ETIENNE GILSON:

Mediaeval realism

T is worthy of remark, it seems to me, that all the great mediaeval epistemologies were, as we should say to-day, realisms. After more than three centuries of idealist speculation we have in neo-scholasticism, a neo-realism once more, a doctrine that refuses to fall in with the method foreshadowed by Descartes, or at least if it does so tries hard to avoid its conclusions. How did it come about that what seems so obvious to so many of our contemporaries, was never so much as suspected by St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, or Duns Scotus? How, especially, shall we explain that once the necessity of starting from thought itself had been proclaimed, it should now once more be denied by so many modern thinkers, and that all those who attach themselves to the mediaeval tradition should be found among the number? Why, in a word, is every Christian thinker a realist, if not by definition at least by a sort of vocation? This is the problem which, in one of its most important aspects, I would take up to - day; by showing that in a Christian universe, the object of knowledge is of such a nature as to be capable of supporting a realist epistemology.

There was nothing to show, a priori, that this must inevitably be so; and St. Augustine's hesitations are there to prove it. Plato, who inspired him, did not think that the nature of material things is sufficiently consistent to allow them to become the objects of any certain knowledge. For pure thought there is the world of Ideas, and these are the objects of science; but the world of sense, hovering on the borderland between being and non - being, is no basis for anything better than mere opinion. Feeling the need of escape from the uncertainties of the sceptics, St. Augustine was led to embrace this doctrine. Through Plotinus he early understood that 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. Hence those conclusions of uncompromising severity which all the great thinkers of the thirteenth century will be called on to consider: "Whatever is attained by sense, what we call the sensible, never for an instant ceases to change. It matters not what age the body has attained; whether the hair of the head be ungrown, whether it be in the bloom of youth or verging to old age, always it is in a state of uninterrupted becoming. Now what does not remain steady cannot be perceived; for to perceive is to comprehend by science, and the perpetually changing cannot be comprehended. From our corporeal senses, then, no genuine truth is to be looked for."[1] The non est igitur expectanda sinceritas veritatis a sensibus corporis, stands there as a solemn warning, and we pause on it the more readily on account of the numerous mediaeval philosophers who were quite willing to come to terms with it.

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. That may be said to be almost a commonplace in the Augustinian schools of the thirteenth century. St. Bonaventure, Matthew of Aquasparta, Roger Marston and many others taught it - not without some perception of the grave difficulties inherent in the position. It was, in fact, an ever - growing consciousness of these difficulties that led at last to its abandonment, after numerous attempts to save the situation by means of a copious supply of complementary hypotheses. In a doctrine of this kind the knot of the problem lies in the part still left to the object to play; and since the examination of this point led mediaeval thought as near as possible to what we now call idealism, it is instructive to watch it at grips with the temptation and to see just why it refused to succumb.

To simplify the study of the matter let us take it up at the point where it entered on its decidedly critical phase, that is, in St. Bonaventure's most original disciple, Matthew of Aquasparta. Persuaded that the instability of sensible things is such as to provide no basis for any certain knowledge, he was led, naturally enough; to ask whether our knowledge depends on the existence of its object, and he answered this question in the negative. His whole doctrine drove him to this conclusion. Some certainties we undoubtedly possess; science, in short, is possible; but there is nothing in material things that can serve as a basis for this science, and therefore it does not depend on their existence. "Thanks to its active power, the intellectus agens abstracts the universal from the particular, intelligible species from sensible species, essences from actually existing things. Now it is quite certain that universals, intelligible species, and the essences of things are not bound up with any actually existing thing. On the contrary they are quite indifferent to the existence or non-existence of things, they take no account of place or time, so that the existence or non-existence of the thing has nothing to do with our knowledge of it. Thus, just as the intellect may know the essence of a thing by its intelligible species when the thing exists, so also it can know it in the same way even when it does not." Doubtless it might be objected that in that case the object of the intellect would be a mere nought; which would seem to be contradictory. But this gives little trouble to Matthew of Aquasparta. He has, not one only, but two replies.

