osophy is
on safe ground only when it unites itself with religion, testing its own
conclusions by a higher reality, and existing not as a rival but as a
coadjutor.

It is St. Paul who declares that "God has never left Himself without a
witness" and the "witness" was explicit, however clouded, in the
philosophies of paganism. Plato and Aristotle knew the limitations of
man's mind, and the corrective of over-weaning intellectuality in
religion, but thereafter the wisdom faded and pride ousted humility,
with the result that philosophy became not light but darkness. Let me
quote from the great twelfth century philosopher, Hugh of St. Victor,
who deserves a better fate than sepulture in the ponderous tomes of
Migne:

"There was a certain wisdom that seemed such to them that knew not the
true wisdom. The world found it and began to be puffed up, thinking
itself great in this. Confiding in its wisdom it became presumptuous and
boasted it would attain the highest wisdom. And it made itself a ladder
of the face of creation.... Then those things which were seen were known
and there were other things which were not known; and through those
which were manifest they expected to reach those that were hidden. And
they stumbled and fell into the falsehoods of their own imagining.... So
God made foolish the wisdom of this world; and He pointed out another
wisdom, which seemed foolishness and was not. For it preached Christ
crucified, in order that truth might be sought in humility. But the
world despised it, wishing to contemplate the works of God, which He had
made a source of wonder, and it did not wish to venerate what He had set
for imitation, neither did it look to its own disease, seeking medicine
in piety; but presuming on a false health, it gave itself over with vain
curiosity to the study of alien things."

Precisely: and this is the destiny that has overtaken not only the pagan
philosophy of which Hugh of St. Victor was speaking, but also that which
followed after St. Thomas Aquinas, from Descartes to Hobbes and Kant and
Comte and Herbert Spencer and William James. The jealously intellectual
philosophies of the nineteenth century, the materialistic and
mechanistic substitutes that were offered and accepted with such
enthusiasm after the great cleavage between religion and life, are but
"the falsehoods of their own imaginings" of which Hugh of St. Victor
speaks, for they were cut off from the stream of spiritual verity, and