courage to repeat after Zeller that Plotinus had lost confidence in thought. Most historians are interested in Plotinus only so long as they find in him the customary argumentation which convinces everyone and which rests on the omnipotence of Necessity. St. Augustine himself, who was constantly inspired by Plotinus (some pages of his work appear almost translated from the Enneads) did not wish, or did not dare, to follow Plotinus in rootlessness and took from Plotinus only what he could assimilate without denying the fundamental principles of Greek thought.

But the development of Greek philosophy stopped after Plotinus or, to put it more accurately, Greek philosophy decayed after Plotinus, just as Scholastic philosophy began to decay after Duns Scotus and Occam. Human thought then congealed into immobility and sank into endless commentaries on what had already been done, instead of going forward at its own risk and peril towards the puzzling unknown of which Plotinus had spoken. It is not for nothing, furthermore, that Plotinus himself says that when the soul approaches the limits of being it stops: “it is afraid that it has nothing.” It is afraid to rid itself of the constraining “must” and “of necessity.” It has so long borne their yoke that it seems to it that freedom is a principle of destruction, of annihilation. No one, then, follows the path indicated by Plotinus. History succeeded in turning the attention of later generations away from what had been most original and most daring in him—his cultivation of rootlessness (people ordinarily speak of Asiatic influences; it would perhaps be better to remember the “Asiatic” ex auditu). But the fact that the last of the great Greek philosophers allowed himself to shake the foundations upon which the ancient thought rested is impossible to deny; and even Zeller, always so prudent and objective, is obliged, as we have seen, to confirm this.

The second period of European philosophy ended in a similar fashion. Almost immediately after the brilliant Thomas Aquinas (and as if in response to him) the last great Scholastics rose with unheard of violence against all the “musts” and “of necessity” through the help of which thought subsisted and developed and to which were bound the goods promised by reason to man. Here finally is the meaning of what is ordinarily called their “voluntarism.” Most of the historians of theology (particularly the Protestants) and most of the historians of philosophy have tried to weaken in one way or another the violence of the challenge thrown by the last great Scholastics to their predecessors, insofar as the latter tried to connect the truths of the Bible with the truths obtained by reason. And from their point of view these historians are right, just as they are when they try to “defend” Plotinus against the reproach that some people have made against him, to the effect that he exercised, through his doctrine, a destructive influence. History is bound to consider only those things to which it is given to determine future development. But the judgment of history is not the only judgment and it is not the final judgment.

If one wished to reduce to a brief formula the ideas that mankind received from ancient thought, I think it would be difficult to find anything better than what Plato says in the Phaedo and in the Euthyphro about reason and morality. There is no greater misfortune for a man, we read in the Phaedo, than to become a hater of reason, a misologos. The holy is not holy because the gods love it, but it is precisely because the holy is holy that the gods love it, says Socrates in the Euthyphro.

One could say without exaggeration that these words contain the two principal commandments of Greek philosophy, its alpha and omega. When we today still aspire so eagerly to truths that are universal and obligatory upon all, we are fulfilling the demands made by the “wisest of men.” It is certain indeed that it was the “righteous” Socrates who inspired in his pupil Plato the worship that gods as well as mortals must render to reason and morality. And I would add that if Socrates had had to choose between reason and morality, and if he had agreed to admit even hypothetically that reason can be separated from mortality—be it only for God—he would have renounced reason but would not have denied morality for anything in the world. Above all, he would not have agreed to free the gods from morality. That the gods in a pinch may soar with Plotinus above knowledge—this may be! But a god who is beyond morality is not a god but a monster. One could have wrested this conviction away from Socrates only with his life. And I think that one can say the same thing of all of us: it is a great misfortune to become a hater of reason but to be deprived of the protection of morality, to abandon morality to anyone’s power—this is equivalent in our eyes to destroying the world, to condemning it to death.

When Clement of Alexandria teaches that knowledge and eternal salvation are inseparable from each other but that if it were not so and if he had to choose between them, it is knowledge that he would choose, he is only repeating the dearest thought of Socrates and all of Greek philosophy. When Anselm seeks to deduce the existence of God from the principle of contradiction, he tries to obtain what Socrates attempted—to blend knowledge and virtus into one—and in this he sees the essential task of life. It is easy for us today to criticize Socrates. According to us, knowledge is one thing and virtue is another. But the ancients, “those ancient and blessed men” who were better than we and closer to the gods, built a “truth” that is not afraid of our critiques and is not even concerned with them. And, to tell all, let us recognize this: even though we criticize Socrates we are still not delivered from his enchantment. A “postulate” of our thought, like that of ancient thought, is always the conviction that knowledge = virtue = eternal salvation. I am not speaking only of the philosophers of the Middle Ages. Hugo of St. Victor declared openly that the Socratic “know thyself” fell from heaven, just like the Bible. We shall have more than once to allude to the strange attraction that the ancient wisdom exercises over medieval and modern thought. For the moment, I shall content myself with indicating that the Scholastic philosophy not only did not wish to fight, but was even incapable of fighting, against the magic spell of the Greek wisdom, as we also do not wish and are incapable of doing. For us, too, Socrates remains the best of men, the wisest of men, a righteous man. For us, too, the judgment of the Delphic oracle remains final.

Once only—and aside, moreover, from the great highway followed by philosophy—someone appeared to express doubt on the oracle’s and history’s judgment about Socrates: Nietzsche found in Socrates the décadent, that is to say, the fallen man kat’ exochên [par excellence]. And as if he were recalling the story of Genesis, Nietzsche called a “fall” precisely that in which the oracle and history and Socrates himself saw Socrates’ greatest merit—his worship of knowledge, to which he was prepared to sacrifice not only his life but also his soul. Up until Nietzsche everyone assumed that “know thyself” had fallen from heaven. But no one believed that the prohibition against tasting of the fruits of the tree of knowledge had fallen from heaven. The “know thyself” was a truth; the tree of knowledge a metaphor, an allegory of which one had to rid oneself, like many other allegories of the Bible, by filtering it carefully through Greek reason. The fundamental truths that had fallen from heaven even before the Graeco-Roman world encountered the Bible were the principles expressed by Plato in the phrases from the Phaedo and the Euthyphro that I have quoted above. Everything that the Middle Ages read in the Bible was refracted through these truths, which thus purified inadmissible elements for cultivated minds. And then suddenly Duns Scotus and Occam impetuously attacked these unshakable truths. As if defending themselves in advance against the conformity of the peace-loving Lessing, they strained all the forces of their marvellous dialectic to remove from the jurisdiction of reason and transport into the domain of credibilia (things to be believed) almost everything that the Bible tells us of God: that “God is living, wise and well-disposed,” that He is “efficient cause,” that He is immovable, unchangeable, and did not cease to exist after creating the world. Duns Scotus says, “On theories rest the credibilia, through which or to the assumption of which reason is compelled, but which are more certain for the Catholic through the fact that they do not rely on our blinking and—in most things—vacillating understanding but firmly on Thy most solid truth.”

Thus could Duns Scotus speak—the very Duns Scotus who, as we recall, had replaced the “I believe, Lord, help thou my unbelief” brought by Jerusalem with the “I believe, Lord, but if it is possible, I would wish to know” derived from Athens. Intellectus for him is no longer “ruler and judge of all” but a blinking and vacillating guide of the blind. And Occam expresses himself no less categorically: “And so the articles of faith are not principles of proof or conclusion, and they are not probable, because to all or to most or to the wise they appear false, and in accepting this they become wise for the wise of the world and especially adherents of the natural reason.” Duns Scotus and Occam do not seek of reason any justification of what the revealed truth has brought. They go even further. They attack what was for the Greeks, as well as for us, the most unshakable of principles: the autonomy of morality proclaimed by Socrates. Dico quad omne aliud a Deo est bonum quia a Deo volitum et non ex converso (I say that everything other than God is good because it is willed by God and not vice versa). Or: “As God therefore can act otherwise, so can he also give another law as right which becomes right if it is given by God, for no law is right except insofar as it is accepted by the divine will.” For “God cannot wish anything with whose wishing He could be in the wrong, for His will is the highest rule.”

If one still recalls that, according to Duns Scotus, “there is no cause why His will willed this except that His will is His will,” it is difficult to assume that the theologians and historians who tried to save Scotus’ reputation by seeking to show that his God is not at all “arbitrary” could attain their goal. Perhaps the hair on our head rises at the thought but he who, like Scotus, declares that omne est bonum quia a Deo volitum est et non ex converso or, like Occam, that “God can be obliged to nothing and therefore the occurrence of what God wishes is just” affirms in God “schlechthinnige und regellose Willkur” (wicked and lawless arbitrariness), no matter how much the theologians may protest.23 There is no rule above God, no law limits His will; on the contrary, He is the source and master of all laws and rules. Just as in Plotinus: “it requires no support, as though it could not carry itself.” It is the same “groundlessness” but it is a still more terrible one, and for the rational man a still less acceptable one. Can one trust such a God, no matter how often the Bible repeats: “Hear, O Israel!”? And if the God of the Bible is such, a God who creates and destroys everything—including the eternal laws—what has He then in common with the rational and moral principles of the ancient wisdom? Is a symbiosis still possible between the Greek and the Judeo-Christian philosophies?

It is clear that a break between them is inevitable, and that this break must be the end of medieval philosophy if the latter has not sufficient power and daring to continue its way at its own risk and peril without letting itself be guided by the ancients. It did not have the courage: it wished at all costs to preserve its bond with the “fatherland of human thought,” with Greece. “It died of its own dissensions,” writes Gilson, “and its dissensions multiplied from the time it took itself as an end instead of ordering itself toward that wisdom which was at the same time its end and its origin. Albertists, Thomists, Scotists, Occamists contributed to the ruin of medieval philosophy in the exact measure that they neglected the search for the truth by exhausting themselves in sterile battles. . . . Medieval thought became only an inanimate corpse, a dead weight, under which the ground that it had prepared and on which alone it could build collapsed.”

After Duns Scotus and Occam, who had withdrawn the base elaborated by centuries, medieval philosophy died, as Greek philosophy, incapable of bearing Plotinus’ “it requires no support” died, of terror. It could not bear the “limitless and lawless arbitrariness” which shone through the omne est bonum quia a Deo volitum et non ex converso [everything is good because God wills it and not the other way around] of Scotus, that is, what constituted the very essence of “the metaphysics of the Book of Exodus” and what it was called precisely to proclaim: “the notion, unknown to the ancients, of a created truth, spontaneously ordered towards the Being who is at the same time the end and the origin,” as Gilson so well expresses it.24

It was not in vain that the Scholastics lived for so many centuries under the shadow of the Greek wisdom and its eternal, uncreated truths. Duns Scotus himself wished with all his powers “to know,” and when his successors had to choose between the revealed truth and the self-evident truth, they turned away from the former and held out their hand toward the tree of knowledge, enchanted by the always seductive eritis scientes (you will know). And what was written came about: “medieval philosophy became an inanimate corpse, a dead weight.” What then will be the end of modern philosophy? It is difficult to foresee this. But if it continues to see in the fruits of the tree of knowledge, as Hegel taught, the sole source that makes us participate in the truth, and if what is written is destined to be fulfilled, then we must believe that it also will not be able to avoid the fate of Greek philosophy and medieval philosophy. Or is Gilson deceived and is the “created truth” a contradictio in adjecto, just like the revealed truth of which the Fathers of the Church and the Scholastics have spoken to us so much and with such great enthusiasm?

IV

We have now arrived at the greatest of the temptations that lay in wait for medieval thought, which set as its goal to support and ground—through rational argument—the revealed truth. With his customary perceptiveness, Gilson has very well discerned and masterfully described all the vicissitudes of that intense struggle which developed in the course of the Middle Ages between the Greek idea of an uncreated and eternal truth and the Judeo-Christian idea of God, the sole creator and source of everything that exists. As might be expected, this struggle was concentrated principally around the question of the relationship between faith and reason.

Already in St. Augustine it is clearly established that faith is subject to the control of reason, that it almost seeks this control. Before one believes, it is necessary to determine whom one believes, cui est credendum. From this point of view, “reason precedes faith.” Hence, the conclusion: intellige ut credas, crede ut intelligas (understand in order to believe, believe in order to understand). Speaking of himself, St. Augustine says more than once: “I should not have believed in the truth of the Gospel unless the authority of the Catholic Church moved me to it.”25

Always true to historical reality, Gilson characterizes the mutual relationships between faith and reason of the scholastic philosophy in the following terms: “It is not at all a question of maintaining that faith is a type of knowledge superior to rational knowledge. No one has ever claimed this. It is, on the contrary, self-evident that faith is a simple substitute for knowledge²⁶ and that, wherever the thing is possible, the substitution of knowledge for faith is always a positive gain for the mind. The traditional hierarchy of modes of knowledge, among the Christian thinkers, is always faith, understanding, seeing God face to face. ‘The intellect which we have in this life,’ writes St. Anselm, ‘I take to be the middle between faith and seeing.’”²⁷ Indeed, the great majority of the medieval thinkers shared the judgment of Anselm of Canterbury. Saint Thomas Aquinas writes: “For faith holds itself in the middle (between knowledge and opinion), going beyond opinion insofar as it has a firm assent but falling short of knowledge insofar as it does not have vision.”

As Gilson indicates, from St. Augustine on the study of the relationship between faith and knowledge had for its point of departure Isaiah VII, 9, in the Septuagint translation: Si non credideritis, non intelligetis (If you will not believe, you will not understand). St. Augustine “repeats these words endlessly.” They represent “the exact formula of his personal experience.” St. Thomas Aquinas repeats them also, though he knows not only that they translate the text of Isaiah incorrectly but quotes next to them28 the correct translation: Si non credideritis, non permanebitis (if you will not believe, you will not endure). However, reason seeks evidence so avidly, aspires to universal and necessary judgments so passionately, that the Hellenized—that is to say, transformed into its opposite—strophe of the prophet speaks more to the soul of the Scholastic philosopher than the original text. Anselm of Canterbury joyously took up St. Augustine’s reflections. “It is known from St. Anselm himself,” Gilson recalls, “that the original title of his Monologium was ‘Meditations on the rationality of faith,’ and that the title of his Prosologion was none other than the famous formula: a faith which seeks understanding.”

Fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding), like credo ut intelligam (I believe that I may understand), were at the base of all of St. Anselm’s reflections. “As soon as a Christian reflects on the obtaining of grace, he becomes a philosopher,” says Gilson in another place.²⁹ But to what did this “reflection,” according to the Scholastics, lead? Gilson answers thus: “If it is true that to possess religion is to have everything else, it is necessary to show it. An apostle like St. Paul can be content with preaching it, a philosopher would like to be sure of it.”³⁰ Here, then, is how medieval philosophy understood its task, here is how it conceived the relationship between faith and knowledge. The apostle “contented himself with faith, but the philosopher wished more—he could not be content with what preaching brings him (“the foolishness of preaching,” as St. Paul himself puts it). The philosopher seeks and finds “proofs,” convinced in advance that the proven truth has much more value than the truth that is not proven, indeed that only the proven truth has any value at all. Faith is then only a “substitute” for knowledge, an imperfect knowledge, a knowledge—in a way—on credit and which must sooner or later present the promised proofs if it wishes to justify the credit that has been accorded to it.

It is beyond doubt that Gilson expounds correctly the position of medieval philosophy on the relationship between faith and knowledge. The principles for seeking truth that it had received from the Greeks demanded imperiously that it not accept any judgment without having first verified it according to the rules by which all truths are verified: the truths of revelation do not enjoy any special privilege in this respect. Defending himself against Luther who calls down the fire of heaven on reason, Denifle, one of the best specialists in the history of medieval philosophy, cites in his book, Luther and Lutheranism, these remarkable words of St. Bonaventura: “The truth of our faith is in no worse situation than other truths, but in the case of other truths every truth that can be attacked by reason can and must also be defended by reason; so similarly the truth of our faith.” And immediately afterwards, Denifle reproduces a no less characteristic sentence of Matthew of Aquasparta: “To believe against reason is blameworthy.”31 And Denifle was right; such indeed was the goal that medieval philosophy set for itself: the truths of faith can and must be defended by the same means that are employed to defend all truths, otherwise they would find themselves in “a worse situation.” And St. Thomas Aquinas from his side warned us: “No one should decidedly adhere to an exposition of Scripture that with sure reason is ascertained to be false . . . in order that, from this, Scripture not be derided by the infidels.”