The first is, that if this nought be taken absolutely, then, no doubt, it is contradictory to suppose that what is nothing can be an object for intellect: it is not contradictory, however, to say that the object of the intellect is the essence of a non-existing thing. Quite the contrary; we might say that the object of the intellect is never the being taken in the sense of existence. In possession of the intelligible species of an essence, that of man, for example, the intellect draws out of it the corresponding concept, but without representing the man either as existing or as not existing. The object of the intellect is thus the essence of the thing independently of its existence: nam, nec re existente, quidditas ut est in rebus, est intellectus objectum. That, then, is one possible solution of the problem. It goes to the point and in a philosophical manner; but Matthew of Aquasparta himself has certain doubts about it, and asks himself whether the question can be wholly set at rest on purely philosophical lines, and without having recourse to theology: iste modus est philosophicus et congruus; non tamen puto, quod sufficiat, et fortassis hic deficiunt principia philosophiae, et recurrendum ad principia theologica. What are his reasons?

The chief one is that if we hold strictly to the philosophic standpoint the sole object that can be guaranteed to the intellect is the concept. Suppose then, for a moment, that our cognition attains nothing but the intelligible species and the concepts drawn from them, then it would have to be admitted that it attains to no reality. It would be a science without object, therefore empty. The most we could say would be that the intellect possesses the science of its own concepts, but since it is indifferent to the question whether any real things correspond to the concepts, its knowledge remains without real content. It is a most remarkable thing that our philosopher is here directing against his own conception of a science of pure essences the very same objections that Aristotle had already directed against the Platonic theory of Ideas. If it is these that constitute the proper object of our science, then, since things are other than the Ideas, our science is no longer a science of things.[2] The only difference, an important one to be sure, is that Matthew of Aquasparta does not count on things to furnish the object of any certain science, so that, in order to reply to the Aristotelian objection that he puts against himself, he has to come back to Plato, or at any rate to Plato as completed by Anselm and Augustine.

What, in fact, is the content of our concept? Not an existence, as we have just said, but then neither is it a pure possible, or pure knowable, but rather a necessary, immutable and eternal truth. As St. Augustine says in his De libero arbitrio (II, 8, 21): "As for all that my bodily senses reach, whether earth, sky or anything else, I know nothing at all about how long they will last; but seven and three make ten, now and for ever, they never have made, and never will make, anything else but ten." Hence it is apparent at once that a necessary science exists, and that it cannot have its source in the contingence of the sensible. What remains then is to recollect that the truth of created things is only a kind of expression of the uncreated truth. St. Augustine says, and St. Anselm puts it on a firm basis in his dialogue De Veritate, that each thing is true only in the measure in which it conforms to its divine exemplar. Let us leave on one side the metaphysical implications of this doctrine, to which indeed we shall soon have to return, and retain only what throws Light on our immediate problem. Well, it does nothing less than give us that object of human cognition we need; not by any means the concept, which is an empty form, nor the sensible thing, too unstable to be grasped; but the conceived essence referred, however, to its divine model: quidditas ipsa concepta ab intellectu nostro, relata tamen ad artem sine exemplar aeternum.[3]

Well and good ! - and the problem, it must be admitted, is handled in a masterly fashion. But then it must be added that this very mastery only brings out more clearly the dangers of the position. If you begin with Plato, then, to remain coherent, you must end with Plato. Matthew of Aquasparta is perfectly coherent, and his science remains always a science of ideas. The ultimate upshot of his analysis is that the object which sensible reality fails to supply to the human intellect is supplied by the divine illumination. Not, certainly, by the divine illumination alone, but the nature of its collaboration with the sensible is such that it is indeed this illumination, and not the sensible, that furnishes that element of stability and necessity of which our science stands in need. This becomes clear when Matthew of Aquasparta asks whether the divine ideas would suffice as basis for this science in the absence of the objects. He replies, as he is bound to do, in the affirmative. That in a certain sense things are the cause of our knowledge is doubtless a fact; but no more than a fact, since the cause wherefore our knowledge becomes science does not lie in things, but in the Ideas. Now these Ideas do not depend on things, the fact is the other way round. Therefore the intellect might very well know by means of the Ideas, even if things did not exist.[4] Things, in short, are not the necessary cause of our science; if God should imprint the species directly upon the intellect, as He does in the case of the angels, we should still know them and know them for such as we do know them.[5]

