13. In view of this, it is evident that a philosophy can be Christian and yet to a greater or lesser degree fall short of the requirements of its philosophic nature. When this happens, we have less to deal with Christian philosophy than with its decadence or disintegration; an instance of which was seen in the days when Occamism held sway in the Universities.

Thus we are led to distinguish between what we may call an organic Christian regime, such as human intelligence knew (not without many a flaw) in the finest hour of medieval civilization, and a dissociated Christian regime, which it experienced during subsequent epochs. In point of fact, Western philosophy has never set itself free of Christianity: wherever Christianity did not have a hand in the construction of modern philosophy it served instead as a stumbling-block. In this context, Nicholas Berdyaev would say that all great modern philosophies (and even, to be sure, that of a Feuerbach) are "Christian" philosophies, philosophies which without Christianity would not be what they are.

Let us bear in mind that if we are to grasp Christian thought in its integrity we must take into account not only philosophy (even Christian) but also, and inseparably, theology and the wisdom of the contemplatives. Today as a consequence of the breakdown of Christian unity, philosophy has fallen heir to all kinds of tasks, preoccupations, and troubles which in former times were part and parcel of the other two forms of wisdom. (An example of this is seen in the idea of the Kingdom of God, which the philosophers turned into the Realm of Minds and finally into Mankind in the sense of a Herder or an Auguste Comte.) As philosophy became inwardly less Christian it grew fat on the leftovers of Christian consciousness. This accounts for the paradox of a philosophy like that of Descartes, or even of Hegel, appearing more deeply tinged with Christianity and less strictly philosophic than the formally Aristotelian (but inspirationally supra-Aristotelian) philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas.