19. We have stated that Christian philosophy ought not to succumb to pride. Have we laid enough stress on the privileges to which we were then alluding? Our reflections on the state and existential conditions of thought forbid that we minimize their importance. We not only stated that a Christian state exists for the philosophizing human subject, for the philosopher; whereupon we could merely conclude that there are Christian philosophers: we said that there exists a Christian state for philosophy itself, and therefore that there are not only Christian philosophers but there is a Christian philosophy as well. Philosophy is of necessity in a Christian or non-Christian state, that is to say, in the modern world and for those regions to which the New Law has been promulgated, in a Christian state or in a state fallen from Christianity, in a state of integral nature or a state of deviation. This explains the unhappy state of affairs -- somewhat humiliating for the philosopher, but which it would be more humiliating still to refuse to face, -- which consists in the fact that the very word philosophy has become fairly equivocal depending on whether it is used by one group or another. When certain modern idealists discuss the nature of philosophy they are talking of something almost entirely different from what we who believe in the reality of things understand by this term: an indefinable something which began to achieve self-awareness no more than three centuries ago, which has no specifying object, and which consists ultimately in devouring and reflecting upon the findings of the physicists and the mathematicians. It is not impossible to discern at the root of this conception a vague craving to win for the human mind the plenteous self-satisfaction which Jean Jacques attributed to divinity when he expressed a wish to be "like God," -- fully content with himself and his conscience.

This is indeed a far cry from the idea of wisdom, which Christian Scholasticism for a while managed to bestow on our civilization.

For we can hardly repeat it too often: it was the Scholastic doctors who, by distinguishing in most rigorous fashion the order of knowledge from that of affectivity, by regulating their thought exclusively in accordance with the objective exigencies of being, taught Western civilization the value of truth and what speculative purity, or chastity, ought to be -- a complete detachment from every biological consideration and all urging of the appetites, a sheer disinterest, even in those concerns which man holds most sacred. Is it not precisely for this too thorough speculative indifference to subjective propensities and tastes, for its too pure objectivity, that many thinkers cannot see fit to forgive Thomism? It was the devotion of the Christian era to the Incarnate Truth which enabled the intelligence to rise to the superior level of purity which was to serve science itself so well when it came to work out its own distinctive methods. The medieval intelligence was, as it were, infatuated with objectivity by the very fact that it was fixed on a superhuman object. Rationalism, through its denial of all truth above the level of reason, that is to say, by conceding reason priority over truth, has been a first and radical breach of contemplative objectivity. In our own day it is in the sphere of phenomenal science alone that a last trace of this speculative purity has been finally preserved. I have no fault to find with present-day rationalists, such as Mr. Brunschvicg, for their admiration and reverence for the intellectual ascesis of the physicist. My reproach bears rather on their failure to see therein a first step or a first inclination toward an ascesis and spirituality of the intelligence which finds its only normal goal in the loving contemplation of the saints.

It is no great accomplishment for a philosophy to be dramatic, it need only give way to its human penchants. But there are two ways for a philosophy not to be so: either not to appreciate the drama of human life, or to be too keenly aware of it. The latter, in my judgment, is the case of Thomism. It was not only at the cost of a rigorous discipline that the thought schooled in the Middle Ages learned to train its sights on the sole and immaculate truth: it was thanks as well to a distinctively Christian love of the sanctity of truth. The daring which reason evinces in scientific research betrays at its first historical inception a moment surpassing mere reason: an absolute, God-given certitude which faith affords the Christian, that by turning his regard from man to seek truth in its purity there is no danger of working against man; for God is; and the outcome is His concern; and we love Him for Himself and all else for His sake. It is because, at a certain moment of history, men knew that God was Subsisting Truth; and because they loved above all One who said: "The truth will set you free," and "I am come into the world to give testimony to the truth," and "I am the truth;" it is for all this that despite every obstacle, a religious respect for truth has -- or had -- developed in the heart of our culture, and that all truth even the most obscure, the most importunate, or the most dangerous, has become sacred, simply because it is truth.

When we declare that the Christian state of philosophy is a superior and privileged one, it is first and above all because in this state alone philosophy can fully recognize that truth is holy insofar as it is truth, and approach holy truth with a respect that is plenary and universal -- with a respect that is so human in the highest sense of this word that its supra-human origin must be acknowledged.