Harnack then was in error when he declared that “one of the heaviest consequences of the doctrine of Athanasius the Great was that, after him, people forever renounced clear and rigorous concepts and accustomed themselves to contradictions. What contradicts reason became—not immediately, it is true, but little by little—the distinctive character of the sacred.”³² Certainly the Fathers of the Church, like the medieval philosophers, could not avoid contradictions, just as Plato and Aristotle did not succeed in ridding themselves of them in their systems; but these contradictions were never exposed to the light of day and no one ever boasted of them. On the contrary, people always tried to shade and hide them more or less cleverly by having recourse to a rigorous, though apparent, logic. Contradictions were admitted only in a very limited number, and it was not permitted anyone to multiply them according to his arbitrariness and fancy. A small number of contradictory but unchanging notions which always repeated themselves were accepted by all the world not, however, as contradictory but as rigorously logical, and it is for this reason precisely that they were recognized as true. In his polemic against the Arians, St. Athanasius himself carefully avoided everything that might permit his adversaries to reproach him with lack of logic and especially, of course, boulêsis (desire or willing): “Just as opposed to desire is that which is reasonably chosen, so what exists by nature precedes and is superior to free choice.” It is obvious that one for whom, as for St. Athanasius, God’s nature is anterior to and independent of His will, not only cannot seek but still less will admit anything that troubles the eternal and immutable order of being. If despite this, Harnack perceives contradictions in St. Athanasius’ doctrine, this does not at all prove the indifference of the latter to the principles and technique of thought of the Greeks.

Still less do we have the right to suppose that the medieval philosophers tried to rid themselves of the principle of contradiction. On the contrary, almost all (there were some exceptions but they were very rare) were deeply convinced that “it is blameworthy to believe against reason.” In addition to what Gilson and Denifle have reported to us, one could quote many other texts which show that the Scholastics were deeply concerned to safeguard the rights of the principle of contradiction, even going to the point of limiting the divine omnipotence for its sake. St. Thomas Aquinas Writes: “Only that is excluded from the divine omnipotence which contradicts the reason or essence of being, that is, that something at the same time be and not be; and something that is of a similar nature is that something not have been that has been.”33 And again: “That which contains a contradiction does not fall under God’s omnipotence.” And in Article 4 of the same question he repeats: “that that which has been should not have been—with the contradiction that it implies—is not subject to the divine power,” and relies on St. Augustine and Aristotle: “and the philosopher says: this only God is powerless to do—to make that which has been not to have been.” Even in Duns Scotus, who defended so passionately the omnipotence of God against all limitations, we read the following: “It is firmly to be held that for God everything—except what is manifestly impossible ex terminis, or the impossibility or contradictoriness of which is self-evidently deduced—is possible.”³⁴ Even the impetuous Occam humbles himself before the principle of contradiction and seeks to obtain its approval and protection for his judgments that are of such provocative daring: “It is an article of faith that God assumed human nature; it involves no contradiction for God to assume the nature of an ass, and with equal reason He could take on the nature of stone or wood.”

From where does the Judeo-Christian philosophy draw this unshakable conviction that the principle of contradiction cannot be overcome? Not from the Bible, surely. The Bible takes no account of the principle of contradiction, just as it takes no account of any principle, of any law, for it is the source, the sole source, and master of all laws. But if the principle of contradiction “is not subject to the divine omnipotence,” then it exists of itself and is independent of God. And we must be prepared to admit that the truth of revelation is quite different from the truth of natural reason. So it is that we read, for example, in Duns Scotus: “With absolute power God can save Judas; on the other hand, with ordered power He can save this or that sinner, though he may also never be saved; but He cannot make stone or wood blessed, with neither absolute nor with ordered power.” But in the Gospel it is written: “For I say unto you that God is able of these stones to raise up children to Abraham.”³⁵ One can find in the Bible many statements of this kind that have broken through the Chinese wall of impossibilities raised by the principle of contradiction; and every time the medieval thinkers found themselves face to face with them, they were obliged to retreat before the invincible logic of the natural reason. “In St. Augustine’s thought the work of creation was an instantaneous fiat, which means not only that the six days of which the account of the Book of Genesis speaks are an allegory and are in fact reduced to a moment, but also that from that moment on the work of creation was really finished.”36 The six days of creation are an allegory—here is a very seductive idea, one of those bridges constructed by Philo of Alexandria thanks to which we can pass so easily above the abyss that separates Athens from Jerusalem. But this idea, which at first blush is so completely innocent, gives the victory to the serpent whose venom, if it did not forever kill, at least for centuries paralyzed, the revealed truth. It means, indeed, that everything that does not agree with Greek thought, everything that can resist a verification effectuated according to the criteria established by this thought, must be rejected as false.

One cannot but remember, writes Gilson, “the innumerable biblical expressions that picture God as offended, irritated, vengeful or appeased. No one is unaware that such images do not authorize us to ascribe human passions to Him. Assuredly the Judeo-Christian God is not similar to the gods of the Greek mythology. He does not feel anger or regret; His inner life is no more troubled by our insults than gladdened by our praises. In this sense it is not Homer but Aristotle who is right.”³⁷ Once more we must agree with Gilson. When the philosophers of the Middle Ages read in the Bible that God became angry or was glad or that He intervened in the daily affairs of men (the miracle of the marriage at Cana which Hegel later mocked), in the depths of their souls there was doubtless born the very same thought that the reading of Homer aroused in Aristotle: “the poets lie a great deal.” To be sure, none of them ever, like the pious Philo, dared to pronounce these blasphemous words even to himself. They did not say “they lie a great deal” but “it is an allegory.” I repeat, however, that this word “allegory” was only the egg from which was to be hatched the scorn of European thought for revealed truth.

By means of the allegorical method of interpretation modern thought ended by completely “purifying” philosophy of the “gross prejudices” that the old book had introduced into the sublime kingdom of wisdom. Hegel already was not afraid to recall, in connection with the exodus of the Jews from Egypt and the miracle of the marriage at Cana, Voltaire’s cynical sarcasms about the God who concerned himself with the establishment of places for easing oneself. The Aristotelian “the poets lie” or, to put it better, the fundamental principles of the Greeks and the Greek technique of thought had done their work. These principles wished themselves to judge, to teach, to be really the “first principles” and admitted no power above themselves. “The mark of the philosopher is that he can judge about everything,” Aristotle firmly declares.38 Or again: “The wise man must know not only what follows from the first principles but also the first principles themselves in order to possess true knowledge.”³⁹ One can believe only what is acceptable to these principles. Faith must obtain the blessing of the first principles, and the faith that has not obtained this blessing has no right to existence.

The first educated Greek who rose up against the Judeo-Christian doctrine (at the time of Celsus Judaism and Christianity were still hardly distinguished from each other but rather almost identified) showed himself particularly indignant over the fact that the new doctrine constantly and exclusively insisted on a faith which not only had not succeeded in justifying itself before reason but even pretended insolently to do without this justification. In the eyes of Celsus this was a sin against the holy spirit; everything will be forgiven but this. For, before believing, the reasonable man must first take account of whom it is he believes. We have seen that this question, which did not exist not only for the first Christians but also for the Jews, always troubled the Fathers of the Church. They wished, as St. Bonaventura was later to say, that the truth of their doctrine not be in a worse situation than all other truths; they wished that it be founded on unchanging and indisputable first principles. We recall that Anselm of Canterbury was “possessed,” following Gilson’s expression, by the idea of finding a proof for the existence of God which rests only on the principle of contradiction.

If we ask ourselves whence this “possession” came, why the philosophers of the Middle Ages aspired so eagerly to the “demonstrated” truth, we shall find no other answer than that already given by Gilson: the principles of the Hellenic philosophy and the technique of Hellenic thought held them in their power and bewitched their minds. For Aristotle, who had in a way drawn up the balance of all his predecessors’ work, the principle of contradiction was not only a principle (archê) but “the most unshakeable of all principles,” as he more than once says. Some people judge, he declares in several places of his Metaphysics, that Heraclitus did not admit the principle of contradiction. Aristotle tries to prove that such a judgment is absurd, as Protagoras’ “against every reason stands another reason” is absurd. It is true that his objections come down to the statement that he who denies the principle of contradiction recognizes it in this very denial. It is true also that one can turn his objections around and say that, in arguing with Heraclitus and Protagoras who deny the principle of contradiction, Aristotle argues as if they recognized the principle. But he holds in reserve still another argument (if one can call it an argument) that is, in his opinion, invincible: “For what a man says, he does not necessarily believe.”40 That is, Heraclitus and Protagoras themselves did not take what they said seriously. Aristotle declared with the same assurance—and let us recall that St. Thomas Aquinas refers to him in this connection—that what had once been could not not have been and that this principle puts a limit to the omnipotence of the gods. No one dreams of denying that these “first principles” are the condition of the possibility of knowledge; everyone is likewise agreed, that they did not “fall from the heavens,” that Aristotle obtained them by his own powers here on this earth, and that not only do they not demand “revelation” but that all revelation must justify itself before them, for the gods themselves are subject to them. The discovery of truths independent of God’s will—veritates emancipatae a Deo—was for Aristotle the greatest of victories; so he realized his ideal, the idea of the philosopher who can think “freely,” and obtained autonomy for knowledge, just as the Pelagians, thanks to their homo emancipatus a Deo, realized the ideal of ethical autonomy. We shall see later that Leibniz also welcomed with enthusiasm “the eternal truths that are in the mind of God independently of His will.”

One would think that the religious philosophers of the Middle Ages should have seen that it was precisely this question of the eternal truths, the truths independent of God, that hid in itself the greatest dangers, and that they should consequently have strained all their powers to defend Jerusalem against Athens and recalled in this connection the warning of the Bible against the fruits of the tree of knowledge. Some of them did remember it. Gilson quotes in a footnote Peter Damian who affirmed that cupiditas scientiae (lust for knowledge) was for men “leader of the flock of all vices,” but Gilson realizes that no one listened to Peter Damian; Bonaventura himself found these words strange. The enchantment of the fruits of the tree of knowledge always persists: we today aspire as eagerly to the eternal truths as the first man. But what is it that seduces us in these truths that depend neither on ourselves nor on God, and why is it that we base our best hopes on the principle of contradiction or on the idea that what has once been cannot not have been? We do not even raise this question—as if the independence of the eternal rational and moral truths were the guarantee of our own independence. But it is just the opposite: these truths condemn us to the most repugnant slavery. Being independent of God’s will, they themselves have neither will nor desire. They are indifferent to everything. They are not at all concerned with what they will bring to the world and to men, and automatically actualize their limitless power with which they themselves have nothing to do and which comes to them one knows not whence nor why. From the “law”—what has once been cannot not have been—may flow for us a good but also an evil—a horrible, insupportable evil; but the law will accomplish its work without caring about this. One cannot persuade the eternal truths, one cannot move them to pity. They are like the Necessity of which Aristotle said that “it does not allow itself to be persuaded.” And despite this—or precisely because of this—men love the eternal truths and prostrate themselves before them. We can obtain nothing from them, consequently we must obey them. We have not the power to escape them, we see in our impotence an “impossibility,” consequently we must worship them. This is the true meaning of the cupiditas scientiae: a puzzling concupiscentia irresistibilis [invincible desire] carries us toward the impersonal, indifferent to everything, truth that we raise above the will of all living beings.

Is it not clear that we are in the power of that terrible, hostile force of which the Book of Genesis speaks to us? We have seen that all the commentators believed that the sin of the first man consisted in an act of disobedience: Adam wished “to be free,” he refused to submit. In reality it is just the opposite that happened: having tasted of the fruits of the tree of knowledge, man lost the freedom that he possessed on leaving the hands of the Creator and became the slave of “the eternal truths.” And he does not even suspect that the eritis scientes (you shall know) by means of which the tempter bewitched his soul led to his “fall.” He continues to the present day, indeed, to identify his eternal salvation with knowledge. And when he hears the apostle’s word, “for the creature was made subject to vanity not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected him,” and that a day will come when he will be delivered from the “bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God,”41 he takes refuge in Aristotle who declares, “One can say this but one cannot think it” or even “the poets lie a great deal.” The principles of the Greek philosophy have accomplished their work: we all prefer the peace of submission to the dangers and uncertainties of struggle. The work of Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae [On the Consolation of Philosophy], which was so attractive to the Middle Ages, is particularly characteristic in this respect.

De consolatione philosophiae is the Book of Job written by a man who, though a Christian, belonged to the Graeco-Roman culture. Hardly had philosophy approached Boethius’ bed than it set itself the duty of chasing away “the Muses who stand at my bed dictating words to my weeping. Who, says philosophy, let these stage prostitutes, who not only do not alleviate his pains through any remedy but further nourish them with sweet poisons, come to this sick man?” Before offering its help, philosophy, like Job’s friends, demands that the man who suffers be silent and cease to complain and call for help: Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere (not to laugh, not to lament, not to curse, but to understand) as Spinoza was later to put it. It is only on this condition, that is, that man renounce everything, that philosophy can come to his aid by conferring upon him its intelligere (understanding). De profundis ad te, Domine, clamavi (out of the depths I cried unto thee, O Lord) must be rejected, forgotten forever. It obstructs the road that leads to the wisdom founded on rigorous knowledge. Philosophy certainly acts honestly: “the most beautiful maiden in the world cannot give more than it has given.” It can only “explain” to Boethius that what happened to him happened because it could not be otherwise. As for saving him from prison and the torture that awaits him, this philosophy cannot, as it assuredly knows (Zeus himself says this to Chrysippus), do; no one in the world can do more.

Job’s friends said the same thing to Job that Boethius’ philosophy said to him; knowing well that they could not help him, they also proposed to him that he seek consolation in “wisdom” or, to put it differently, in submitting to the inevitable. Philosophy succeeded in convincing Boethius; he accepted its “consolations.” As for Job, he did not chase away the Muses, he drove out his friends—” You are miserable comforters”—and resolved to oppose his lugere et detestari [weeping and cursing] to the intelligere [understanding] that philosophy offered him. There can surely be no doubt on the matter: the principles of the ancient philosophy and of the Greek thought would have taken the side of Boethius and not of Job, and rigorous logic does not permit human sorrow to raise its voice when it is a question of the truth. Job demanded that what had been should not have been, that his murdered children should not be murdered, that his burnt up wealth should be intact, that his lost health should not be lost, etc. . . . In other words, he demanded what “does not fall under God’s omnipotence,” what God Himself cannot accomplish because the principle of contradiction, “the most unshakeable of all principles,” will not authorize it. It is true that in the Bible something else is said: according to the Bible, philosophy was covered with shame while the Muses, with their lugere et detestari and the De profundis ad te, Domine, clamavi (out of the depths I cried unto thee, O Lord) triumphed over the intelligere and over all the eternal uncreated truths obtained by the intelligere. God returned to Job his flocks, his health, his children. God brought it about that quod fuit non fuisse (what had been had not been), without concerning Himself with any laws whatsoever. But, of course, one cannot demand of a learned man that he believe all these stories, just as one cannot demand of him that he accept the God of the Bible who rejoices, becomes angry, regrets what He has done, transforms water into wine, multiplies loaves of bread, leads the Jews across the Red Sea, etc. All this must be understood allegorically or metaphorically. More exactly, as long as the “the most unshakeable of all principles,” the principle of contradiction, will not have been overthrown, as long as it commands God rather than obeys Him, and as long as man will not resist the temptation to transform the revealed truth into a self-evident truth, it will be necessary to protect oneself against all these stories by means of the words (or exorcism?) del maestro di coloro che sanno (of the master of all those who know): “the poets lie a great deal.” Human groans, curses and supplication must be silent before the unchangeable principles of being.42

V

Under the aegis of the eternal truths there was introduced into medieval philosophy a profound distrust precisely toward the “notion, unknown to the ancients, of a created truth” that this philosophy, as Gilson so well says, was called by the very content of the Bible to proclaim to men. On the road that led to the created truth the principle of contradiction arose and opposed its veto. Gilson declares, it is true, that the notion of a created truth was preserved in Scholasticism and even stimulated modern philosophy: “The entire Cartesian system rests on the idea of an omnipotent God who somehow creates Himself and even more naturally creates the eternal truths, including those of mathematics!”⁴³ We shall return further on to the question of deciding whether we have or have not the right to affirm that the entire Cartesian system is founded on the idea of an omnipotent God who creates the eternal truths. But it is beyond doubt that Descartes did not recoil before such “paradoxes.” He writes to Arnauld (29 July 1648): “But it does not appear to me that it is to be said of anything whatsoever that it cannot be done by God; since every ground of the true and the good depends on His omnipotence, I would not even be able to say that God cannot bring it about that there be a mountain without a valley or that one and two not make three; but I say only that He has given me a mind such that a mountain without a valley or a sum of one and two that does not make three cannot be conceived by me, etc.”