To reach conclusions of this kind is to admit that pure philosophy is unable by its own resources to secure the foundations of science, and since Matthew of Aquasparta regards the doctrine of illumination as essentially theological, we may say that his epistemology is a philosophical scepticism saved by fideism. That amounts to saying that there is no guarantee of certitude save in faith, and that mediaeval thought is here tending towards the theologism of Occam. The importance of the problem was so much the greater inasmuch as the case of Matthew of Aquasparta did not, and could not, stand alone. His conclusions are bound up with a way of stating the question which is not peculiar to himself, and they follow by way of necessary consequence. Nothing is more interesting than to watch the Augustinians themselves taking note of the danger that threatens them. Olivi would wish to follow the Augustinian tradition, but to follow it, if possible, sine errore, and here is the first error into which he fears to fall: "As regards the intellect we must be careful lest we deny its power of forming true and certain judgments as the Academicians did, careful, too, not to credit it with an original science of all things possessed naturally, as Plato did, who said on that account, that to learn is nothing else than to remember."[6] Faced with the alternative of an innatism that no one desired, and the scepticism that manifestly threatened, what path was left open to mediaeval thought? None, save to rehabilitate the sensible order; and this was what Duns Scotus set out to do, following St. Thomas Aquinas.

For all his desire to stabilize the sensible order and to give it some intelligibility worthy of the name, St. Thomas was never led on that account to derogate from the rights of thought. Nor was he even tempted to do it. Truth, in the full and proper sense of the term, is found in thought alone; for truth lies in the adequation of thing and intellect. Now in this connection it is the intellect that becomes adequate to the thing, it is in the intellect that the adequation is set up, and therefore it is certainly in the intellect that truth resides: ergo nec veritas nisi in intellectu. That said, two other things have to be added if we would understand the Thomist attitude to the problem: first, that the adequation of intellect to object is a real adequation; and secondly, that the things to which the intellect conforms are themselves conformed to another intellect. Let us consider each of these points in turn; for they are essential to any understanding of the Christian position in this matter.

Truth, to put the case precisely, is in the intellect affirming that things are or are not, and judging them to be this and not that. It is commonly objected to-day that this conception of truth as a "copy" will not stand examination, since the intellect is wholly unable to compare the thing as it really is, which it never reaches, with the thing as represented to itself, which is all it can ever know. If modern idealism has nothing more than that to oppose to mediaeval realism, then I venture to say that it no longer has any conception of what a genuine realism is. Undoubtedly, the unfortunate habit we have acquired since Descartes of proceeding always from thought to things, leads us to interpret the adequatio rei et intellectus as if it involved a comparison between the representation of a thing and this mere phantom, which is all that the thing outside all representation can be for us. It is easy to amuse oneself by denouncing the innumerable contradictions in which epistemology involves itself when it enters on this path, but we should have the justice to add, since it is a fact, that the classical mediaeval philosophy never entered on it at all. When it speaks of truth it does indeed refer to the truth of the judgment, but if the judgment is conformed to the thing it is only because the intellect putting forth the judgment has first itself become conformed to the being of the thing. It is of its very essence to be able to become all things in an intelligible manner. Its affirmation, therefore, that such and such a thing is, or is this and not that, is due to the fact that the intelligible being of the thing has become its own. It is true, of course, that we do not find our judgments in things themselves, and it is just on that account that our judgments are not infallible; but the content of our concepts at least we find in things, and if, in normal conditions, the concept always represents the real thing apprehended as it really is, it is because the intelligence would be unable to produce the concept at all had it not itself become the thing expressed by the concept, the thing to the essence of which the judgment is to conform itself. In short, the adequation between thing and intellect set up by the judgment, always presupposes a prior adequation between concept and thing, and this, in its turn, is based upon a real adequation of the intellect and the object informing it. Thus it is in the primitive ontological relation between intellect and object and in their real adequation, that there resides, if not truth in its perfect form, which appears only in the judgment, yet at least the root of this equality of which the judgment takes cognisance and which it expresses in an explicit formula.

Thus in the philosophy of St. Thomas the word "truth" has three different but closely allied meanings; one proper and absolute and the other two relative. In a first relative sense, the word "true" designates the basic condition without which no truth would be possible, that is to say being. There could in fact be no truth at all without a reality which can be said to be true when brought into relation with an intellect. In this sense it is therefore quite correct to say with St. Augustine that truth is what is: verum est id quod est. In its proper and absolute sense, truth consists formally in an ontological accord between being and intellect, that is to say in a conformity of fact set up between these two, as it is set up between the eye and a colour perceived; and this is expressed in the classic definition of Isaac Israëli: veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus, or again in that given by St. Anselm and also adopted by St. Thomas: veritas est rectitudo sola mente perceptibilis; for the rectitude of a thought which conceives that what really is, is, and that what really is not, is not, is indeed an adequation of fact. Finally there is the logical truth of the judgment which is but a consequence of this ontological truth: et tertio modo definitur verum secundum effectum consequentem, so that here knowledge is the manifestation and declaration of the already realized accord between intellect and being; knowledge results, and literally flows, from truth as an effect from its cause. And that is why, being founded on a real relation, it has no need to ask how it shall rejoin reality.[7]

