inclines toward the ideal of a Christian philosophy;
which, however, Scholasticism, in his view, did not
attain, inasmuch as its thought was heathen in its
blind reverence for Aristotle, even though its faith
was Christian. In order to heal this breach between
the head and the heart, it is necessary in religion
to return from confessional distinctions to Christianity
itself, and in philosophy, to abandon authority for
the reason. We should not seek to be Lutherans
or Calvinists, but simply Christians, and we should
judge on rational grounds, instead of following Aristotle,
Averroes, or Thomas Aquinas. Anyone who does
not aim at the harmony of theology and philosophy,
is neither a Christian nor a philosopher. One
and the same God is the primal source of both rational
and revealed truth. Philosophy is the basis of
theology, theology the criterion and complement of
philosophy. The one starts with effects evident
to the senses and leads to the suprasensible, to the
First Cause; the other follows the reverse course.
To philosophy belongs all that Adam knew or could
know before the fall; had there been no sin, there
would have been no other than philosophical knowledge.
But after the fall, the reason, which informs us,
it is true, of the moral law, but not of the divine
purpose of salvation, would have led us to despair,
since neither punishment nor virtue could justify
us, if revelation did not teach us the wonders of
grace and redemption. Although Taurellus thus
softens the opposition between theology and philosophy,
which had been most sharply expressed in the doctrine
of “twofold truth” (that which is true
in philosophy may be false in theology, and conversely),
and endeavors to bring the two into harmony, the antithesis
between God and the world still remains for him immovably
fixed. God is not things, though he is all.
He is pure affirmation; all without him is composed,
as it were, of being and nothing, and can neither
be nor be known independently: negatio non
nihil est, alias nec esset nec intelligeretur, sed
limitatio est affirmationis. Simple being
or simple affirmation is equivalent to infinity, eternity,
unity, uniqueness,—properties which do not
belong to the world. He who posits things as
eternal, sublates God. God and the world are opposed
to each other as infinite cause and finite effect.
Moreover, as it is our spirit which philosophizes
and not God’s spirit in us, so the faith through
which man appropriates Christ’s merit is a free
action of the human spirit, the capacity for which
is inborn, not infused from above; in it, God acts
merely as an auxiliary or remote cause, by removing
the obstacles which hinder the operation of the power
of faith. With this anti-pantheistic tendency
he combines an anti-intellectualistic one—being
and production precedes and stands higher than contemplation;
God’s activity does not consist in thought but
in production, and human blessedness, not in the knowledge
but the love of God, even though the latter presupposes
the former. While man, as an end in himself,
is immortal—and the whole man, not his
soul merely—the world of sense, which has
been created only for the conservation of man (his
procreation and probation), must disappear; above
this world, however, a higher rears its walls to subserve
man’s eternal happiness.