So Descartes spoke in his letters⁴⁴; but in speaking so he departed from the medieval philosophy as well as from the rules of the Greek philosophy by means of which the Middle Ages tried to understand and justify the truth of the biblical revelation. We recall what Aristotle said about those who denied the principle of contradiction: one can say this but one cannot think it. We remember that St. Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and even Occam said that “what includes in itself a contradiction does not fall under God’s omnipotence.” But to assume that God can create a mountain without a valley, or bring it about that one and two not be equal to three, etc., is to recognize the independence of God in relation to the principle of contradiction. If Descartes really thought what he wrote to Arnauld and Mersenne, we are obliged to confess that the greatest rationalist of modern times broke with the ancient philosophy and took the road opened up by Tertullian and Peter Damian! Gilson quotes in a footnote a text of Peter Damian’s that I believe is necessary to reproduce in extenso:45 “Can God bring it about that what has been shall not have been? If, for example, it is firmly established that a virgin was corrupted, would it be impossible that she become again unspotted? This, as far as nature is concerned, is certainly true, and the judgment stands. . . . For contraries in one and the same subject cannot agree. This will further rightly be characterized as impossible if reference is made to the impotence of nature. Yet far be it that this be applied to the divine majesty. For He who gave nature its origin can, if He wishes, easily take away the necessity of nature. For He who rules over the created things does not stand under the laws of the Creator, and He who created nature turns the natural order according to His own creative will.”

What difference is there between Damian and Descartes? In view of Aristotle’s first principles, both affirm self-evident absurdities: one can say this but one cannot think it. The principle of contradiction is the “most unshakable of principles.” If it is overthrown, the idea of knowledge no longer has any meaning. Damian, it is true, cites examples other than Descartes’, examples that are more concrete and closer to real life.⁴⁶ Can God create a mountain without a valley or bring it about that one and two not be three—these, it seems, are theoretical, abstract questions which touch neither the fate of the world nor of man. But when Damian demands “if it is firmly established that a virgin was corrupted, would it be possible that she become again unspotted?,” our interest is concentrated not on theoretical propositions but on what has immense, decisive importance for men. A virgo corrupta is a woman who has fallen, sinned, or been dishonored. As long as the principle of contradiction rules undividedly, as long as it remains “an eternal truth, a truth not subject to God,” once the sin or dishonor has come into the world, it remains there finally and forever. No one in the world can return to the woman her honor and deliver her from the shame or sin of her voluntary or involuntary fall, for it is not given to anyone “to take away the necessity of nature.” We must say the same of Job: the divine omnipotence itself cannot return to him his murdered children. And if the Bible tells us the opposite, the believing philosopher, like the unbelieving Greek, is obliged to see in these stories only a metaphor or allegory.

Then, another question: Descartes affirms that judgments such as “one and two do not make three” or ideas such as “a mountain without a valley” appear contradictory to us only because God has given us an understanding incapable of thinking otherwise. But he himself admitted, at least as a hypothesis, that a powerful but malevolent and hostile spirit can deceive man through the self-evidences. One would think that such an assumption would have held the attention of a man who knew the Bible and considered it an inspired book once he was endowed, by some unknown miracle, with the thought that the self-evidences by themselves still do not bear witness to the truth. But this idea did nothing more than brush his consciousness and vanished without leaving any traces. He wished at all costs to preserve the self-evidences and the reason that is the source of the self-evidences. And he connected the “eternal truths” not with the malevolent spirit who deceives man but with God who, as he tried to prove to us, never deceives. St. Thomas Aquinas did the same thing: in order to save Aristotle’s “first principles” from all attacks, he asserts that “the knowledge of the principles known naturally is inspired in us by God, for God Himself is the author of our nature.”47 The thought of Peter Damian follows a different route. Gilson expresses it briefly thus: “The life of a Christian has only one goal—to bring about his salvation. Salvation is achieved through faith. To apply reason to faith is to dissolve it. . . . In sum, it is the devil who has inspired men with the desire for knowledge and it is this desire that has caused the original sin, the source of all our evils.”⁴⁸ And he quotes immediately afterwards these few lines of Damian’s work De sancta simplicita: “Furthermore, he who wished to introduce the hosts of all vices installed the lust for knowledge as commander and so, through it, let loose on the unhappy world all the hosts of iniquities.”

The difference between Descartes and Damian appears clearly: Descartes is afraid, even in his letters, to offend reason: “What altar will he who offends the majesty of reason build for himself?” as Spinoza was later to say. But for Damian there is not, there cannot be, any place for other majesties besides the “divine majesty,” and he is prepared to rise up against anyone who would dare to limit the omnipotence of God. He remembers the “you will be like God” that the Middle Ages had completely forgotten, and he is not afraid to refer to the Book of Genesis at the risk of provoking the mockery of the unbelieving and hearing Aristotle’s ironic “the poets lie.” But from the philosophic point of view, Damian and Descartes finally say the same thing: the “first principles” inherited from the Greeks are not at all principles, for in the world created by God there are not and cannot be any first principles, that is, principles absolutely independent and sufficient by themselves. As for our certainty that there cannot be a mountain without a valley and that one and two cannot but make three, we must see here only temporary suggestions: if they come from the Creator they are not dangerous and can even be beneficial; if they come from the enemy of the human species they are doubtless deadly. But in any case, as conditioned and relative, they have no right to the predicate of eternity and must sooner or later disappear. And then the metaphysics of knowledge that is in harmony with the Judeo-Christian revelation will show that the reason that aspires eagerly to universal and necessary judgments is not at all worthy of having altars built to it.

Such is the meaning of Damian’s thought, and this is what Descartes also tells us in his letters. Both of them destroy the foundations of the Socratic thought that one must not disdain reason, one must put nothing above the good, not even God. Both of them, if you wish, realize the synthesis of Plotinus’ “soaring above knowledge” with Duns Scotus’ “schlechthinnige und regellose Willkur” [wicked and lawless arbitrariness]. To be sure, it is impossible to defend this thesis through the methods that are used to defend other truths. It is a truth of “revelation.” Like David in the Bible before the gigantic Goliath armed from head to foot, it remains invisible even to the “eyes of the mind,” unarmed and defenseless before the innumerable army of all historic philosophy’s arguments. It does not even have the sling possessed by the young shepherd, the future great king and psalmist. And yet, weak as it was, it entered into combat with “the wisdom of the century.” “The unlearned rise and storm heaven,” as Saint Augustine with amazement exclaimed. And Saint Thomas Aquinas echoed him: “But it would be more wonderful than all signs if the world were brought to believing such hard things, executing such difficult things, and hoping for such exalted things by simple and unlearned men without miraculous signs.” And indeed, the Bible was brought to the world by simple, ignorant people who were absolutely incapable of defending it by the methods which learned people use to attack it.

But this Bible did not satisfy the philosophers. Even Saint Bonaventura, whose “Adam, as Brother Alexander of Hales said of him, did not seem to have sinned,” wished to obtain “demonstrated” truth. Even the saints no longer escaped the consequences of the original sin: the doctor seraphicus (angelic doctor), the spiritual heir of Saint Francis of Assisi, who had overcome all earthly passions, is nevertheless possessed, like all of us, with the cupiditas scientiae (lust for knowledge) and cannot overcome this passion. He wishes to “defend” the truth of revelation, to make it self-evident. Temptation lies in wait for us just where we least expect it. Our Greek teachers put our vigilance to sleep by suggesting to us the conviction that the fruits of the tree of knowledge were and must be the principle of philosophy for all time. Even the doctor subtilis allowed himself to be tempted, as we have seen. He believes, but faith is not enough for him. He asks of God permission to taste the fruits of the tree of knowledge. All the most remarkable and influential representatives of the philosophy of the Middle Ages repeat endlessly: credo ut intelligam.

It is here that the consequences to which the symbiosis of Greek philosophy with the truths of the Bible had to lead appear most clearly. The principles and technique of the ancient philosophy wrapped themselves around the Judeo-Christian revelation and choked it, as the ivy chokes the tree. Faith became a substitute for knowledge. The whole world openly admitted it, all the more so in that thus the mocking of the unbelievers was avoided. Scripture, it is true, was opposed to this conception of faith, but it is always possible to “interpret” Scripture. And as every interpretation presupposes a technique of thought, and this technique as well as the principles of thought were sought and discovered among the Greeks, it was clear in advance that the Bible, interpreted, would locate faith in the place suitable to it, below knowledge. The efforts of Duns Scotus and Occam to protect the domain of the credibilia against the invasion of reason did not turn medieval philosophy away from its effort to transform the revealed truths into self-evident truths. And such a transformation appeared and still appears the essential work of the Judeo-Christian thought.

We recall that Lessing affirmed that sooner or later all the truths of revelation would become truths of reason, and that Gilson was obliged to check his pious ardor. Not all, he says in the name of medieval philosophy, but only some. Here is something very significant. Why only some? And what shall we do with those that will never succeed in justifying themselves before reason? Will we not be forced to hide them in order to avoid railleries and wounding reproaches? Will we not even be obliged finally to renounce them if it appears at last that not only can they not count on the protection of reason but that their very existence is a defiance of reason? The prophet Isaiah and St. Paul have warned us that human wisdom is foolishness before God and that God’s wisdom is foolishness in the eyes of men. And this, above all, because the source of the revealed truth is faith, which is not located on the level of rational comprehension. Faith cannot be changed and does not even wish to be changed into knowledge. The faith of which the Bible speaks to us delivers man, in an incomprehensible way, from the chains of knowledge, and it is only through faith that it is possible to overcome the knowledge that is bound to the fall of man. So that when we transform a truth given by faith into a self-evident truth or understand it as such, it is a sign that we have lost this truth of faith. “I know that God is one” means something other than “I believe in one God” and than that Audi Israel of the Bible that has found its expression in credo in unum Deum.

Gilson declares that monotheism was alien to the Greek philosophers. I cannot here examine this question and will content myself with recalling that, from its beginnings, Greek philosophy always sought to discover the single principle of the universe, beginning with Thales who proclaimed that the principle of everything was water. Aristotle ends the twelfth book of his Metaphysics (which Gilson uses precisely to prove that monotheism was strange to him) with this verse of Homer: “the rule of many is not good, let there be one master only.” And Saint Thomas Aquinas, citing this passage, writes: . . . “Aristotle concludes from the unity of order in existing things the unity of the ruling God.”49 I do not at all mean by this that Aristotle’s God is the God of the Bible. On the contrary, it is proper here to recall Pascal’s words: “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, and not the God of the philosophers.” If one could demonstrate clearly that the Greek philosophers were monotheists, this would not at all mean that they had had a premonition of the biblical revelation. The one God whose existence appears evident in the ordering of the universe resembles as little the God of the Bible as the dog, the barking animal, resembles the constellation called the Dog. Reason perceives a single principle. It must find him who, according to Pascal’s expression regarding Descartes, gives the first fillip. Reason wishes to understand. It is not for nothing that Hegel so ardently defended the ontological argument against Kant. The God who seeks and obtains the protection of the principle of contradiction is certainly not the God of Abraham, Isaac and of Jacob. Of course, Hegel could admit such a God in all tranquility. A “proven” God could defend himself against Aristotle’s logic as well as Voltaire’s sarcasms.

But “faith”—again, naturally, the faith of the Bible—concerns itself neither with understanding nor with proofs. It requires something else, something completely different—something, as we shall see, that excludes once for all “understanding” and “proofs.”

VI

When it is a question of biblical faith, we must above all recall the words of the prophet Habakkuk (II, 4), “the righteous shall live by faith,” words which St. Paul repeats in the Epistle to the Romans (I, 17) and in the Epistle to the Hebrews (X, 38). How little these resemble the credo ut intelligam [I believe in order to understand] and the si non credideritis, non intelligetis [if you do not believe, you will not understand] of the Septuagint! Faith, in the prophets and apostles, is the source of life; faith, in the philosophers of the Middle Ages educated by the Greeks, is the source of the knowledge that understands. How can one not recall in this connection the two trees planted by God in the Garden of Eden? And as if he did not wish to allow any doubt to exist about the respective place of faith and knowledge in the scale of values, the apostle says almost immediately after citing Isaiah’s words: “By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out unto a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went (Hebrews XI, 8.).” Here is something that unconditionally contradicts the teaching of the Greeks. Plato opposed to those who “know not where they are going” the philosophers who, being convinced that one cannot do what philosophy forbids, follow it wherever it leads them.50

It would be too easy to multiply quotations to prove that what St. Paul said of Abraham, who went he knew not where, would have appeared to the Greek thinkers the height of folly. And even if Abraham had arrived at the Promised Land, his act, in the judgment of the Greeks, would have been as absurd as if he had not arrived anywhere. What vitiates his act, in their eyes, is precisely what confers its immense value upon it, according to the apostle and the Bible: Abraham does not ask reason, he refuses to admit the legitimacy of the pretensions of knowledge. With what scorn Socrates in the Apology expresses himself concerning the poets, the prophets, the diviners: “those who do what they do not by reason but in obedience to nature or in enthusiasm.” “I have left them,” he concludes, “believing that I have over them the same advantage as over the politicians.”⁵¹ And in the Timaeus (the well-known passage 71E) and in his other dialogues, Plato turns away always from the “divine fate without reason,” e.g., Meno, 99C or again the Phaedo (aneu philosophiâs te kai nou). What strikes and charms the apostle in Abraham, what he sees in him as the highest virtue, appears to Plato as a truly criminal frivolity. How indignant he and Socrates would have been if it had been given them to read what St. Paul writes in the Epistle to the Romans: “For what saith the Scripture? Abraham believed God and this was imputed unto him for righteousness.” (Romans IV, 3.)

Celsus reflects very precisely the attitude of the Graeco-Roman world toward the fundamental principles of the new doctrine that irrupted into the world. The Greek wisdom could admit neither Abraham, the father of faith, nor St. Paul, nor the prophets of the Bible to whom the apostle constantly refers. The indifference, the “proud” scorn of knowledge, would be pardoned neither in this world nor in the other. St. Paul and his Abraham are only pitiful “haters of reason,” who must be fled like the plague. It is impossible, on the other hand, to try to console oneself by saying that St. Paul was not a “thinker” and that he was concerned only with saving his soul. For the Greek philosophy (and Clement of Alexandria along with it, as we recall) believed that knowledge was the only way to salvation: “To him who has not philosophized, who has not purified himself through philosophy and who has not loved knowledge, it is not given to unite himself with the race of the gods.”⁵² If Abraham and St. Paul are not “thinkers,” if they do not love and seek knowledge, they will never obtain salvation. The Greeks knew this well and they would never have agreed to grant anyone the right to raise and resolve the question of knowledge and the salvation of the soul: Aristotle has told us that philosophy itself resolves all questions. But St. Paul, for his part, would not have given in to the Greeks. The Greek philosophy was for him foolishness and he proclaimed, as Gilson says, “the bankruptcy of the Greek wisdom.” In the Epistle to the Romans (XIV, 23) he expresses himself with still greater power: “All that does not come of faith is sin.” And in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians (V, 7) he says: “For it is by faith that we walk and not by sight.”

It is no longer a question only of the bankruptcy of the Greek wisdom but of a terrible danger. The Greeks await salvation from their wisdom founded on knowledge, but they are going to their ruin, for salvation comes from faith, from nothing but faith.53 It is difficult not to see that there is a direct connection between the discourse of the apostle, the words of the prophets and the acts of the patriarchs, on the one side, and the story of the fall of Adam in the Book of Genesis, on the other side. It is still more difficult to assume that the relationship between faith and knowledge established by the medieval philosophy was borrowed from the Bible. On the contrary, it is clear that the “first principles” of the Greeks choked the essential truth of the biblical “revelation.” Not only is not faith a lower form of knowledge, but faith abrogates knowledge. The father of faith went out without knowing where he was going. He had no need to know: where he would arrive, and because he would there arrive, would be the Promised Land. Obviously there could not be any greater folly as far as the Greeks were concerned. This is Tertullian’s certum est quia impossibile (it is certain because it is impossible). All the definitions of truth given by Aristotle (and those which later were expressed in the formula of Isaac Israeli, accepted by the Middle Ages, that truth is adaequatio rei et intellectus [agreement between things and intellect]) are overthrown. It is not man who adapts himself to things and submits to them; it is things that adapt themselves to man and submit to him. Things will bear the name that man gives them: the veritates aeternae, veritates emancipatae a Deo (including the principle of contradiction), on which are founded and which guarantee the solidity and stability of the “knowledge” apotheosized by the ancient world, let man escape from their clutch.