Hence in the first place we see that the modern critics of scholasticism do not so much as suspect either the nature or the depth of the gulf that divides them from it; and we also perceive how vital it was for mediaeval thought to maintain the intelligibility of the sensible order intact. Truth, properly speaking, is in the human intellect, but must in a way reside also in things, albeit in things only as related to an intellect. And primarily it must be in things as related to the divine intellect. This is what is definitive in the conclusions of the De Veritate of St. Anselm. When man is in question truth is above all in the human intellect, but, absolutely speaking, it resides in the divine intellect. There is therefore one sole truth for all things, in this sense: that the truth of the divine intellect is one and that it is from this one truth that the multiple truths of particular things derive; but there is; nevertheless, a truth proper to each thing appertaining to it in the same right as its very entity. It is communicated to each being by God and is therefore inseparable from it, since things subsist only because the divine intellect brings them to being. The creative action, in producing beings, bestows therefore an inherent truth upon each in the very act: namely the entitative truth of things to which our intellect achieves an adequation, or of the intellect itself which achieves it.[8] In any event there could be no intellection unless the sensible object known were endowed with its own proper intelligibility.

If therefore we put Matthew of Aquasparta's question to St. Thomas there can be no doubt at all about the answer. When things themselves are eliminated can any truth remain? Certainly: the truth of the divine intellect subsists, but the relative truth of things would disappear with things, or with the human intellect which alone can perceive it. The Christian doctrine of creation carries, of necessity, this consequence: for either the term of the creative act is null, in which case there would be no being and no formal truth of things to know; or else this term is positive, and then things are certainly real along with their inherent truth. In any Christian philosophy fully conscious of the meaning of its own principles, there will be an order of truth contingent as to its existence, but as stable, as to its essence, as that of the being to which it belongs: nulla res est suum esse et tamen esse rei quaedam res creata est, et eodem modo veritas rei aliquid creatum est.[9] This created truth, the concept of which is characteristic of Christian philosophy, belongs therefore of full right to sensible things, as well as to the perception apprehending them. What remains of the Augustinian critique of sensation is this: that sense, because bound up with a corporeal organ, cannot achieve that complete return upon its own act which would be necessary for knowledge of the act. The return indeed begins, for the animal feels that it feels; but is not completed, for it does not know what feeling is. Nevertheless, if truth in its explicit form is not to be found in the sensible, it has a foundation there: veritas est in sensu sicut consequens actum ejus, dum scilicet judicium sensus est de re, secundum quod est.[10] From the fact that sense does not know truth it does not follow that what it knows is not true; quite the contrary, the intellect has only to turn to the data of sense and it disengages truth.

For my part I think that the greatness and vitality of the Franciscan school is nowhere more apparent than in the ready way in which its representatives grasped the necessity of this conclusion, and, having grasped it, set out to demonstrate it in accordance with their own principles. Many years ago a friend of mine, who happened to be a sociologist, congratulated me for treating the philosophies of the Middle Ages as those of groups, of collectivities. But the fact is that the groups were all formed around individuals, and nowhere does this more clearly appear than in the present case. By all Franciscan tradition Duns Scotus should have taken up the cudgels against St. Thomas and voiced the suspicion thrown on the sensible by the Augustinians of his Order; but judging the position to be philosophically untenable, he purely and simply rejected it, reserving the right to find some other means of saving whatever truth there is in St. Augustine's doctrine.

He, too, had narrowly scanned the problem raised by the ninth of Augustine's Eighty - three Various Questions. He knew all the other texts, become by his time classical, even hackneyed, alleged in support of the one in question: but the whole mass of Augustinian citations was outweighed by the single sentence of St. Paul: Invisibilia Dei a creatura mundi per ea quae facta sunt intellecta conspiciuntur (Rom. i. 20). For, on St. Augustine's own showing, these invisibilia Dei are the divine Ideas: "Therefore the Ideas are known from creatures; therefore also prior to any vision of these ideas, there must be some certain knowledge of creatures."[11] In thus reversing the Augustinian presentation of the problem, Duns Scotus commits himself to a justification of the validity of sense cognition, and we may watch him actively employed in the task.

