9. Finally, the fortunes of philosophy are involved both by right and in fact, with that very portion of the revealed deposit which no longer has to do with data rational in their nature but with essentially supernatural mysteries.
This is so, first of all, because in a Christian regime of thought philosophy is used by theology as an instrumental organ in the effort to elucidate these mysteries; how could it possibly not learn many things while being thus led along paths which are not its own?
Secondly, even when it keeps on working on its own account, its field of inquiry is thereupon considerably broadened. Philosophy seeks enlightenment about sensible objects from the natural sciences; what is to prevent it from learning of divine things from faith and theology? "The facts of religion or the established dogmas are objects of my experience," Malebranche declared, -- once they have been brought to my attention, "I employ my mind in the selfsame manner as the student of Physics"; and hereby he shared in the very movement of Christian thought -- this despite the fact that on another level he had made the mistake of lumping together philosophy and theology, and of failing to appreciate that philosophy is powerless to make its abode in a zone of experience which surpasses it. It has often been remarked that unless there had been speculation on the dogmas of the Trinity and the Incarnation, it is exceedingly unlikely that the philosophers would have come to an awareness of the metaphysical problem of the person.
This is not all. The philosopher's experience itself has been revitalized by Christianity. He is offered as a datum a world that is the handiwork of the Word, wherein everything bespeaks the Infinite Spirit to finite spirits who know themselves as spirits. What a starting point! Here is, as it were, a fraternal attitude towards things and reality, -- I mean in so far as they are knowable -- for which the progress of the human mind is indebted to the Christian Middle Ages. There is every indication that it was this attitude which laid the groundwork for the flowering of the empirical sciences on the one hand and for the expansion of reflective knowledge in which modern times pride themselves on the other.
We should do well, finally, to pay attention, with Mr. Gabriel Marcel, to the paradox, the scandal if you wish, confronting reason which resides in the very fact that the quality of the revealed datum absolutely transcends all and every experience that can be constructed on purely human bases. It would seem, then, that there can be no genuinely Christian philosophy "except where this paradox, this scandal, is not merely admitted, or even accepted, but embraced with fervid gratitude and without qualification. As soon as the philosopher seeks, on the contrary, by any means whatsoever to tone down this scandal, disguise this paradox, or catch up the revealed datum in a dialectic of reason or of pure mind, he ceases to that precise extent to be a Christian philosopher." . . . We might say in this same vein that a Christian philosophy "discovers its ontological pivotal center" outside and above the entire philosophic order "in that fact, unique and beyond all compare, which is the Incarnation." And it does not seem exaggerated to assume that in the firmament of the soul the vital impulse which energizes a like philosophy from above consists in a "meditation on all the various implications and consequences of this datum, which is not only unforeseeable but contrary to certain superficial claims of reason which in first instance are wrongly presumed to be unimpeachable." Metaphysical reflection, thus restored to its own authentic natural spirituality, will then proceed to test these claims "in the name of higher claims" -- in the name of claims of a reason which is genuinely pure and "which, moreover, faith in the Incarnation renders capable of achieving full self awareness. . . ."{19}
{19} Gabriel Marcel, Nouvelle Revue des Jeunes, March 15, 1932.