It is to be assumed that the ancients would have been amazed (and perhaps even indignant) if they had read in the Bible that the Son of Man proclaims himself master of the Sabbath. No one can call himself master of the law. And still less has anyone the right to say that the Sabbath is made for man and not man for the Sabbath. This is even worse than Protagoras’ statement “man is the measure of all things.” It is destruction of the eternal and immutable order of the universe, of that ordo which is dear to the Greek heart. The Sabbath is not holy because God so ordained it, but it is because the Sabbath is holy that God ordained the commandment “Remember the Sabbath day.” The holy is uncreated and exists from all eternity, just like the true; the eternal truths are the uncreated Sabbaths and the uncreated Sabbaths are the eternal truths. But what would particularly have revolted the Greeks is that Jesus permitted himself to transgress the commandment for a reason so completely insignificant—his disciples were hungry. Now, for a philosophic Greek—and it is in this that his wisdom and the good news that reason brought into the world consisted—the joys and sufferings of men belong entirely to the domain of being independent of, and consequently indifferent to, us of which the Stoics have spoken so much, or to the afflictions and passions from which Plato’s catharsis has delivered us.

Epictetus was convinced that if Socrates had found himself in the situation of Priam or Oedipus, his customary calm would not have abandoned him. He would have uttered the words that he spoke in prison: if the gods wish it, let it be so! Socrates would certainly have spoken in the same way to Job if he had been among his friends (furthermore, Job’s friends themselves realized what they had to say to him). But the Bible speaks quite otherwise: “the very hairs of your head are all numbered.” (Matthew X, 30.) This does not mean that God is a good accountant who keeps his books carefully but that God comes to man’s help and does so precisely in situations of which, according to the teachings of the Greeks, neither God nor men have even the right to dream. A woman approaches him. He heals her and adds, “Be of good comfort, my daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole.” (Matthew IX, 22.) And we read again, “Oh, woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt. And from that very hour her daughter was made whole.” (Matthew XV, 28.) To the blind who had come to him, he addresses these puzzling words: “According to your faith be it unto you.” (Matthew IX, 29.) All these quotations, which could be multiplied many times, assuredly show that man acquires through faith something that is as far removed from the catharsis of the Greeks as from their gnosis. And these words of Jesus express this with special power (Matthew XVII, 20, Mark XI, 23, and Luke XVII, 6.): “For verily I say unto you, if ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say to this mountain ‘Remove hence to yonder place’; and it shall remove and nothing shall be impossible for you.”

It is easy to imagine the indignation that such words aroused among minds imbued with Greek culture; the calmest among them were not content with the Aristotelian “the poets lie a great deal.” Even in our age Hegel, the “Christian” philosopher, was not ashamed to repeat in a less important context the cynical sarcasms of Voltaire. But it is not this aspect of the question that interests us here. Let us leave some to mock the Bible while others ask with admiration, Who is he who speaks as one who has power? What is important for us is that the faith of Scripture has absolutely nothing in common with faith as the Greeks understood it and as we now understand it. The faith of the Bible is not the trust that we put in a teacher, in parents, in superiors, in a doctor, etc., which is really only a substitute for knowledge, a knowledge on credit, a knowledge not guaranteed by proofs. When one says to a man, “according to your faith be it unto you” or “if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, nothing will be impossible for you,” it is clear that this faith is a mysterious, creative power, an incomparable gift, the greatest of all gifts. And if furthermore, as in the examples already cited, the gift relates not to the domain that the Greeks called ta eph’ hêmin, that is, what depends on us, but to what is outside our power (ta ouk eph’ hêmin)—faith being capable of healing the sick, opening the eyes of the blind, even of moving mountains—then there cannot be any doubt that the faith of the Bible determines and forms being and thus abolishes knowledge with its “possible” and “impossible.”

Socrates was right to demand of men knowledge for, like Aristotle,54 like the Stoics, like all the Greek philosophers, he was dominated by the conviction that there exists an immense realm of being which is subject neither to men nor to the gods themselves—“that which is not in our power.” And if this conviction really came to him from heaven, like his “know thyself,” and was not inspired by a hostile force (“you shall be like God knowing”), then not only is it “blameworthy to believe contrary to reason” but it is also scandalous to believe “without philosophy and understanding,” and everything that the Bible tells us about faith must be rejected. As for the teaching of St. Paul, who says that “a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law” (Romans III, 28), this is immoral and revolting. And, in general, most of the ideas that he develops in his epistles and the quotations from the Old Testament with which his reflections are interspersed can awaken in educated people only feelings of irritation and revulsion. One could even say that he seeks deliberately to provoke the ancient wisdom as well as the traditional piety. He quotes (Romans IX, 15) the words addressed by God to Moses: “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion,” and adds, “so then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy.” And again: “Therefore hath He mercy on whom He will have mercy, and him whom He will He hardeneth.”⁵⁵ To all the “objections” that might be made against him, he opposes only Jeremiah’s words: “Nay, but who art thou, O man, that repliest against God?” (Romans IX, 20.) Referring to the patriarchs and the prophets, St. Paul dares to say, “the law entered that the offence might abound.” (Romans V, 20.) Or still again (Romans IV, 15): “Because the law worketh wrath; for where no law is, there is no transgression.” And finally (Romans X, 20) : “But Isaiah is very bold and saith: ‘I was found of them that sought me not; I was made manifest to them that asked not after me.’”

For the Greeks and the medieval thinkers who followed them, the words of Isaiah resounded like a terrible condemnation: vain are all our searchings, all our demands! God reveals Himself, God will reveal Himself, to him who does not seek, to him who does not ask. What more terrible thing can there be? What good, then, is Plato’s catharsis, the Stoics’ struggle, the monks’ exercitia spiritualia, and the rigorous itineraria of the martyrs, ascetics and mystics? Will all these tremendous, superhuman and glorious works then have served for nothing? Is it possible to “defend,” through rational arguments, the God of the Bible against these accusations that are so well founded on rational thought? Obviously not. One can only try to rid oneself of reason and its arguments as Pascal did: “humble yourself, impotent reason.” Our conviction that self-evidence guarantees the truth appears to Pascal an enchantment et assoupissement surnaturel [supernatural enchantment and slumber] into which our thirst for knowledge has plunged us. “If you wish to subject everything to yourself, subject yourself to reason,” says Seneca in the name of the ancient philosophy. And it seems to us that this is the supreme wisdom: we submit joyously to the obligation that is imposed on us. But the Bible speaks quite differently. To the offer—“All these things will I give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me”—it is answered: “Get thee hence, Satan! For it is written (Deut. VI, 13): ‘Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve.’” (Matthew IV, 10.) It is in this that the essential opposition between the “truth” of the Greeks and the “revelation” of the Bible consists. For the Greeks the fruits of the tree of knowledge were the source of philosophy for all time, and by this very fact they brought men freedom. For the Bible, on the contrary, they were the beginning of enslavement and signified the fall of man.

Considering the difficulties that the biblical conception of the role and meaning of this cupiditas scientiae that lives in us presents, this is the time, it seems to me, to recall what Dostoevsky wrote on this matter. Dostoevsky certainly did not possess the erudition of a Pascal, and he was not very learned in theology and philosophy. But in the course of the four years that he spent in prison he read only the Bible, for he had no other book. And he drew from this reading the same hatred, the same scorn that Pascal had for “rational arguments.” He also sees in the self-evidences of our thought only an enchantment, only a stupefaction of the spirit.

“The impossible,” he writes, “is a stone wall. What kind of stone wall? But, of course, the laws of nature, the deductions of the natural sciences, mathematics. The moment that it is demonstrated to you, for example, that you are descended from an ape, it is useless to make any grimace, admit the thing as it is. . . . Permit me if you will, someone will cry to you: it is impossible to debate the matter—it is two times two make four! Nature does not consult you, it has no concern for your desires. And what does it matter to it whether these laws please you or not? A wall is a wall, etc. But, good Lord! What do the laws of nature and of arithmetic matter to me when, for some reason or another, they do not please me? Of course, I shall not break the wall with my head, if I really have not the power to break it, but I shall not accept it, I shall not resign myself to it, merely because it is a stone wall and I lack the power. As if such a stone wall were an appeasement and contained but a word of peace merely because it is two times two makes four.”56

Translated into philosophic language, these overwhelming words constitute a defense that is decisive and unique of its kind against those universal and necessary judgments to which, according to Kant, our reason so avidly aspires, or against those “wherefore” (dioti) which are for the Stagyrite the very essence of knowledge (in Spinoza, tertium genus cognitionis or intelligere) and because of which St. Augustine and the Scholastics agreed to believe. With an audacity and clear-headedness that we seek in vain in the author of the Critique of Pure Reason and in the maestro di coloro che sanno (the master of all those who know), Dostoevsky hurls himself in an attack on the “eternal truths.” And he attacks them precisely from the side which seemed “naturally” defended and consequently inaccessible. Before the wall, he says, men who are philosophically cultivated, that is, schooled by the Greeks, “bow down in all sincerity. . . . A wall for them has something calming, final, perhaps even mystical about it.” Dostoevsky did not know Aristotle’s metaphysics, he did not know his “Necessity does not allow itself to be convinced” and his “cry halt before Necessity”; but, if he had known them, he could not have better revealed and appreciated the meaning and content of the Stagyrite’s philosophical endeavors. How did it happen that the greatest of the philosophers saw in the stone wall and in “two times two makes four” the final and supreme power and, what is more, prostrating himself before them, worshipped them?

Dostoevsky raises a question which must be considered as the basic question of the critique of pure reason but from which Kant, following the example of his predecessors, turned aside: the question of the conclusive value of proofs, of the source of that constraint which the self-evidences exercise. From where does this constraint come? Dostoevsky discovered in the Bible what, according to Gilson, the medieval philosophers had discovered there: “The divine law exercises no constraint on the will of man. . . . It is established that freedom is an absolute absence of constraint, even in relation to the divine law.”57 God does not constrain, but “two times two makes four” and the stone walls do constrain, and they constrain not only man but also the Creator. We have already heard enough about what “does not fall under God’s omnipotence.” Precisely because Necessity constrains, that is, is deaf to persuasion, men have seen in it something “calming, final, mystical even.” Indeed, it is difficult for us to admit that an indoctus (unlearned man) should have been able to show such penetration and raise the basic problem of the metaphysics of knowledge. When Kant speaks of reason that aspires avidly to universal and necessary truths, when Aristotle writes at the beginning of his Metaphysics the famous phrase “by nature all men desire to know,” they admit in advance and bless the constraint that flows from knowledge. The doctor subtilis himself—whose doctrine of freedom amounts almost to admitting the existence in the very bosom of being of a lawless, limitless arbitrariness—cannot prevent himself from adoring that constraining truth that is the condition sine qua non [indispensable] of knowledge. He defends his “freedom” by having recourse to the same means that are used for defending other truths: it cannot be found in pejoris conditionis (a worse condition). He writes: “Those who deny a contingent being are to be exposed to torture until they concede that it is possible not to be tortured.” When Epictetus, to rid himself of those who dispute the principle of contradiction, is not content with referring to the self-evidences and appeals to more energetic means, to threats of violence, this is still understandable. One lets him pass, for he is considered only one of the dei minores [lesser gods] of philosophy. But Duns Scotus is not Epictetus, neither is Saint Thomas Aquinas. Duns Scotus is an extraordinarily keen and perceptive philosophical mind, a dialectician of genius. And yet, he also is obliged to have recourse to brutal physical constraint. If the truths did not possess for their defense anything but ideal proofs, if it were not given them to realize their rights through constraint and violence, there would not be much left of our so apparently solid knowledge. The God of the Bible constrains no one, but the truths of rational knowledge do not resemble the God of the Bible and do not even wish to resemble him: they constrain, and how they constrain! Self-evidence is only a hypocritical sine effusione sanguinis (without bloodshed) behind which pyres and tortures are hidden. And, let it be said by the way, this is what explains for us the paradoxical fact that the Christianity of the Middle Ages could have given birth to the Inquisition. If one can, if one must, defend the revealed truth by the same means as those employed to defend the truths obtained by natural reason, it is impossible to do without tortures, for the self-evident truths also rest, in the final analysis, on constraint.

The Greek philosophy stops here, as does the Critique of Pure Reason. But Dostoevsky feels that one cannot stop, that it is precisely here that the critique begins. “Two times two makes four (that is, the self-evident truths),” he writes, “is no longer life, gentlemen, but the beginning of death. In any case, man has always been afraid of the two times two makes four and I also am still afraid of it now.” And suddenly he allows this to escape: “Two times two makes four is an insolence, two times two makes four rises across your way with hands on its hips and spits at you.” The self-evidences and the reason which aspire so eagerly to self-evidence do not “satisfy” Dostoevsky, they “irritate” him. When he finds himself before the self-evident truths, he insults them, mocks them, sticks out his tongue at them. He wishes to live not according to rational freedom but according to his own “foolish” freedom. Such a pretension appears to us, to speak politely, absolutely paradoxical: we cannot admit such objections. Before reason and the truths that it reveals our teachers stood as if petrified, and they have taught us the same attitude. Bewitched by the fruits of the tree of knowledge which the Bible agrees were pleasant to the eyes and desirable to look at, not only Plato, that poetic and enthusiastic mind, but even the sober Aristotle, “moderate to excess,” composed incomparable hymns to the glory of reason.

I cannot stop at length on this matter, but to show to what a degree the great representatives of the Attic genius found themselves dominated by the metaphysics of being that they had discovered, I shall recall to the reader these lines of the Ethica Nicomachea which, along with other passages of the same Ethics and the Metaphysics, express what determined the searchings of the Greek philosophy: “The activity of God, the blessedness of which surpasses everything, is purely contemplative, and among human activities the most blessed of all is that which most nearly approaches the divine activity.”58 If, as Gilson indicates,⁵⁹ the words “this is the perfection of man-likeness to God” express St. Thomas Aquinas’ thought, then Plato’s catharsis ends in “making oneself as like God as possible.”⁶⁰ Aletheia—the truth which was opened up to the Greeks (a-lanthanein), is the immutable essence of being behind the changing appearances of the world accessible to all, and the contemplation of this essence dominated all their thoughts and desires. But even though he belonged to these simplices and indocti of which St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas spoke, or, to put it better, precisely because he had conversed for so many years with the simplices and indocti who brought the Bible to the world, Dostoevsky discovered that the contemplation glorified by the Greeks consisted in the worship of the stone wall and of the petrifying “two times two makes four” and that under the much-vaunted freedom of philosophical search there was hidden an enchantement et assoupissement surnaturel [supernatural enchantment and slumber].

Yet what could Dostoevsky do? It is impossible to argue. Aristotle stops him cleanly with his “one can say this, but one cannot think it”; and Duns Scotus himself is not ashamed to declare “he is not to be argued with, but told that he is irrational.” But in the final analysis, it is not others that Dostoevsky mocks, it is not with others—with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle—that he argues; it is with himself that he enters into battle, in himself that he tries painfully to overcome the fallen man and that cupiditas scientiae which Adam, who tasted the fruits of the forbidden tree, transmitted to us. This is why he had to say—no, not to say, but to cry: “I insist on my caprice and that it be guaranteed to me!” Or again: “I wish to live according to my foolish will and not according to the rational will.” He sought to escape from the temptation “you will be like God, knowing” and the “all these things will I give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me,” as well as from that unconquerable fear before the “lawless and limitless arbitrariness of God” which was, it seems, inspired by the tempter in the first man and which became our second nature after the fall. “Hear, O Israel” signifies precisely that everything depends on the will of God—omnis ratio veri et boni a Deo dependet [everything which is true and good depends on God]. This is why it is written: “thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and Him only shalt thou serve.” And he only will be able to free himself “from the bondage of corruption” (Romans VIII, 21.) who will overcome the fear before the boundless arbitrariness of God which our reason inspires in us and dissipate the enchantment of the eternal, uncreated truths. He only will be able to cry with the prophet: “Death, where is thy sting? Hell, where is thy victory?”

VII

The violence and frenzy of Dostoevsky’s speech when he talks of the self-evident truths sufficiently show that he felt the deep, indissoluble bond that exists, as the Bible tells us, between knowledge and the evil that rules in the world. Insofar as and for as long as the truth is bound to knowledge, the evil is indestructible, the evil appears to be inherent in being as such. Medieval philosophy, which indifferently passed by Tertullian and Peter Damian but piously preserved the “first principles” of the Greeks, excluded from its field of vision the very possibility of the problematic of the book of Genesis, the problematic of knowledge. So it was obliged—like all the wise men of antiquity—not only to reconcile itself to the evil but to justify it. The philosophers of the Middle Ages were as little sensitive to the Apocalypse and its storms, to the book of Job and its cries, as to the story of Genesis about the fall of man. And, indeed, is it possible to oppose thunder and cries to reason? Thunder as well as cries come before reason: reason will calm the storm and suppress the cries. Even if he is a Christian, the philosopher will find more in Boethius’ De Consolatione than in the Bible; or, in any case, with the help of Boethius’ wisdom, he will succeed in calming the anxiety that the passionate words of Job and the rolls of thunder of the Revelation of St. John arouse in him. The “out of the depths I cried unto Thee, O Lord” likewise passes to the second level in the philosophy of the Middle Ages. The Psalmist’s word does not, indeed, at all harmonize with the general spirit of the ancient philosophy, which was born “out of wonder” according to the teaching of Plato and Aristotle, and which has always warned men against despair and measureless sorrow.

