Etienne Gilson Quotes
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Modern man, brought up on Kantian idealism, regards nature as being no more than an outcome of the laws of the mind. Losing all their independence as divine works, things gravitate henceforth round human thought, whence their laws are derived. What wonder, after that, is if criticism had resulted in the virtual disappearance of all metaphysics? As soon as the universe is reduced to the laws of mind, man, now become creator, has no longer any means of rising above himself. Legislator of a world to which his own mind has given birth, he is henceforth the prisoner of his own work, and he will never escape from it anymore. If my thought is the condition of being, never by thought shall I be able to transcend the limits of my being and my capacity for the infinite will never be satisfied.
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For St. Thomas Aquinas the problem was rather different. It was a question of how to integrate philosophy into sacred science, not only without allowing either the one or the other to suffer essentially thereby, but to the greater benefit of both. In order to achieve this result, he had to integrate a science of reason with a science of revelation without corrupting at the same time both the purity of reason and the purity of revelation.
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The Middle Ages were long preoccupied with the nature of the concept, or of the notion which the intellect abstracts from the object; but they never doubted that its content was borrowed from the content of the object, still less that the object really existed.
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Humans feel at home in a world of things, whose essences and laws it can grasp and define in terms of concepts; but shy and ill at ease in a world of existences, because to exist is an act, not a thing.
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He (E.A.Poe) cannot be blamed for not saying clearly what beauty is. The greatest philosophers in the world acknowledge in the end that the best one can do is to recognize it when it is there.
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But if one decides to start with Descartes and finish with Aristotle, and to employ an idealist method while shamelessly making use of a reality one has no right to, one brings confusion into the heart of philosophy and makes its cultivation impossible. To make it possible again is the reason why realists are realists and call themselves such. They too follow a method, but they do not lay down beforehand what that method is to be, as though it were a necessary pre-condition for their philosophy. Instead, they find their method in their philosophy. So they never have to ask themselves whether it is legitimate to transform their method into a metaphysics, because their method is that metaphysics, which is fully aware of its proceedings, of its initial positions, and of their implications.
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The God of St. Thomas and Dante is a God Who loves, the god of Aristotle is a god who does not refuse to be loved; the love that moves the heavens and the stars in Aristotle is the love of the heavens and the stars for god, but the love that moves them in St. Thomas and Dante is the love of God for the world; between these two motive causes there is all the difference between an efficient cause on the one hand, and a final cause on the other.
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Man is not a mind that thinks, but a being who knows other beings as true, who loves them as good and who enjoys them as beautiful. For all that which is, down to the humblest form of existence, exhibits the inseparable privileges of being, which are truth, goodness, and beauty.
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Radiance belongs to being considered precisely as beautiful: it is, in being, that which catches the eye, or the ear, or the mind, and makes us want to perceive it again.
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What a man finds circa se or sub se is overwhelming in amount, what he finds in se is embarassing in its obscurity, but when from his own being he would obtain light as to what is supra se, then indeed he finds himself face to face with a dark and somewhat terrifying mystery. The trouble is that he is himself involved in the mystery. If, in any true sense, man is an image of God, how should he know himself without knowing God? But if it is really of God that he is an image, how should he know himself?
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To minds tormented by the divine thirst, it is useless to offer the most certain knowledge of the laws of numbers and the arrangement of the universe.
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History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought.
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When man subverted order he did a great deal more than merely fall away from the rationality of his nature, diminish his own humanity, which is all that he does in Aristostle's ethics, nor he did merely compromise his destiny by an error, as it happens in the Plathonic myths; he brought disorder into the divine order, and presents the unhappy spectacle of a being in revolt against Being. Every time a man sins he renews this act of revolt and prefers himself to God; in thus preferring himself, he separates himself from God; and in separating himself, he deprives himself of the sole end in which he can find beatitude and by that very fact condemns himself to misery.
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Why are there organized beings? Why is there something rather than nothing? Here again, I fully understand a scientist who refuses to ask it. He is welcome to tell me that the question does not make sense. Scientifically speaking, it does not. Metaphysically speaking, however, it does. Science can account for many things in the world; it may some day account for all that which the world of phenomena actually is. But why anything at all is, or exists, science knows not, precisely because it cannot even ask the question.
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For theology to remain formally one as a science, all the natural knowledge it contains must be directed and subordinated to the point of view proper to the theologian, which is that of revelation. Thus incorporated into the theological order, human learning becomes a part of the sacred doctrine which is founded on faith.
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There must necessarily be agreement between a reason coming from God and a revelation coming from God.46 Let us say, then, that faith teaches truths which seem contrary to reason; let us not say that it teaches propositions contrary to reason. The rustic thinks it contrary to reason that the sun should be larger than the earth. But this proposition seems reasonable to the scientist.47 Let us rest assured that apparent incompatibility between faith and reason is similarly reconciled in the infinite wisdom of God.
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Just as it is by His goodness that God gives being to beings, so also it is by His goodness that He makes causes to be causes, thus delegating to them a certain participation in His actuality. Or rather, since causality flows from actuality, let us say that He confers the one in conferring the other, so that to the Christian mind the physical world in which we live offers a face which is the reverse of its physicism itself, a face where all that was read on the one side in terms of force, energy and law, is now read, on the other in terms of participations and analogies of the Divine Being. The Christian world takes on the character of a sacred world with a relation to God inscribed in its very being and every law that rules its functioning.
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Philosophy always buries its undertakers.
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God creates, not that there may be witnesses to render Him His due glory, but beings who shall rejoice in it as He rejoices in it Himself and who, participating in His being, participate at the same time in His beatitude. It is not therefore for Himself, but for us, that God seeks His glory; it is not to gain it, for He posses it already, nor to increase it, for already it is perfect, but to communicate it to us.
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Pure sensism leads inevitably to universal doubt; if reality is in the end reducible to sensible appearance, then, since this is in a state of perpetual flux and self-contradiction, no kind of certitude will any longer be possible. Truth is necessary and immutable; but in the sensible order nothing necessary or immutable is to be found; therefore sensible things will never yield us any truth.
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Faith comes to intelligence as a light that overflows it with joy and inspires it with a certitude that does away with question.
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As long as one makes some kind of conscious state, whether a “passive sensation” or an “apprehended”, come before reality, one will remain more or less in debt to the idealist method. The realist method pursues an exactly opposite course. Every given reality implies the thought which apprehends it. Therefore being is the condition of knowing; knowing is not the condition of being. When this has been established, another step in the direction of metaphysics can be taken.
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What is necessary is that epistemology, instead of being the pre-condition for ontology, should grow in it and with it, being at the same time a means and an object of explanation, helping to uphold, and itself upheld by, ontology, as the parts of any true philosophy mutually will sustain each other.
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Faith in revelation does not destroy the rationality of our knowledge but rather permits it to develop more fully. Even as, indeed, grace does not destroy nature but heals and perfects it, so faith, through the influence it wields from above over reason as reason, permits the development of a far more true and fruitful rational activity.