The Return to Reality
THE RETURN TO REALITY JUST a very few years ago reigning human intelli-gence seemed to have gone swimming in mystical currents. Digesting Spengler was a sign of advanced culture; listening to some...
...But it must, above all, not make us forget that even the humble, who will never understand the difference between ens and essentia, can help to realize the central purpose of Thomism if they will but cling steadily to the vita ecclesiae...
...Briefly stated, it is this: since the war the theories of Einstein and the fresh emphasis laid upon parts of Catholic philosophic traditionalism have joined in recommending three or four important conclusions...
...and one who reads such a work as the Vocabu-laire which various French savants have compiled may well be led to believe that modern desire to define precisely the terms of thought has inaugurated a new scholastic discussion...
...Indeed there is some danger lest the Summa, which our great saint inlaid so carefully into a theological system, should become the pasture of a certain rationalistic faddism...
...But the facts equally suggest that we may be on the boundaries of a new life...
...and he is now a convenient centre to which we can attach whatever of that experience comes home to ourselves...
...We observe with pleasure that the well-known Dominican theologian, P. Garrigou-Lagrange, has dealt with just this matter in a book devoted to Mysticism and Christian Perfection...
...and it is very hard to strip a system of thought of its slowly evolved mode of expression...
...Victory in this struggle has not yet been guaranteed, but it is in the offing...
...listening to some wanderer from Punjab expounding the mysteries of oriental reverie was a manifesto of social prestige...
...The universe studied by natural science is once again plainly a universe of mystery, so independent of man that no pictures of it arrived at by him a priori are even remotely adequate...
...It is not an intuitional-ist philosophy, to be sure, and quite frankly stands apart from Anselmian ways...
...Philosophy is clearer of fog than it has been for a good many years...
...And one seems to notice, in the literatures of cultured countries, a rationally controlled outlook which is free from the worst of the old schematizations of rationalism...
...Indeed, one occasionally has the suspicion that it is this "life of the Church," so admirably set forth in Karl Adam's Spirit of Catholicism, which many of us have in mind when we speak of Thomism...
...Even its most humdrum details are hallowed by that sense of the life of the Church-the holy spirit of the middle-ages-which modern dissident ages have so largely forgotten...
...In an essay on recent books about Descartes, Mr...
...And since the mass of men is always eager to follow such a lead, the supply of pseudo-mysticisms rivaled the array of magazines at a railroad newsstand...
...The tendency now is to "humanize" Aquinas-to stress anew his clarification of Aristotle, his divinations of cosmic structure, his analysis of the intrinsic "life-purpose...
...That is a victory which may earn numerous and splendid spoils.d spoils...
...The great saint summarized so much of what had been the long experience of saint and sages...
...At all events, the concordance between an old doctrine and a modern science is impressive and has not gone unnoticed...
...Saint Thomas is here shown as one who, far from spending his time splitting hairs in a logical laboratory remote from actuality was interested in reconstructing and ennobling the whole plan of human life...
...A recent writer, noting the flood of contemporary religious publications, observes: "People are drawn to Saint Thomas precisely because he was a saint and a mystic-not merely the author of the Summa contra gentiles, but the great poet of the Holy Eucharist...
...Thus he becomes something like the creator of a satisfactory metaphysical formula, a little more advanced than C H O, but essentially not very different...
...Today all is changed...
...To him the laws of the natural world were anticipatory of, were complemented by, the equally permanent laws of the spiritual universe...
...We shall put forward our hypothesis with becoming modesty, realizing full well that it is open to question and yet sure that it suggests a number of interesting points of view...
...But precisely because it is based upon experience it repudiates no variety of experience...
...This is so true that it calls for repeated emphasis, lest the central Catholic philosophy degenerate into a logician's toy...
...For the benefit of his generation, Mr...
...This is all very well, if it imply no narrowness or unjustified criticism of others...
...It may be termed the topic which engrosses Professor Whitehead...
...His philosophy is dogmatic, but not drily Aristotelian...
...But if, on further research, it appears that the differences of religion (of a religion, it is true) and of science are merely logical, differences of mode rather than of mood, then the situation becomes tremendously significant...
...the easy assumption is that we exist in a state of despair...
...It is a little hard to explain the change...
...Their terminology might well be quite different, one being derived from an ancient tradition, the other from a new science...
...And yet the laws of the reasoning mind and of nature concur, so that the finiteness of the cosmos established long ago by classical metaphysicians is now a truism of experimental science...
...And so, in the end, Thomistic doctrine is as close to man as his very breath and as near to God as the pneuma of the Church itself...
...God is the centre of all-not as One Who can conveniently be abstracted from given facts or events, but as the Worker of all good in ourselves and in life...
...This is the form, permitting infinite diversification, which alone is worthy of either God or man...
...Parallels to this passage are numerous, and one makes no error in asserting that interest in Thomistic philosophy is growing everywhere...
...Herbert Read declares: "Only now have we begun to see in Descartes's simple and direct philosophy the source of all the great intellectual sophisms of our age...
...It comes from the spirit and not from the intellect, and it leads toward contemplation...
...Meanwhile all of us may rejoice that the formlessness of spiritual beliefs which grew out of nebulously understood science is being more and more widely repudiated by science itself, and that the structure of the world (in the sense that it is, spiritually and physically, ruled by order) is once again the true wisdom of perennial philosophy...
...During recent years the neo-scholastic movement has generally been forced to battle against a tendency to identify Thomism with the thirteenth century-to encase it in swaddling clothes proper to an epoch, and to renounce every contact with a more modern era...
...One needs, therefore, to reaffirm the essentially mystical quality of Thomism...
...T. S. Eliot defines civilization as "spiritual and intellectual coordination on a high level"-which is, at least, miles away from the swamps of Freud...
...It would be interesting to inquire how far these two quite different schools of thought coincide-how near, that is to say, they approach each other in their metaphysical assumptions...
...Obviously we exist, as an age or an epoch, in a state of indecision...
...Criticism fatal to it comes from two quite different camps: it is a doctrine of that revival of scholasticism represented in France by M. Maritain, and it is a corollary of the most recent advances of science...
...Thus the charms of subjectivism have been marred, if not dispelled, and the way is clear for other triumphs of critical realism-the innate "necessity" of ethical mandates, the fact that culture is not a mechanism but a unity spiritually experienced, which reposes upon a coordination of varying relations to one and the same objective being, and the realization that "purposive-ness" is inseparable from life...
Vol. 11 • February 1930 • No. 15