Kierkegaard declared that the essential opposition between the Greek philosophy and the Christian philosophy comes from the fact that the former has for its source wonder and the latter despair. This is why the Greek philosophy, according to Kierkegaard, leads to reason and knowledge,61 while the Christian philosophy begins where for the former all possibilities are ended, and puts all its hopes in the Absurd. Man no longer seeks to “know” and “understand”; he has become convinced that not only is knowledge impotent to help him but that it will demand that man worship it and see in its impotence something final, calming, mystical even. Kierkegaard returns to faith the position that the Bible had conferred upon it. It is only on the wings of faith that one can fly over all “stone walls” and the “two times two makes four” erected and apotheosized by reason and rational knowledge. Faith does not examine, it does not look around.

The Middle Ages, for which the Greek philosophy was a second “Old Testament” and which believed that Socrates’ “know thy-self” had fallen from the heavens just like the Audi Israel, regarded thought as a looking around. The thought of Abraham, of the prophets and the apostles did not appear sufficient to it but had to be completed and corrected. To tell all, it was not really thought. Of course, this was not openly expressed thus, but everything that could be done was done to bring the structure and content of the truths of the Bible as close as possible to the ideal of the truth which the Greeks had worked out and in which, from the very beginnings of Hellenic philosophy, the Aristotelian assurance “intellect is a substance completely separated from the soul and is one in all men,” was transparent. The Scholastics fought desperately against Aristotle’s intellectus separatus (remember the polemic of Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas against Siger of Brabant!)⁶²; but even in fighting it they allowed themselves to be seduced by it. The ideal of the “reason that is separated from everything, impassive, and constitutes activity by its very essence”⁶³ (in the newer German philosophy Bewusstsein überhaupt [consciousness in general]) responded to the deepest needs of the soul that aspires to knowledge and finds in it calmness and peace.⁶⁴

For God Himself one can find no greater praise than to represent Him under the aspect in which the intellectus separatus [intellect which is separate/emancipated from God] appears in Aristotle. By means of the Aristotelian “the poets lie,” medieval philosophy pushed aside the stories of the Bible which show us God rejoicing, being angry, regretting, etc., only for the purpose of “raising” God to the intellectus separatus. What is best in us, “what alone is immortal and eternal in us,”65 is that by means of which we participate in reason. All of the Scholastics’ thoughts reflect the deep conviction that the divine in the universe and in man is finally only “the separable, impassive and pure reason.” This is never said explicite, but implicite this conviction persists in all the philosophic constructions. All that the Scholastics have told us of the principle of contradiction and of the other principles of our thought (more exactly, of being) permit us to realize the role that Aristotle’s intellectus separatus (intellect which is separate from God) was destined to play in the development of the philosophy of the Middle Ages (and also of the new philosophy).

“It does not fall under God’s omnipotence” is the decisive argument to which appeal is always made when it is a question of fundamental problems. Gilson’s work testifies clearly to this. We have already seen how the Middle Ages interpreted the story of the fall. Having quoted the words of St. Paul which “echo the story of the book of Genesis”—“through one man sin entered the world”—Gilson writes, “Once more, in revealing to man a fact which by nature escapes him, revelation opens the way to the enterprises of reason.”⁶⁶ But what does reason, placed before the truth that has been revealed to it about the fall of man, seek to achieve when it proposes to “understand” what it has learned from the Bible? Above everything, it must turn suspicion away from itself: it had, and still has, no part in the fall of the first man. Medieval philosophy, says Gilson, proposed “the most optimistic interpretation conceivable of a universe where evil is a fact whose reality cannot be denied.”⁶⁷ The interpretation consists in the following: “Created ex nihilo, things are and are good because they are created, but their changeability is inscribed in their essence precisely because they are ex nihilo. Thus if one persists in calling the change to which nature is subjected as to an ineluctable law ‘evil,’ he must see that the possibility of change is a necessity that God Himself could not eliminate from what He had created, because the fact of being created is the deepest sign of this possibility itself.”⁶⁸ And again: “It is not a question of knowing whether God could have made unchangeable creatures, for this would be more impossible than to create square circles. It has been seen that mutability is as co-essential to the nature of a contingent creature as immutability is co-essential to the nature of the necessary Being.”⁶⁹

Where did medieval philosophy find all this? Certainly not in the Bible. In the same chapter, “Christian Optimism,” Gilson indicates that the optimism of medieval philosophy has for its point of departure the words of the Creator at the end of each day of creation, “and God saw that it was good,” and the words spoken when, contemplating His work at the end of the sixth day, He declared Himself fully satisfied: “And God saw everything that He had made and it was very good.” The story of the Bible does not make the least reference to the presence, in the act of creation, of any defect or fault which would have made possible the appearance of evil in the world. On the contrary, according to the Bible, the act of creation guarantees us that the created can and must be good, and only good. The idea that the created as created already bears in itself the possibility of evil was found by medieval philosophy not in the Bible but in the Greeks. Having created the world, the Demiurge of the Timaeus sees that the world is very far from perfection and tries, as much as is in his power, to correct his work, even if only partially. Epictetus relates, always rather naively but frankly and honestly, what he had learned from his teachers. We read in him that Zeus admits to Chrysippus that his power is limited: it was not in his power to give men full possession of the world and their bodies. He could give all this to them only for a certain time, for everything that is created, having had a beginning, must have an end (such is the law of being, ineluctable even for the gods: birth (genesis) is necessarily bound to death (phthora); so he made them participants in the divine reason (intellectus separatus), thanks to which they would somehow manage to adapt themselves and live in the created world.

So the Greeks thought: God, even for Plato, shares His power with Necessity. The act of creation inevitably introduced into the world imperfection and evil. But the position of the Bible is quite different: all possible perfections have for their single source the creative act of God. The Bible knows no power of Necessity and no insurmountable laws. It introduced into the world a new, unheard of idea—the idea of the created truth, the truth which the Creator rules as He wishes and which docilely accomplishes the desires of its master. How then could this truth change itself into an omnipotent law—this truth that was made to obey? Or must we admit that the Greek Demiurge was simply more perceptive than the Judeo-Christian Creator? The Demiurge realized immediately that there was something wrong in the universe, while the God of the Bible was content to repeat “very good” without suspecting that, by virtue of certain ineluctable laws which a mysterious hand had inscribed in the very essence of being, everything that is created cannot be “very good.” In the final analysis, medieval philosophy discredited the creative act and admitted at the same time that God was not capable of estimating at its true value the world He had created.

It cannot be assumed, of course, that the medieval philosophers would have risen deliberately against the testimony of the Bible, just as it cannot be assumed that they would have used, in regard to the Bible, the expression “the poets lie” which Aristotle used concerning Homer. But the fundamental principles that they had accepted from the Greeks did their work for them. The Scholastics were ready to discredit the act of creation and to doubt the omniscience of God, rather than admit that there could be a defect in reason. They spoke, as if it were nothing, of the “ineluctable law” inscribed in the being of the created, of the impossibility for God Himself to get rid of this law, risen one knows not whence and imposed one knows not why—just as it is not given Him to create a round square. Every time they were convinced that they stood before an impossibility insurmountable even for God, it might truly be said that they felt, following Dostoevsky’s expression, an almost mystical sense of satisfaction and inward peace: an impossibility, a stone wall, “two times two makes four”—consequently, one can and must stop.70 That a round square is impossible—this truth, as irrefutable for God as for man, seems to be a gift fallen from heaven like the “know thyself” and other indisputable truths which, as also fallen from heaven, were gathered in ancient times by the Greeks: they guaranteed “knowledge.”

But what difference is there between a round square and that mountain without a valley of which Descartes spoke? The mountain without a valley sets a bound only to human thought and does not in any way limit the divine omnipotence; why, then, should the round square enjoy such a privilege? Or must we consider what Descartes said merely a metaphor? He also did not believe that God was capable of creating a mountain without a valley and did not grant that the medieval philosophy, from which he had received the Bible that proclaims the possibility of mountains without valleys and round squares, had ever admitted any such thing: one can say this but one cannot think it, as the maestro edi coloro che sanno [the master of all those who knew] expressed it. The eternal truths are not created by God, they are drawn both for men and God from the intellectus separatus. It is Aristotle who judges the Bible and not the Bible that judges Aristotle: the principle of contradiction is “the most unshakable of principles.” Without demanding authorization from anyone whomsoever, it inscribes whatever it pleases in the book of being and the Creator Himself is incapable of opposing it. We shall be obliged to return to this, but I would here cite the testimony of Leibniz who says that evil which, according to the doctrine of the Greeks, had its origin in matter flows, according to the “Christian doctrine,” from the ideal, uncreated principles, from the eternal truths which, as we already know, were introduced into the mind of God without taking any account of His will.

We are convinced that, in the problem which was central for it, the philosophy of the Middle Ages rejected its task, which consisted in bringing to the world the idea, unknown to the ancients, of a created truth. It could still be assumed that God had created the universe—this Plato had also taught. But the truths are not created by God, they exist before Him and without Him and do not depend on Him. It is true that we meet also among the philosophers of the Middle Ages the idea of eternal, created truth. They thus acquired, in a way, the right to speak of conditions of being and existence that are “invincible” and “insurmountable” even for God. But they bought this right at the cost of an inner contradiction: for, if the truth is created, then, as we have just heard, it cannot be eternal and immutable—even if God wishes it. Yet to the created truth an indulgence is shown that the living man seeks in vain to obtain. The created man is necessarily imperfect and cannot pretend to eternal existence. But when it is a question of truth, the principle of contradiction shows itself disposed to renounce its sovereign rights: it grants to the created truth that immutability which is refused to living beings, without taking account of the precept “to believe against reason is blame-worthy.”

And it was with the same heedlessness that medieval philosophy accepted the doctrine of the Greeks which affirmed that evil is only privatio boni (the privation of good). To him who wishes to “understand” evil, such an explanation appears satisfactory, for it more or less attains its goal. Evil arose “naturally” in the world; what other explanation can one then demand? All honor to the philosophy which could make the ineluctability of evil self-evident! Does not “to understand” and “to explain” consist in establishing that what is cannot be other than it is? In the knowledge that what is is inevitable (“everything that is real is rational,” according to Hegel’s formula), Greek philosophy succeeded in finding a solution, “something pacifying and even mystical.” Yet the Judeo-Christian philosophy, insofar as it participated in the revealed truth, had as its task not to strengthen but finally to overcome the idea of inevitability. Gilson speaks to us of this many times. Evil explained does not cease to be evil. Evil as privatio boni [the privation of good] is quite as repugnant and inadmissible as evil that has received no explanation. And the attitude of the Bible towards evil is quite different. It does not wish to explain evil but to destroy it, to tear it out of being by the roots: before the face of the God of the Bible evil is changed into nothingness.

One can say that the very essence of the God of the Bible consists precisely in the fact that in “a world where evil is a given fact whose reality cannot be denied” there arises before Him in a mysterious way the possibility of what Gilson calls a “radical optimism”: the metaphysics of knowledge of the Book of Genesis refuses, contrary to the Greeks, to see in the “given fact” a reality that it is impossible to deny. It raises in its own way the question of what is a “fact,” a “given,” “reality” and, recalling “God saw everything that He had made and it was very good,” it asks audaciously whether the “fact,” the “given,” the “real” actually possess the “final” character that we, not daring to dispute with reason and the principle of contradiction produced by reason, attribute to them. For Aristotle this is pure madness. He knows with certainty that the given is “the first and the beginning.”71 We today also say: one cannot argue with facts. And indeed, he who “knows” does not argue; he prostrates himself before facts. Knowledge paralyses his will, and he accepts everything that it brings him, convinced in advance that knowledge will make him like the gods (eritis sicut dei scientes). But the Bible says something else. God does not do this or that because it is good, but this or that is good because it was created by God. We know that this doctrine of Duns Scotus was rejected by medieval philosophy just as by modern philosophy. For our intelligence it is even more unacceptable than Plotinus’ “beyond reason and knowledge”; or, to put it better, Plotinus’ “beyond” frightens us because we feel that it hides within itself just that which Seeberg calls “arbitrary, lawless and boundless.” Nevertheless, terrible as this may appear to us, the God of the Bible is not bound by any rule, by any law; He is the source of all rules and all laws just as He is master of the Sabbath. The tree of knowledge was planted by God near the tree of life, but not in order for man to feed on its fruits. The opposition of good and evil or, more exactly, the appearance of evil, bears no relation to the creation of the world; then everything was “very good,” but only up to the moment of man’s fall. Before then nothing limited the divine freedom and the human as well. Everything was good because it was made by God; everything was good because it was made by man, who was created in the image and likeness of God. This is precisely what this “very good” that is so mysterious to us means. Freedom as the possibility of choosing between good and evil, that freedom which the Greeks knew and which passed into medieval and modern philosophy, is only the freedom of the fallen man, freedom deformed by sin. It allowed evil to penetrate into the world and is powerless to drive it out. Thus, the more man clings to the idea that his salvation depends on “knowledge” and the possibility of distinguishing good and evil, the more deeply sin penetrates and roots itself in him. He turns away from the Bible’s “very good,” just as he turned away from the tree of life, and puts all his hopes in the fruits he gathers from the tree of knowledge.

“Good and evil by which we are praiseworthy or blameworthy”—so the Pelagians expressed themselves: praise or blame for good or evil actions become, in the eyes of man, not only the principal but the only spiritual value. Thomas Aquinas—and in this he does not at all distinguish himself from the other philosophers of the Middle Ages—demands calmly, without apparently suspecting what he is doing, “whether to believe is meritorious.” But is not faith a gift, the greatest gift that man can receive from the Creator? I recall once more “nothing shall be impossible for you.” (Matthew XVII, 20) What can our merits and the praises of him who kept watch over the tree of knowledge do here? Is it not he who still suggests such questions to men today? To be sure, if freedom is only the possibility of choosing between good and evil and if faith is the result of such a choice when conditioned by the good, then one can speak of man’s merits and even assume that our merits cannot but be recognized by God’s judgment. But the judgment where our merits decide our fate or have even only a certain influence on the way in which our fate is decided, the judgment where virtues will be rewarded and vices punished, is not the “final judgment” of the Bible but the moral judgment of the Greeks that is perfectly understandable to man. In the Bible preference is given to the sinner who has repented over ten righteous men, there is more rejoicing over the return of the prodigal son than over the constancy of the faithful son, the publican takes precedence over the pious Pharisee. In the Bible the sun rises indifferently on the good and the evil. But even St. Augustine, who denounced Pelagius so unpityingly, can hardly bear the immorality of the Bible and allows a sigh of relief to escape when, dreaming of another world, he can allow himself to say: “there the sun does not rise over the good and evil, but the sun protects only the righteous.”

VIII

The Pelagian bonum et malum quo nos laudabiles vel vituperabiles sumus (good and evil by which we are praiseworthy or blameworthy), in other words, the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, became the spiritual nourishment par excellence, the “one thing necessary,” for the medieval philosophers as it had been for the Greeks. “The greatest good of man is to discourse daily about virtue,” says Socrates in Plato’s Apology. And we shall hardly be mistaken if we see in this the articulus stantis et cadentis of the Greek wisdom. Gilson is certainly right when he urges us not to put too much trust in what is customarily called “the perfect serenity (sérénité) of the Greek world.” Nietzsche was the first to discover many things which no one had suspected. He saw, we recall, and showed us in Socrates the décadent, the fallen man. And it was precisely in what the Delphic oracle regarded as his greatest merit and in what Socrates himself saw his difference from other men that his fall, in Nietzsche’s eyes, consisted: Socrates esteemed and taught others to esteem in life only the praises of the good and feared and taught others to fear only the blame of the same good. All of the Greek wisdom is based on this principle. The dialectic discovered by the Greeks had as its essential task to denigrate the fruits of the tree of life, to convince man of their uselessness and nothingness. The basic objection that the Greeks, as well as St. Augustine and later the Scholastics, made to the fruits of the tree of life was that these fruits are not in our power: the possibility of obtaining them, and still more of preserving them, does not depend on us. From this derives the very significant distinction made by the Stoics between “what is in our power” and “what is not in our power,” and their no less famous doctrine that man must seek only that which is in his power, all the rest being relegated into the domain of the “indifferent.”