This is so much the more remarkable inasmuch as Duns Scotus' whole noetic tends to strengthen as much as possible the independence of the intellect in respect of the sensible order. It is just this that distinguishes it from the noetic of St. Thomas. Throughout all its emendations of Augustine's doctrine a vein of Augustinianism persists; sense knowledge is never anything more for him than the "occasion" of intellectual knowledge. But even while he thus limits its rôle, Duns Scotus considers it absolutely necessary to establish its validity: it must be beyond attack in the exercise of its proper function. Why this solicitude? Because Duns Scotus very clearly saw that the New Academy is the legitimate daughter of the Old; Plato's transcendent idealism is quite compatible with a complete scepticism as regards the world of bodies; and on account of his very Christianity Duns Scotus could never reconcile himself to that. He finds himself set down in a world of created substances; and he must first acquire a knowledge of these if he is to rise to that of the Ideas; he cannot possibly install himself in the world of Ideas and look down complacently from that height on the world of bodies. Aristotle warns him that behind the Augustinian criticism of sense he will find not only Plato but Heraclitus. For indeed it is Heraclitus who furnishes the major proposition of the syllogism, and this major is false: antecedens hujus rationis, scilicet quod sensibilia continue mutantur, falsum est: haec enim est opinio quae imponitur Heraclito.

In thus taking up an attitude of opposition to the Platonic depreciation of the sensible, Duns Scotus is naturally led to criticize the Augustinian conception of illumination. His chief objection is that it tries to build on a sinking foundation. If the sensible element in knowledge is such that it eludes the grasp of science, if in short it is essentially fugitive, how can even the divine illumination give it the stability it needs? Either the divine light will be drawn along with the sensible and become no less fugitive itself, and in that case nothing will be gained, or else it will so transfigure the sensible that our knowledge will no longer have any relation to the true nature of its object; and we shall fall back into the error with which Aristotle reproaches Plato. If the situation is to be saved there is but one resource left, and that is to admit an empirical certitude based upon experimental reasoning. It is true, of course, that an induction of laws from a starting point in experience will lead to no absolutely necessary conclusions; there is no contradiction in supposing that things might be produced otherwise than they are in fact produced, but our knowledge of the laws of reality is none the less certain and exempt from error for all that, since it rests precisely on the stability and necessity of natures. The great principle that guarantees the validity of experimental science is that all that happens regularly in virtue of a non-free cause is the natural effect of that cause. Natural, that is to say non-accidental, necessary; so that even the natural sciences themselves, though only to be acquired through experience, will nevertheless contain an element of necessity.[12]

The whole of Duns Scotus' doctrine on this important point may be summed up by saying that he is opposed to the view of Heraclitus on the ground that if natural things are fugitive their natures are not. It was therefore not by chance, nor in virtue of any mere freak of history, that the thirteenth century gave birth to the work of Roger Bacon, and the fourteenth to the first tentative developments of positive science. We should deceive ourselves, however, if we credited the mediaevals with any love of science for science's sake, with any "disinterested" science as we like to call it to-day. Of course, as far as practical ends are concerned, their love of science was as disinterested as ours, often indeed a good deal more so, but they never regarded the knowledge of things as an end in itself. They turned towards nature because they were Christians, and as Christians they studied it; for what they saw and loved in it was nothing other than the work of God. Hence comes that vein of religious tenderness with which they numbered all its marvels, and hence too their ever watchful care to safeguard its intelligibility.

Mediaeval realism thus became the heir to Greek realism for quite another motive than that which inspired the philosophy of Aristotle; and it is this that gives it its own peculiar character. Aristotle turned away from Platonic idealism because man's kingdom is a kingdom of this world, and because above all else we need to know something of the world in which our lot is cast. Christians turned away more and more resolutely from Platonic idealism because the kingdom of God is not of this world, but because the world, on the other hand, is necessary as a starting-point from which to rise to the kingdom of God. To dissolve it into a flux of inconsistent appearances is to snatch from us our best means of rising to the knowledge of God. If the work of creation were not intelligible what could we ever know of its Author? Were we presented with nought but an Heraclitean flux, would a work of creation be even imaginable? It is just because all is number, weight and measure that nature proclaims the wisdom of God. It is precisely in its fecundity that it attests His creative power. Because things are of being, and no mere quasi-nought, we know that He is Being. Thus what we learn concerning God from revelation the face of the universe confirms: "The creatures of this visible world signify the invisible attributes of God, because God is the source, model and last end of every creature, and because every effect points to its cause, every image to its model, every road to its goal."[13] Suppress all knowledge of the effect, the image, and the road, and we shall know nothing of the cause, the model, and the goal. The philosophical realism of the Middle Ages was nourished on Christian motives, and a realism there will always be as long as the influence of Christianity continues to make itself felt.

