History of Modern Philosophy eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 841 pages of information about History of Modern Philosophy.

History of Modern Philosophy eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 841 pages of information about History of Modern Philosophy.
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.

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History of Modern Philosophy from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.