We find in Epictetus the confession that the beginning of philosophy is the knowledge that man has of his own impotence before Necessity. To escape from the Necessity which rules in this world, there is no other means of salvation, the Greeks believed, than to turn toward the intelligible world. It is there that the wise man seeks a refuge against the sufferings, the horrors, the injustices of the real world. And since the intelligible world is accessible only to reason, to the spiritual vision, to the “eyes of the mind,” the Greeks naturally put all their hope in reason and regarded it as the highest part of man. Furthermore, they had irrefutable arguments for doing so: man is a rational animal. Reason is his differentia specifica [specific difference] which distinguishes him from the genus of animals in general and, consequently, it is in this that his essence as man consists. For man to live according to nature, taught the Stoics, means to live according to reason. The Scholastic philosophy joyfully received this truth, among so many others, from the hands of the Greeks without even taking the trouble to look at what Scripture said on the matter or, to put it better, prepared in advance not assuredly to reject, but to be silent about, or interpret, everything in the Bible that could not be harmonized with the wisdom of the Greeks. It read in St. Paul that the principal and essential thing for man resides neither in reason nor in knowledge. Knowledge makes man presumptuous, and all the gifts of knowledge are nothing without love. The philosophers of the Middle Ages spoke constantly of love—Gilson devotes a remarkable chapter to their doctrine of love—but, as we shall see, the Scholastics were also obliged to proceed to a purification, a catharsis, of the love of the Bible in order not to offend in any way the ancient ideal. In the medieval philosophers love is transformed into what Spinoza later called amor Dei intellectualis [the intellectual love of God], so that Gilson’s chapter could be applied quite as well to the philosophy of Spinoza as to that of the Middle Ages.

“When the so-called philosophers by chance speak what is true and corresponds to our faith, this is to be claimed for our use as from unjust possessors”: so St. Augustine defined his attitude towards Greek philosophy. Yet, as we have already had occasion to become convinced, in fact it was the opposite that happened: the Greek truth was not verified by means of the biblical truth but the biblical by means of the Greek. When trying to reconcile the Platonism of St. Augustine and of Dionysus the Areopagite with his own doctrine, St. Thomas Aquinas wrote: “For the intellectual light itself which is in us is none other than a certain similarity through participation with the uncreated light in which the eternal truths are contained.”72 It is difficult not to recognize here the idea of “the separated reason, the only immortal and eternal thing,” the intellectus separatus of Aristotle. St. Thomas, it is true, refers to the text (Psalms IV, 7.): “There be many that say, Who will show us any good? Lord, lift Thou up the light of Thy countenance upon us.” He also quotes the well-known text of St. Paul, Romans I, 20. But these quotations precisely make clear the goal that the medieval philosophers set themselves when they sought “metaphysical principles” in the Bible.

By means of the method of analogy, the most risky of methods imaginable, medieval philosophy passed from the empirical truths that the intelligence discovers in experience to the eternal and unchangeable truths that it called “metaphysical.” Now when we examine it closely, it appears that the method of analogy is very little distinguished from the method of discovery of truth employed by Socrates and which hid in itself a secret defect. As has already been indicated, the latter inevitably led the last of the great Greek philosophers, Plotinus, to a distrust of the very essence of Greek thought. Socrates took for his point of departure what men ordinarily considered true and good; starting from this, he deduced that there is an eternal truth and an unchangeable good. He dealt always with men of action, practical men—smiths, carpenters, doctors, politicians, etc. He thus arrived at the conviction that the essence of the truth and the good consists in knowing the conditions in which man is born and in living in such a way as to submit to them and adapt one’s activity to them. Up to this point he doubtless followed the right way. But when he concluded that the laws and conditions of human existence that he had observed reflected the truth an sich and that submission to these conditions was the good an sich, he committed a crying “leap into another realm.” It is, indeed, just the contrary: the truth an sich and the good an sich cannot be perceived by him who, thanks to the conditions of his existence, finds himself placed in the necessity of “learning” and “adapting himself.” The truth and the good live on a completely different level. How little the biblical words “lift Thou up the light of Thy countenance upon us” resembles those rationes aeternae (eternal reasons) for which the medieval philosophy, hypnotized by the Greek wisdom, had exchanged them! Here again we are forced to remember the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. The tree of knowledge bore the eternal truths and the “good and evil by which we are praiseworthy and blameworthy,” that is, worthy of the praise and blame of him who, with his “you will be like God” reduced the human soul to slavery. Can one imagine anything which less resembles the living God of biblical thought than the eternal truths, incapable of changing anything whatsoever that they bring to man, congealed, petrified and petrifying? It is true that the Scholastic philosophers could cite—and they did not fail to do so—“I am the Lord and I do not change.” But it is here that Gilson’s comment is justified: our concepts fall to pieces when we try to introduce into them the content of the Bible. The immutability of God has nothing in common with the immutability of the eternal truths. The latter do not change because they have not the power to change; God does not change because, and insofar as, He does not wish to change and does not judge it good to do so. When Abraham, the father of faith, intercedes on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah, God listens calmly, takes what he says into consideration and changes his decision. Of such examples one can find as many as one wishes in the Bible, and if one is not afraid of Aristotle and his “the poets lie,” one would have to admit that the immutability of the biblical God has not even the most distant resemblance to that immutability which the Greek wisdom venerated, but even excludes it. Like the Sabbath, the immutability of which the Bible speaks exists for man and not man for the immutability. Immutability does not rule God, it serves Him, as do all the other truths which, insofar as they are created, possess only an executive power and only for as long as they are of some use.

All this clarifies, to a certain point, the relationship between the tree of knowledge and the fall of man. Enthralled by the tempter’s words eritis scientes, Adam exchanged the freedom which determined his relationship to the Creator who hears and listens for a dependence on the indifferent and impersonal truths which do not hear and do not listen to anything and automatically actualize the power which they have seized. That is why it is incorrect to speak of the relationship of man to God as a relationship of dependence: the relationship of man to God is freedom. And it was precisely this that Dostoevsky had in mind when, face to face with “two times two makes four,” with “the stone wall” and with other “impossibilities,” he demanded that his “caprice” be guaranteed to him. He choked “in a universe where evil is a given fact whose reality cannot be denied,” and he felt the necessity of submitting to the “given” as the consequence of the original sin. This is also the profound meaning of Nietzsche’s doctrine concerning the morality of masters and slaves: behind Nietzsche’s apparent atheism was hidden a desperate thrust towards the freedom of the innocent man who gave names to all things and ruled over all things. With still greater right Nietzsche could have spoken of the truths of masters and the truths of slaves, but he lacked the daring to do this.

We are so strictly bound by the fundamental principles of the ancient philosophy which we have imbibed with our mother’s milk that every attempt to oppose to these principles the truth of the Bible appears to us not only mad but sacrilegious. The most remarkable representatives of the philosophy of the Middle Ages expected salvation from the fruits of the tree of knowledge and, despite his flights of genius, St. Augustine himself did not leave the eyes of the Greeks. He who so glorified the Bible nevertheless aspired to self-evidences; he who rose with such violence against Pelagius and his friends nevertheless believed that freedom consisted in the liberty to choose between good and evil and made man’s salvation dependent on his merits and works. Thus when one compares St. Augustine’s own writings with those fragments of the Psalms and other books of the Bible that he so joyfully interpolates in them, one cannot fail to notice, despite all the author’s ingenuity, something artificial. It is not a free flight but a struggle against the all too human law of gravity: the arguments with which he abundantly sprinkles his reflections and a certain vehemence of tone remind us always that, even when it is a question of grace, the “mechanism” of understanding is not overcome.73

The “habit of reflecting on his faith,” as well as the invincible need die moralische Betrachtung der religiosen zu überordnen (to set the moral point of view over the religious) permeate the whole medieval philosophy and particularly the doctrine of grace. When we are told “grace does not abolish nature,”⁷⁴ it may seem that this is a loving tribute to the Creator. But, on the contrary, we must see here a trick of reason which wishes at all costs to preserve its sovereignty. For reason the potentia ordinata (ordered power) of God is much more comprehensible and much more acceptable than his potentia absoluta (absolute power), which it fears at bottom more than everything in the world. Reason seeks and finds everywhere a well-defined order, an arrangement established once for all. It even goes so far as to oppose potentia absoluta to potentia ordinata as a supernatural to a natural order, thus brushing aside in advance every threat against the integrity of its sovereign rights. The following example is sufficiently eloquent in this connection, even though it concerns an unimportant question. We read in St. Thomas Aquinas: “Some say that the animals which are now wild and kill other animals were in that state (before the sin) tame, not only toward men but toward animals. But this is completely unreasonable. For the nature of animals was not changed through the sin of man so that those, for example lions and falcons, for whom it is now natural to eat the flesh of others then lived on plants.”⁷⁵ Once more we must recognize that St. Thomas is right: “it is completely unreasonable” to assume that the carnivores fed on grass before the fall.

But we read in Isaiah that God does not ask what must be according to the nature of things. The whole world knows the famous words: “the wolf and the lamb shall feed side by side and the lion will eat straw like the bullock.” (Isaiah, LXV, 25.) St. Francis of Assisi even succeeded in changing the nature of the wolf merely by means of the soft words “brother wolf.” And he succeeded in doing this only because, like Isaiah, he did not wish to “know” and did not aspire to transform the truth of revelation into self-evident and immutable metaphysical principles. For St. Francis of Assisi and Isaiah, unshakableness and immutability, the things that constitute the very essence of knowledge and that human reason seeks so avidly, offered nothing enticing: on the contrary, these terrified them. “‘Two times two makes four’ is already the beginning of death”: every line of the Bible tells us this again and again. And if one had declared to the Apostle that “in a universe where evil is a given fact, its reality cannot be denied,” he would have answered with the well known words: “The fool saith in his heart, ‘there is no God.’” For the fact, the given, does not at all have the right to limit the divine omnipotence: the divine “very good” denies the fact as well as all “given,” and only human reason sees in the “wherefore” (hoti) the “first and the beginning” (to prôton kai archê) which it has never been.

If one had proven to the Apostle with all the required evidence, like “two times two makes four,” that man is descended from the ape, neither proofs nor evidence would have convinced him. He would perhaps have repeated Dostoevsky’s words, “but what does it matter to me?” Probably, however, he would have recalled the Bible: “. . . as thou hast believed, so be it done unto thee.” In other words, if you believe that you are of God, you are of God; if you believe that you come from an ape, you come from an ape: “the righteous shall live by faith.” This is “entirely unreasonable,” and it is beyond doubt that reason would direct the entire arsenal of its vituperabilia against the daring man who would have the audacity to affirm that among men some are descended from Adam who was created by God, and others from an ape that came naturally into the world and that no one created—and that this depends only on their faith.

For faith has nothing to do with this: it is knowledge and the eternal truths of the intellectus that rule in this domain. “For the intellectual light is nothing but a certain similarity through participation in the uncreated light.” It is not given to any faith to overcome the self-evidence of the truths of reason. They are truths of reason precisely because no power in the world can overcome them. And if we attribute immutability to the Creator Himself it is only because we wish to see and can see in Him the “uncreated light”: the method of analogy authorizes and obliges us to do so.

IX

I have not here the space necessary to point out, like Gilson, all that the Scholastics accomplished in the domain of philosophy or, more exactly, the results at which they arrived in trying, and insofar as they tried, to draw from the Bible eternal and unshakable truths by using the principles and methods of research that they had inherited from the Greeks. Before the tree of life and the tree of knowledge they, like the first man, did not have the power to overcome the temptation eritis scientes. For the Scholastics, as for the Greeks, the final source of truth was reason with its immutable laws. That is why, as we have seen, they so carefully protected the principle of contradiction and were even ready to sacrifice to it the omnipotence of the Creator. That is why St. Augustine granted that the will of the fallen man was free, notwithstanding that it subjected itself without protest to that law by virtue of which “in our world where evil is a given fact whose reality cannot be denied” evil must be “explained” and accepted. To argue with the Greeks was to condemn oneself in advance to defeat or, to put it better, it was possible to argue with the Greeks only after having once for all taken the decision to renounce their principles as well as their technique of thought.

“If you wish to subject everything to yourself, subject yourself to reason.” This was the summing up of the Greek wisdom, according to Seneca’s formula. How could the Middle Ages reply to this maxim? Could they perceive here a temptation? Our entire experience of life and our entire reason are on the side of the Greeks. Philosophy in this respect is only the systematization and most complete expression of discoveries that each of us makes every day: one does not argue with facts, the fact is the final and definitive reality. The principle of contradiction and that law, just as unshakable, which holds itself under its protection and which says that what has been cannot not have been are inscribed in some way in the very structure of being, and the omnipotent Creator Himself is incapable of delivering being from their hold. It is only on condition of accepting and worshipping them that man, as Seneca, the disciple of the Greeks, tells us, can dominate the world. But in the Bible we hear something quite different. When the powerful and crafty spirit says, as if repeating Seneca: “All these things will I give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me,” he hears in reply: “Get thee hence, Satan, for it is written, ‘Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and Him only shalt thou serve.’” In other words, one does not even argue with reason, with its principle of contradiction, its “two times two makes four,” its stone walls (that which has been cannot not have been; in the world where evil is a fact, its reality cannot be denied; man is descended naturally from the ape, etc.). One simply chases it away as a usurper—this reason to which he must submit in order to obtain any good.

Such is the teaching of the Bible. When Dostoevsky rudely mocked the pretensions of reason and its universal and necessary truths, he was only following the Bible. And though human, all too human, it was nevertheless an imitatio Christi (imitation of Christ). Reason does not have and cannot have a single universal and necessary truth, and it is not given to it, any more than to anyone except the Creator, to inscribe its laws in the structure of being. It is not in vain, however, that Kant said that experience only “irritates” the philosopher; experience does not contain what rational philosophy seeks to obtain. Experience does not at all prove that the principle of contradiction “does not fall under God’s omnipotence” or what has been cannot not have been. All the “stone walls,” all the “two times two makes four” already constitute a certain addition to experience, and it is from this addition that the tempter drew his eritis scientes [you will know].

Accordingly, the Bible sees in the eternal truths that are independent of the Creator only a lie, a suggestion, an enchantment. If the first man and all of us after him have not the power nor even the will to rid ourselves of these truths, this does not at all give us the right to consider them as something definitive and consequently calming, even mystical. On the contrary, this ought to be for us a source of unceasing, torturing, insurmountable anxiety. And it is certain that this anxiety has always persisted and persists still in the human soul, and that the Middle Ages knew it only too well. But it is no less certain that man fears anxiety above everything and makes every effort to choke it in himself. He is ready to accept anything whatsoever as definitive and forever insurmountable in fact and in right—matter, inertia, walls indifferent to everything—in order to be able to escape anxiety and cease struggling. Non lugere neque detestari [do not weep nor curse]—the Greek philosophy could never resolve to pass beyond the limits of this ideal. It is from this that the credo ut intelligam (I believe so that I may understand) of St. Augustine, of Anselm of Canterbury and of all those who followed them comes. From this comes Spinoza’s non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere [do not laugh, do not weep, nor curse, but understand]. Nietzsche himself, who overwhelmed minds with his “beyond good and evil” (which denied the fruits of the tree of knowledge though people did not realize it, any more than Nietzsche did), his morality of masters, his will to power (Deus omnipotens, ex nihilo creans omnia—allpowerful God who makes all things out of nothing), ended by glorifying the “love of fate.” The supreme wisdom consists in loving the inevitable. He forgot that it was precisely this that Socrates, whom he recognized as the fallen man par excellence, had taught. But the Stoics are descended from Socrates, and when Seneca writes, “I do not obey God but I agree with Him in spirit, nor do I follow Him because it is necessary,” he was only repeating Socrates.