We often speak, nevertheless, of a Christian idealism, and no doubt the expression has an acceptable meaning; but the type of Christianity then in question is something very different from mediaeval Catholicism. For Lutheranism, characterized by a theology that does not lead to any great interest in a nature irremediably corrupted by sin, idealism is a philosophical issue ready made to its hand; perhaps we had better say, to be more exact, that it was natural that it should be Lutheranism that issued in idealism. Reducing the history of the cosmos to the drama of the individual soul's salvation, the true Lutheran is not drawn to seek God in nature, he feels God at work within his soul, and that is enough for him. Of course mediaeval Catholicism never overlooked the fact that nature is at grips with sin, and stands in urgent need of grace; it insists again and again that the material world is made for man and man is made for God. This anthropocentrism, and the geocentrism that seems to go along with it, have been too often cast up against mediaeval thought to allow any room to-day for the reproach that it underestimated the importance of the human standpoint. It remains true to say, nevertheless, that in a deep sense the Middle Ages always kept itself at arm's length from that type of anthropocentrism so dear to the heart of our contemporary idealists.

We have here, indeed, one of the most extraordinary spectacles in the history of thought; the first act opened with Descartes and the play still proceeds. The Christian philosophers were certainly persuaded that nature was made for man, and in this sense it is true to say that man stands at the centre of the mediaeval world; but they recognized, none the less, that since the universe was created by God it is endowed with an existence proper to itself, it is something that man can know but could never pretend to have created.[14] Guaranteed by the efficacy of the divine action, the nature of things always remains a distinct reality for thought, something to be received from without, accepted, mastered finally, and assimilated. When Kant proclaimed that he was about to effect a Copernican revolution by substituting his critical idealism for the dogmatic realism of the Middle Age, the thing he really brought about was the very opposite.[15] The sun that Kant set at the centre of the world was man himself, so that his revolution was the reverse of Copernican, and led to an anthropocentrism a good deal more radical, though radical in another fashion, than any of which the Middle Age is accused. It was only in a local sense that mediaeval man thought himself to be at the centre of things; the whole creation of which he was the destined crown and end, which he recapitulated in himself, was none the less something outside himself, something to which he had to submit and conform himself if he would know anything of its nature. But 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, if criticism has resulted in the virtual disappearance of all metaphysics? If we would pass beyond the physical order there must first of all be a physical order. If we would rise above nature there must first of all be a nature. As soon as the universe is reduced to the laws of the 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 any more.

If we consider the spirit of the Kantian reform we go far to grasp the spirit it proposed to make an end of. For through the dogmatism that Kant attacked it was mediaeval realism that he aimed at. Criticism shall make all things new, cum revera sit infiniti erroris finis et terminus legitimus.[16] But what he never seems to have suspected is, that mediaeval realism can never be uprooted from the mind save along with the Christian spirit that ruled its evolution and assured its growth. The mediaeval thinkers learned from Genesis that the world is God's work and not man's; and from the Gospel that man's end does not lie in this world but in God. Turning the whole problem the other way about, critical idealism made it for ever insoluble. 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. Even if my thought does no more than provide the a priori conditions of experience, there will always remain interposed between myself and God the veil of the categories of the understanding, shutting off all knowledge of His existence here on earth and all beatifying vision of His perfection hereafter. Doubtless it is possible to imagine a complete transmutation of man which would qualify him for a mode of knowledge foreign to his nature, but this is just the sort of thing which the Christian thinkers regarded as very dubiously philosophical and considered it necessary to avoid. Taken simply as he is, the wayfaring man should be found to be en route for an end which, however much it may transcend the forces of his nature, is not essentially beyond its capacity; his intellectual activities, remaining precisely what they are, should be capable of leading him to this; docile in face of reality, enriching without ever being able to satiate itself with the essences of beings, human thought should be gently led towards Being and should thus prepare itself for the sole Object which will finally saturate and fulfil its nature. But how our thought stands to this Object, and in what sense it is capable of it, are questions that remain to be examined in the following chapter.

 
Chapter 12 (Knowledge of things) of Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, [Gifford lectures; 1931-2], tr. A.H.C. Downes, Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1991[2], Originally published: London, Sheed & Ward, 1936, ©1936 Charles Scribner's Sons. Published here without the footnotes.

 

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