Conclusions

12. These explanations, which touch on concrete relationships that extend indefinitely, could be carried to considerable length. Reducing them to essentials, however, I have held to a simple outline, my sole purpose being to work out in more precise detail the meaning of the distinction I have made between philosophy considered in its nature and philosophy considered in its state in the human mind.

We see now how the expression Christian philosophy does not designate a simple essence but a complex, that is, an essence taken in a particular state. Whence some unavoidable want of precision surrounding this expression, which for that matter stands for something very real. Christian philosophy is not a determinate body of truths, although, in my opinion, the doctrine of St. Thomas exemplifies its amplest and purest form. Christian philosophy is philosophy itself in so far as it is situated in those utterly distinctive conditions of existence and exercise into which Christianity has ushered the thinking subject, and as a result of which philosophy perceives certain objects and validly demonstrates certain propositions, which in any other circumstances would to a greater or lesser extent elude it. This is, therefore, entirely an interior qualification, which informs and molds the determining marks of a particular doctrinal family. Thus once more do we arrive at Mr. Gilson's conclusions: "Though their relationship is intrinsic, the two orders remain distinct." This relationship is not an accidental one: it results from the very nature of philosophy, from its natural longing to know its proper objects as well as possible, as also from the very nature of the Christian doctrine and life, and from the inner and outer bolstering which they afford reason. So far as Thomism in particular is concerned, first we must say that if it is a philosophy at all, it is so to the point that it is rational, not to the point that it is Christian. For another thing, if we take the viewpoint, not of formal causality, but of historical development, it must be admitted that Thomism owes its standing as a true philosophy not only to reason but also to the sustenance it receives from above, from that which, according to the Eudemian Ethics, being the source of reason, is greater than reason. The fact remains that what counts in a philosophy is not that it is Christian but that it is true. I reiterate, no matter what the conditions of its development and its exercise in the soul may be, philosophy depends on reason; and the truer it is, the more will it remain rigorously faithful -- and if I may say so, fastened -- to its philosophic nature. It is for this reason that far from being shocked, as are some, by the fact that St. Thomas Aquinas procured his philosophical armour from the soundest thinker of pagan antiquity, I find therein a real source of intellectual stimulation.