On this point the Middle Ages could not and would not break with the tradition of Greek philosophy. It could not do this because it had borrowed from it the fundamental principles and technique of thought. It would not do it because this happens “not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy.” (Romans IX, 16.) Certain chapters of the second volume of Gilson’s work are particularly instructive in this respect: L’Amour et son objet (Love and Its Object), Libre arbitre et liberté chretienne (Free Will and Christian Freedom), Loi et moralité chrétienne (Christian Law and Morality). Medieval philosophy at times made extreme and desperate efforts to preserve the truth of revelation, while accepting the Greek wisdom. But all its efforts remained fruitless: the truth of revelation ended by completely resembling the natural truth. And this resemblance is expressed, above everything, in that it refuses to recognize its dependence on the Creator but wishes that the Creator obey it. From this comes the following unexpected and paradoxical result: when one reads the chapters mentioned above where, with his customary masterfulness, Gilson succeeds in giving an exposition in a relatively modest number of pages of the fundamental ideas of Scholasticism, it seems at times that it is not the medieval philosophy that is being discussed here but Spinoza’s, and that the numerous quotations and references to the Bible must be taken in a figurative sense—or that there is to be seen here simply one of those annoying carelessnesses that even the greatest minds do not always succeed in avoiding. Be it a question of the peace of the soul, of the love of God, of virtue, of nature, of freedom—whatever be the theme of the medieval philosopher, one cannot fail to evoke the memory of the solitary Dutchman. There is the same aspiration towards a universal, rigorous and immutable order joined to an indifference, a scorn even, for all the goods of life (it is known that Spinoza reduced them to “wealth, honor and pleasures”); the same glorification of contemplation and of the spiritual joys which flow from it; the same freedom of the man qui sola ratione ducitur, who has adapted himself to the inescapable laws of the structure of being (homo emancipatus a Deo [man separate from God]); and finally the amor Dei intellectualis [the intellectual love of God] which dominates everything.

For medieval philosophy, says Gilson, “human love is only a finite participation in the love that God has for Himself.”76 And again, “God’s love is only the generosity of the Being whose superabundant plenitude loves itself in itself and in its possible participations.”⁷⁷ And in Spinoza we read: “For the mind’s intellectual love of God is part of the infinite love with which God loves Himself”78; then, in the corollary, “hence it follows that, insofar as God loves Himself, He loves men, and consequently that God’s love for men and the mind’s intellectual love of God are one and the same.” Whether Spinoza received his fundamental ideas directly from the Greeks or through the medium of the medieval philosophers is of no importance. What is important is that there is not and cannot be any trace in them of what animated and nourished the Judeo-Christian thought, no matter how we interpret the latter. The philosophy of Spinoza, as highly as we may value it, demands as conditio sine qua non [indispensable condition] that we renounce completely the truths of revelation. For Spinoza the Bible has nothing in common with the truth, just as the truth has nothing in common with the Bible. No one in the Seventeenth Century opposed to the stories of the Bible the Aristotelian “the poets lie” with so much frankness, rigor and courage as Spinoza. If it appears finally that the Scholastics were so close to Spinoza (one could show that the Scholastics’ doctrine of being, founded on the Bible’s “I am that I am” is not at all distinguished from Spinoza’s doctrine of being), this would already entitle us to conclude that the Scholastics, as philosophers, were not inspired by the Bible, and that it was at the school of the maestro di coloro che sanno (master of all those who knew) that they learned to seek and find what they needed, not in the “foolishness of preaching” but in the self-evidences of reason.

Gilson opposes Luther to the Scholastic philosophy and, in emphasizing this opposition, says that many of the reproaches made against the Scholastics should have been addressed rather to Luther. It is beyond doubt, indeed, that Luther’s doctrine is completely contrary to what the Scholastics sought and obtained. And Luther did not hide this. St. Thomas, he writes, “wrote many heretical things and is the originator of the now ruling pious doctrine of the awful Aristotle.” Here, furthermore, is just one of his milder judgments on St. Thomas. Gilson is also right when he says that a consistent Lutheran is a rara (I would even say rarissima) avis [a rare or the rarest bird]. And yet Luther is strictly connected to the medieval philosophy, in the sense that the very possibility of his appearance presupposes the existence of a Judeo-Christian philosophy which, setting as its task to proclaim the idea—hitherto unknown—of a created truth, continued to cultivate the fundamental principles and technique of the ancient thought. Luther is ordinarily not even considered a philosopher by those, in any case, like M. de Wulf, who identify philosophy with rational philosophy. It would be more just, however, to place oneself on other grounds and to ask oneself: does not Luther belong to the small number of those who have daringly tried to realize the idea of philosophy that is not rational but Judeo-Christian, of a philosophy which permits itself to submit to a new examination precisely those fundamental principles and those methods of discovering the truth which, as “things known of themselves,” the Middle Ages had accepted from their Greek masters docilely and without verifying them? Luther’s sola fide (by faith alone) and his tenebrae fidei, ubi nee lex, nee ratio lucet (the darkness of faith, where neither law nor reason shines)—are these not an obvious reaction to the systematic attempt of the Scholastics to submit the truth of revelation to the control and guardianship of the truths that are obtained naturally?

For our reason faith is darkness, it is the lower degree which must be transcended in order to obtain clear and distinct knowledge. The apostles and the prophets were content with faith; the philosopher wishes more—he wishes to know. The apostles and the prophets awaited their salvation from on high; the philosopher finds his salvation through wisdom founded on stable knowledge, hopes to obtain the good will of the gods by means of his wise life, and wishes even that this wise life should guarantee him salvation: “God does not deny grace to him who does what is his.” All this had been borrowed by the Scholastics from the Greeks. In the preceding chapters I have quoted many passages from Plato and Aristotle on this subject, and these quotations could be multiplied. But as for Luther, he fled from Athens. He feared, as Dostoevsky instinctively feared, the eternal truths; his entire being aspired to Jerusalem. Reason, which we consider our natural light, leads us to our ruin. The law, on which we rely as on an unshakable rock, in reality only multiplies the crimes. “Because man is presumptuous and imagines himself to be wise, righteous and holy, it is necessary that he be humbled by the law, that thus that monster—the illusion of his own righteousness—without whose killing man cannot live, be put to death.” Homo non potest vivere is, in Luther, an objection against the self-evident truths that are revealed to us by the light of reason and the law. Similar objections were, for the Greeks, something completely new or, to put it better, simply could not find a place on the level of Greek thought. To obtain the truth, we must “kill” the self-evidences. “The righteous shall live by faith.” This is the point of departure of what Kierkegaard was later to call “existential philosophy” and which he opposed to the speculative philosophy that we have inherited from the Greeks. Hence comes the implacable hatred that Luther had for Aristotle,79 hence come Luther’s sola fide and servum arbitrium (the bound will).

Luther’s enslaved will is that enchantement et assoupissement surnaturel [supernatural enchantment and slumber] of which Pascal speaks. “Nothing is more strongly opposed to faith than law and reason, nor can these two be overcome without great effort and labor; yet they must be overcome if you wish to be saved.” When and for as long as man puts his hope of salvation in them, our knowledge and our virtues are only “instruments and weapons of that infernal tyrant, i.e., sin, and through all these you are forced to serve the devil and to promote and augment his kingdom.” Having tasted the fruits of the tree of knowledge, man has lost faith, and with faith freedom. Our will is bound by sin—it is paralyzed, plunged into a “deep dizziness” (Kierkegaard), almost dead. Knowledge has handed man over to the power of the truths that are uncreated or freed of God, and his virtues simply testify that he has exchanged God’s “it was very good” for “the good and evil by which we are praiseworthy or blameworthy,” that is, the fruits of the tree of knowledge. Such is the terrible and fateful consequence of the fall of the first man. He cannot escape from that slumber of the spirit which is altogether like death. The eritis scientes has enchained his intelligence as well as his consciousness; it has permeated and cast a spell over his entire being. Man aspires to knowledge, he is persuaded that knowledge is the same thing as salvation. Even more: if it appeared that knowledge is not salvation and that man had to choose between the two, he would prefer knowledge to salvation—as Clement of Alexandria said. This was, for Luther, the profound meaning of all the searchings of the Scholastic philosophy. But going further still, Luther had to recognize, terrified, that every man—and he himself before all—is in the power of that “infernal tyrant,” i.e., sin, and that not only has he not the power to rid himself from this spell but that his fallen being continues to see in the eritis scientes and in the “walls of stone,” the “two times two makes four,” and the other self-evidences introduced by the eritis scientes, a solution—something calming and even mystical. Hence Luther’s furious attacks against reason and its knowledge, against human wisdom and its virtues.

Gilson says: “To encounter De servo arbitrio, we must go to Luther. With the Reformation there appeared for the first time that radical conception of a grace which saves man without changing him, a justification which redeems corrupted nature without curing it.”80 Luther, indeed, was the first who spoke of the enslaved will; but he spoke of it precisely because he saw in our knowledge the original sin and became convinced that the Scholastic philosophy, instead of trying to deliver the will paralyzed by the sin of knowledge, followed the Greeks and did everything in its power to take away from man every possibility of regaining his original freedom. It taught, indeed, that knowledge is the highest degree of faith and that the wisdom founded on knowledge is the way to salvation. It concerned itself, then, with something quite other than restoring man and healing him from his frightful sickness. It declared that everything could still be put in order through good will and with the help of the Greek wisdom. But, in Luther’s eyes, this was proof that not only is our will bound but that it has even lost the memory of what freedom is. It loves its dependence on the eternal truths emancipated from God with that love with which, according to the great commandment of the Bible, it should love God alone. From this enchantement et assoupissement surnaturel, to repeat once more Pascal’s words, there is no salvation but through a help that is also supernatural. Our knowledge nourishes “that monster without whose killing man cannot live.” Only the foolishness of faith, which does not ask anything of anyone, can awaken man from that torpor into which he sank after tasting the fruits of the tree of knowledge.

Luther’s doctrine of the law and redemption is bound to sola fide and de servo arbitrio. We imagine that the law exists in order to direct man and to punish him: the Greeks always and everywhere sought, and taught us to seek, laws in order to submit to them. But the Bible tells us something else: when Moses was on the mountain face to face with God he had no law, but when he descended from the mountain he began to govern the people by means of law. Where God is there is no law, there is freedom. And where freedom is not, God is not. Redemption, according to Luther, consists in man’s deliverance from the domination of sin, from the domination of the truths and laws that enslave him; the freedom of innocence, of ignorance, is returned to him. Sin not only does not exist in the present, it has also not existed in the past. “In a universe where evil is a given fact whose reality cannot be denied,” Deus omnipotens ex nihilo creans omnia [the allpowerful God who makes all things out of nothing] shatters by His word the fundamental principle of the ancient thought: that which has been cannot not have been. “All the prophets saw this in the spirit,” writes Luther, “that Christ would be the greatest robber, thief, blasphemer, murderer, adulterer, etc., such that no greater would ever be in the world.”81 Several pages further⁸² Luther “explains” this shaking “truth” in a series of images that are even more terrible because they are more concrete: “God sent his only begotten son into the world and threw upon him all the sins of all men, saying, ‘Be thou Peter, that denier; Paul, that persecutor, blasphemer and violent man; David, that adulterer; that sinner who ate the apple in paradise; that robber on the cross—in short, be thou the man who committed the sins of all men.’” These words of Luther’s are for the Greek and medieval philosophy the worst of absurdities. God cannot overcome the principle of contradiction, for “it does not fall under God’s omnipotence.” God does not possess any magic word capable of rooting out of the past the sins of Peter, Paul and David and bringing it about somehow that the original sin, the sin of Adam, from which all the other sins flowed, never existed. The “eternal truths, truths emancipated from God” here automatically set a limit to the divine omnipotence. And it is still less possible and thinkable that the sins of David, of Peter, of Paul, and even of Adam should not be their sins but the sins of God—that God be a criminal “such that no greater has ever been in the world.” To say such things is to defy and to outrage the Greek philosophy and the whole of the Greek wisdom.

Yet the task of the Scholastics, the task of the Judeo-Christian philosophy, consisted precisely in making all truths dependent on the Creator. Luther was not afraid to force “the most unshakable of principles,” the principle of contradiction, as well as the self-evident truth that flows from it (what has been cannot not have been), to retreat before the divine omnipotence. It is only thus that one can radically heal man’s fallen nature, it is only thus that one can destroy to the root the evil which entered the world along with sin and lead men back to the divine valde bonum (very good), to return to them that freedom which is not the freedom of choosing between good and evil with their praises and condemnations but the freedom to create the good, as He who made man in His own image creates it. Can one say that Luther speaks of the grace that saves man “without changing him, without curing him?” And does not the fallen man’s complete and final restitutio in integrum [restitution to his state of health] consist precisely in the restoration of his freedom from the “eternal truths” and in the annihilation of sin not only in the present but also in the past (for as long as sin exists in the past it continues to rule in the present)?

So then Luther, with his sola fide, made a mad, desperate attempt to realize the very thing that the Judeo-Christian philosophy considered its essential task. History, it is true, has seen to it that men should not listen to Luther, as they have not listened to other thinkers who aspired to create a Judeo-Christian philosophy without taking account of the problems, principles or technique of the thought of the Greeks and who dared to oppose the “faith” of Jerusalem to the “knowledge” of Athens in order to overcome the latter through the former. But can history be considered the final court?

X

History pushed Luther into the background, just as it had pushed Plotinus, Tertullian, Peter Damian, and even Duns Scotus. Athens triumphed over Jerusalem. And if Descartes became the father of the new philosophy, it was only because he addressed himself to men—as he himself admitted—without taking any account of the faith to which they belonged. This is the meaning of Hamelin’s statement that Descartes came after the ancients as if between them and him there had been no one except the physicists. In his letters we find such solemn declarations as “every ground of the true and the good depends on God’s omnipotence.” If this formula which united in itself the “soaring above knowledge” of Plotinus and the “everything else from God is good because it is willed by God and not vice versa” of Duns Scotus—had been completely realized in his philosophy, modern philosophy would have once and for all detached itself from that of the ancients and would have been obliged to set its own problems, completely different from those of the Greeks. It would have found “first principles” and would have radically modified the entire “technique of thought.”

The created truth, the truth of which the son of man remains always master as he is of the Sabbath, as well as the good which has for its source the divine will that nothing limits—this, for the Greeks was only a contradictio in adjecto, consequently an impossibility and, further, an abomination of desolation. The idea of the created truth brings us back to that state of innocence and ignorance of which the Book of Genesis speaks and puts an end to rational philosophy. In his letters, Descartes had the daring to proclaim such a truth only because he was convinced in advance (reservatio mentalis) that it would oblige neither him nor anyone else to anything. One can say the same of the Scholastics who believed that they had as their mission to announce to the world the till then unheard of idea of a created truth. Descartes, like the Scholastics, could not help but understand that this was only an indispensable tribute paid by the believer to the Bible and that, having rendered this tribute in words, he then acquired the possibility and the right to “think” as his intellectual conscience demanded of him: credo ut intelligam (I believe that I may understand). It is enough to recognize the limitless will of the Creator only once; then nothing will prevent one from accepting the potentia absoluta [absolute power] which changed itself “willingly” and definitively into potentia ordinate [ordinate power] in order never again to be remembered. It is here that the power which Greek thought exercised over Descartes especially manifests itself. Ipse creator et conditor mundi semel jussit, semper paret (the Creator and Ruler of the world once commanded, always obeys), proclaims Seneca, repeating what he had been taught by Athens. The freedom to command was for the Greeks inconceivable and hateful; they recognized only the freedom to obey. The freedom to obey was and still remains the condition of rational thought and rational knowledge. God Himself was authorized to command only once, after which He obeys—just as do mortals.

Pascal, who was so perceptive, understood this: recall his famous words, “I cannot forgive Descartes . . . , etc.” Like the Greek philosophers, Descartes carefully avoided the jubere—to command; he feared it instinctively, seeing in it—and certainly he was right to do so—the most dangerous threat to rational thought. And if the source of Descartes’ philosophy is sought, it will be found not in the divine jubere but in the human or “metaphysical” parere [to obey]. Apud me omnia fiunt mathematice in Natura (For me everything in Nature occurs mathematically): this is the whole of Descartes. And that is why the condemnation of Galileo upset him so: “I am almost resolved to burn all my papers,” he wrote to Mersenne. “. . . I confess that if the movement of the earth is false, all the foundations of my philosophy are also false.” In his polemics against the unbelievers, St. Augustine could still refer to the Bible, where it is said that Joshua stopped the sun. And on the strength of this testimony the Church could also reject the Copernican theory. But it is no longer given Descartes to overcome Aristotle’s “the poets lie.” Joshua, who stopped the sun, completely destroys the foundations of his philosophy. To put it differently, in Descartes, as in the Greeks, God’s potentia absoluta [absolute power] belongs to that semel jussit [once commanded] which, even if it did once take place, is treated by our thought as never having existed and as obliging us to nothing. Descartes could in all tranquility render unto God that which is God’s for he knew definitely that Caesar would not suffer any harm from this and would fully receive that which is Caesar’s. From this point of view it may be said without exaggeration that Descartes anticipated Kant. If one brings together his omnis ratio veri et boni ab omnipotentia Dei dependsit [everything which is true or good depends on God’s omnipotence] with his apud me omnia fiunt mathematice in Natura [in my view, all things in nature occur in accordance with mathematics], one obtains a critique of pure reason: freedom is transferred to the intelligible world, while our world is handed over to the synthetic judgments a priori which no one can overcome and which no one even has the desire to overcome.

If you wish, the critique of reason is carried through in Descartes in a more radical fashion than in Kant. Awakened from his dogmatic slumber by Hume or by his own discovery of the antinomies of the pure reason, Kant was obliged to recognize that the idea of necessity, to which reason aspired so eagerly, has no root in experience and consequently in being, and that it is a phantom which has somehow taken hold of our consciousness. He concluded from this that the metaphysical ideas—the idea of God, of the immortality of the soul and of freedom—cannot be justified by means of those demonstrations which are used to prove the truths of mathematics and the natural sciences. But in The Critique of Practical Reason, reason attains an almost complete compensation: in place of the idea of necessity that has been taken away from it, it is offered the idea of the “should,” of duty, of the imperative whose categorical character can compensate man for the heavy loss he has sustained. It is impossible to preserve ratio veri and to defend it against freedom but, thanks to the practical reason, ratio boni remains unshakable: Kant succeeded in maintaining it against all attacks, and “deduced” his famous ethical “law,” the source and foundation of morality.

His successors, however, could not be content with this “almost” complete compensation and could not forget the losses that had been sustained. The harshest reproaches that Hegel made against Kant relate to The Critique of Practical Reason: the “ought” or duty does not replace the “necessary,” even in the domain of the ethical. Only “the critique of reason,” in the form that we find it in Descartes, can satisfy the man who thinks and furnish a solid base for philosophy. Just as in Kant, God, the immortality of the soul, and freedom are transferred into the intelligible world or, rather, unintelligible world, which has no relationship with us; the practical reason blends into the theoretical reason, and on our earth an unshakable order which assures “knowledge” with its eternal, irrevocable truths in saecula saeculorum is established. But neither Descartes nor Kant stopped before the question: whence comes the power of reason and its eternal truths? Still less did they think of what this power brings to men. They did not even believe it necessary to ask themselves—even if only to give their investigation formal perfection and desired fullness—whether metaphysics must really be a knowledge or science, whether the true goal of metaphysics and every prolegomena to it does not consist precisely in the testing of the pretensions of the eternal truths to reign over men and over all being. But it was with just this that the Judeo-Christian thought—the thought to which was revealed the truth of the one omnipotent God, Creator of heaven and earth—should have been concerned before everything else.

None of the influential “Christian philosophers” of modern times—neither the dogmatic Descartes nor the critical Kant—even tried to construct a philosophy having as its point of departure the revealed truth. On the contrary, I repeat, all of them applied themselves exclusively to driving out of our world the revealed truth, to relegating it to another world which has no relationship with ours. This tendency is expressed with particular force in the philosophy of Leibniz. Leibniz did not wish to awaken from his dogmatic slumber—not even later to go back, like Kant, to sleep more deeply. He was no longer willing to pay tribute to God, be it only in words, in order later to forget Him and to follow Caesar alone. It was not given Leibniz to debate with Kant but every time he recalled or there was recalled to him Descartes’ omnis ratio veri et boni, Leibniz, ordinarily so reserved and calm, lost his self-control and was quite beside himself. We must assume that when he said “I despise almost nothing” the “almost” referred to the interpretation Descartes had given of the divine omnipotence. One can discuss everything in a calm and respectful tone, but limitless, unrestrained arbitrariness—even if it be the arbitrariness of God—is worthy only of scorn. Man, angels, God—all equally must recognize the power of reason. “For by what means will the true God be distinguished from the false god of Zoroaster if all things depend on the caprice of an abstract power, without there being any rule or regard for anything whatsoever?” be asks in the Treatise which precedes the Theodicy.83 And he repeats the same thing in the New Essays: “Faith must be grounded in reason . . . without this why should we prefer the Bible to the Koran or to the old books of the Brahmans?”⁸⁴ This argument appeared to him absolutely irresistible. Several pages further he declares: “Revelation cannot go contrary to clear evidence.” And he immediately explains: “because even when revelation is immediate and original, we must know with evidence that we are not in error in attributing it to God.”⁸⁵

And indeed, who will guide us in our choice? Leibniz forgets only one thing: what if reason chooses not the Bible but the Koran or the old books of the Brahmans? But he should have thought of this possibility. Perhaps reason will reject the Koran but it is certain that if one gives it a choice between the Bible and the ancient books of the Brahmans, it will without hesitation prefer the latter, for the Bible is not afraid to contradict the self-evidences while the wisdom of the Brahmans is founded on these self-evidences. Yet Leibniz does not account for this. His argumentation, I repeat, appears to him absolutely irrefutable, as it doubtless does to most of those who read him. And he never loses an occasion to reproach Descartes for his attitude: “This is why I also find completely strange the expression of certain other philosophers who say that the eternal truths of metaphysics and geometry and, consequently, also the rules of goodness, justice and perfection are only the effects of God’s will; it seems to me instead that they are only consequences of His understanding which assuredly does not at all depend on His will, no more than on His essence,” he writes in the Discourse on Metaphysics. After reporting in the Theodicy both Bayle’s reflections on Descartes and his disciples who believed that God is “the free cause of the truths and the essences” and Bayle’s confession that despite all his efforts he had not succeeded in understanding this idea of Descartes but hoped that “time would resolve this beautiful paradox,” Leibniz indignantly declares: “Is it possible that the pleasure of doubting can exercise so much influence over a clever man as to make him desire and hope to believe that two contradictories are never found together only because God has forbidden this to them, and that He could also have ordered them always to go together? What an excellent paradox this is!”

I hope that the reader will not reproach me for these long quotations from Leibniz: again, and for the last time, we are now before the basic question which the Middle Ages posed and which, from the Middle Ages, passed into modern and contemporary philosophy—the question of the created truth. Leibniz, who knew Scholasticism as well as Descartes and who, like Descartes, posed in all his writings as the faithful champion of Christianity, was organically incapable of “accepting” a truth created by God. Such a truth seemed to him the height of absurdity, and if it appeared that the Bible was called to proclaim it to men, he would have renounced the Bible as well as the God of the Bible without the least hesitation. Even Bayle, who had agreed with Descartes that omnis ratio veri depends on the will of God and that God could establish the principle of contradiction but that He could and can also suppress it, when he comes to the second part of Descartes’ formula—omnis ratio boni [everything which is good]: depends on God—refuses to follow Descartes. He declares with genuine terror that it is impossible to accept or admit this. God Himself must be held in leash—otherwise what catastrophes He could unloose! But the eternal and uncreated truths are, of course, something else: they will never harm anyone.

Whence came this lack of trust in God in Bayle and in Leibniz, while they showed themselves quite disposed to confide their destiny to the eternal, uncreated truths? It is in vain that we shall await from them an answer to this question. Even more—Leibniz, who protects us with so much care against the arbitrariness of God, shows himself ready to accept in advance all that the eternal truths may bring with them. “The ancients,” he writes, “attributed the cause of evil to matter, which they believed to be uncreated and independent of God. But where shall we, who derive all being from God, find the source of evil? The answer is that it must be sought in the ideal nature of the creature, insofar as this nature is contained in the eternal truths that are in the mind of God independently of His will.” Can one say, after such a confession, that in the person of its most influential representatives modern philosophy has preserved any bond with the Judeo-Christian Audi Israel? What Leibniz tells us with such assurance leads us back to the separatus intellectus [the separate intellect] of Aristotle: Leibniz’s thought continues to seek the truth as if between the Greeks and himself nothing important or significant had happened.

It must still be added: what we have just heard from Leibniz constitutes the point of departure of the philosophy of Descartes, who lived before Leibniz, and of Kant, who considered himself the destroyer of the dogmatism of Leibniz and Wolf. And all this had been prepared by the Scholastic philosophy. Quoting the well-known passage from St. Augustine’s Confessions:86 “Whence comes evil? Or was there an evil matter, out of which He made it? And did He form and order matter in such a way that He still left in it something that He did not change into good? Why now this?” Gilson asks: “But how could Augustine excuse a creator-God for having made matter evil or even only of having left it as how He found it?” And indeed, how could St. Augustine accept this? But with still greater justification it might be asked: how could Leibniz “excuse” God for having created bad truths or, if He did not create them and found them ready-made, for having preserved them as He found them? However, neither St. Augustine nor the Scholastics nor Leibniz raised such questions. As far as matter is concerned, God can still manage it: Leibniz agrees to admit, as the Bible demands, that God created matter. But as for the ideal truths, this is something else: men and God Himself must submit to them; here begins the domain which non cadit sub omnipotentia Dei. At the same time Leibniz realizes clearly that these truths, which have entered into the mind of God without His will, show themselves to be precisely the source of all evil, of all the horrors of terrestrial existence. But this does not trouble him: he agrees to all, provided only that he can “understand,” that he can “know.”

Furthermore, and one cannot repeat this too often, when Leibniz expresses such judgments, he is expressing not only his own point of view. So thought the ancients, so thought the Scholastics, and so thought Descartes and all who came after him. No one has ever recognized Descartes’ omnis ratio veri et boni [everything which is true and good]—Descartes himself no more than others. If historians of philosophy happen to recall it, this is only in passing (Schelling and Hegel even speak of it in their course on the history of philosophy); but most of the time they do not think of it. It is clear to everyone that the eternal truths entered the mind of God without asking permission of Him, and that Descartes himself could not think otherwise. No philosopher, however, permitted himself to state as candidly and as light-heartedly as Leibniz that the eternal truths or, as he puts it, the ideal principles, are the source of evil. Since the most ancient times it has been assumed that the responsibility for evil falls upon matter. But it appears that it is not matter, of which one can somehow or other rid oneself (in the Greeks catharsis led to “the delivery of the soul from the body”), but the ideal principles, from which one cannot escape, that are to blame. Leibniz and medieval philosophy taught, it is true, that amends for the evil which the ideal principles bring will be made by God in another world. With a truly puzzling “lightness,” Leibniz develops at length the theme that if God, giving way to the demands of the eternal truths, was obliged to admit certain imperfections “here,” “there” imperfections will no longer exist. Why? Will the eternal truths and the intellectus separatus that bore them and preserves them in its bosom ever renounce, in the other world, their power to do evil? Will the principle of contradiction and all that it brings with it cease “there” to be noli me tangere [do not touch me] and liberate the Creator?

It is difficult to believe that the perceptive Leibniz could have overlooked this question; but, enchanted by the ancient eritis scientes [you will know], he aspired to knowledge, nothing but knowledge which, for him, is eternal salvation. Evil must be “explained”—that is all that is demanded of philosophy, whether it be Judeo-Christian or pagan: credo ut intelligam [I believe so that I understand]. The victim of a kind of enthusiasm, Leibniz proclaims in an inspired tone: “The eternal truths, the objects of wisdom, are more inviolable than the Styx. These laws do not constrain: they are stronger, for they persuade.”87 The eternal truths that entered the mind of God without His permission are forever inviolable, like the Styx, even more than the Styx: they have “persuaded” Leibniz, have persuaded all of us. How have they persuaded us? By their “constraint.” No matter what they bring, we will not permit ourselves to argue with them, we will accept everything submissively and joyfully. If they proclaim that evil must exist in the world, that there must be more evil than good, we will accept it; how could we argue with them, since they are not content to constrain but also persuade us? If they brought it about that the good disappeared completely and only evil remained in the world, this also would have to be accepted; and if one day this happens, we shall submit: so boundless is their power.

Leibniz’s theodicy reduces itself finally to this: basing himself on the ideal, uncreated principles, Leibniz shows that, insofar as and because they exist, evil must necessarily exist in the world. His theodicy, then, is not a justification of God but a justification or, more accurately, a voluntary perpetuation, of evil. How can we doubt after this that Leibniz’s “will,” the will of the man who knows, is enslaved and that it is a question here not de libero but de servo arbitrio [not free but unfree will], of an enchantement et assoupissement surnaturel [supernatural enchantment and slumber]?

If Hegel was wrong to declare that the biblical serpent did not deceive the man with his eritis scientes, he was perfectly right from a historical point of view. The fruits of the tree of knowledge became the source of philosophy for all time. Medieval philosophy, which was born and developed in the bosom of the most intense religious searching, was also incapable—and this despite the undeniable genius of its greatest representatives—of overcoming the temptation of rational knowledge. It sought the truth from the intellectus separatus, to which the entire universe and its Creator as well were subordinated. Modern philosophy merely continued and perfected the work of Scholasticism: the intellectus separatus (the Bewusstsein überhaupt [consciousness in general] of German idealism) was installed, in it, in the place of the biblical Deus omnipotens, ex nihilo creans omnia [the allpowerful God who makes all things out of nothing]. When Nietzsche proclaimed that we have killed God, he expressed briefly the conclusion to which the millennial development of European thought had led.

Can one, then, still speak, with Gilson, of a Judeo-Christian philosophy? I think we can. But to find it we must leave the high road that the development of European philosophy has followed. As we have already had occasion to become convinced, history has preserved the memory of a series of extremely remarkable and audacious attempts to oppose to the eternal truths discovered by reason the Bible’s created truth. These broke completely with the ancient philosophy, and had for their origin the conviction that knowledge, and the wisdom of the Greeks founded on this knowledge, are the consequence of man’s fall. Hence Luther’s De Servo Arbitrio, hence Pascal’s enchantement et assoupissement surnaturel. Knowledge does not free man but enslaves him by handing him over to the power of truths as invincible as the Styx but also, like the Styx, death–dealing; and the wisdom founded on this knowledge accustoms men to love and bless the truths of the Styx. It is only by overcoming in himself “presumptuousness” (not pride, but false pride), “the monster without whose killing man cannot live,” that man acquires the faith which reawakens his slumbering spirit: this is what Luther’s sola fide means. Luther and Pascal follow in the direct line of Tertullian who denied all our pudet, ineptum, impossibile, and of Peter Damian who, following the Bible, had the daring to see in the cupiditas scientiae, in the avidity with which our reason aspires to universal and necessary truths (that is, truths as inexorable as the Styx), the source of all the evils and horrors of terrestrial life.

But the distant past has no monopoly on these solitary thinkers. The scientific Nineteenth Century produced Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard, who refuse to recognize the eternal truths of knowledge and the wisdom founded on them. Nietzsche’s “will to power,” his “beyond good and evil,” his “morality of masters” which he opposes to the “morality of slaves” and through which already appeared the idea of the truth of masters (the truth over which the son of man rules as over the Sabbath)—these are only a desperate attempt to leave the tree of knowledge and return to the tree of life. And this is also the meaning of Dostoevsky’s writings: where rational philosophy with its “two times two makes four,” its “walls of stone” and other eternal truths discovers a source of peace, calmness, and even mystic satisfaction (the eternal truths not only constrain but persuade us, as Leibniz said), Dostoevsky sees the beginning of death. For Kierkegaard, the spiritual double of Dostoevsky, speculative philosophy is an abomination of desolation precisely because it disregards the omnipotence of God. Speculative philosophy bows down before the self-evidences: Kierkegaard proclaims the existential philosophy, the source of which is faith and which overcomes the self-evidences. He leaves Hegel, the famous professor publicus [well-renowned professor], to go to the private thinker Job; he opposes to the reason of the Greeks the Absurd. The beginning of philosophy is not wonder, as in Plato and Aristotle, but despair (de profundis ad te, Domine, clamavi [out of the depths I cried unto Thee, O Lord]). He replaces credo ut intelligam [I believe so that I may understand] with credo ut vivam [I believe so that I may live]. The model of the “thinker,” in his eyes, is not Socrates who, as Kierkegaard himself admits, was the most remarkable of all men who lived before Europe received the Bible, but Abraham, the father of faith. In Abraham faith was a new dimension of thought that the world had not known before, that did not find any place on the level of ordinary consciousness, and that exploded all the “constraining truths” which our “experience” and our “reason” have whispered to us. Only such a philosophy can call itself Judeo-Christian, a philosophy which proposes not to accept but to overcome the self-evidences and which introduces into our thought a new dimension—faith. For it is only on these conditions that the idea of the Creator as the source and master not only of real but ideal being, for which the Judeo-Christian philosophy has striven and—according to Gilson—must strive, can be realized.

This is why the Judeo-Christian philosophy can accept neither the fundamental problems nor the principles nor the technique of thought of rational philosophy. When Athens proclaims urbi et orbi: “If you wish to subject everything to yourself, subject yourself to reason,” Jerusalem hears through these words, “All these things will I give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me,” and answers, “Get thee hence, Satan, for it is written Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and Him only shalt thou serve.”