10. It is highly interesting to note the awkward position into which moral philosophy was forced during the baroque period of Scholasticism. Even the best treatises, like the Summa Philosophiae of Alamannus, could be cited as evidence. The authors of these works understood, on the one hand, the need for a moral philosophy distinct from theology. But then, owing to the established Aristotelico-Christian pedagogical routine, and owing to the fact that the mind advances at a snail's pace toward an awareness of its own internal organization, they failed to bring fully to light those characteristics of a science subalternate to theology which moral philosophy must needs possess the moment it is considered truly adequate to its object and in gradu verae scientiae practicae.^{34}

And so, in order that the course of philosophy might be complete, they taught a so-called purely philosophic moral philosophy; and then, in order that this "philosophy" might be true, and not such as to lead minds astray instead of instructing them, they taught under this heading a sort of fragmentation of moral theology (of the secunda pars of the Summa, to be exact), and in doing so they cut away or covered over the vital nerve thereof (faith and revealed data) and forced it onto the plane of pure nature, while maintaining therein a material disposition and an order or method which were not philosophic but theological. An epistemological monster was the result, -- the inescapable result, since they failed to recognize that moral philosophy is a science subalternate to theology, that is, a philosophy, but not purely philosophic.

{34} One wonders whether Javelli (Cf. his exposition De celsitudine divinae et christianae philosophiae moralis in his Christiana Philosophia, 1640) had not sensed the problem. At all events, he did not make the explicit distinctions requisite in this matter, and thus inevitably ran the risk of confusing in practice "Christian moral philosophy" and theology. See M. D. Chenu's article Javelli in the Dict. de Théol. Catholique, V. VIII; also E. Gilson's L'Esprit de la Philosophie Médiévale, v. II, p. 279.