IN THE FORM OF EDUCATION AND RELIGION 11 



to the study of the creation, trying to see how God works in his 

 goodness, giving true being to his creatures, and lifting them up 

 into rational souls able to see the vision of God. 1 



VII 



The piety of the intellect contains in it also another possibility 

 of lapse into impiety of intellect, namely, through lack of power to 

 hold to the sovereignty of God. It may go astray from the search of 

 the First Cause and set up secondary causes in place of a First Cause. 

 This is the opposite danger to pantheism, which gets so much in- 

 toxicated with the divine unity that it neglects nature and history 

 and discourages intellectual piety and loses the insight into the revela- 

 tion of God's goodness and righteousness in the creation of the world. 



There are two kinds of intellectual impiety, one kind that goes 

 astray after a secondary cause in place of a First Cause, and the other 

 that passes by secondary causes as something unworthy of the true 

 First Cause, not seeing that the true First Cause makes the world 

 with its three orders of being: the lower ministering to the higher and 

 the higher to the lower, an inorganic below an organic realm, 

 and within the organic realm creating the animal below the man, and 

 among the races of man making savages below civilized peoples. It 

 does not see that in all these divine goodness has its own great pur- 

 pose to make the world of time and space an infinite cradle for the 

 development of spiritual individuality. The Christian God is not 

 an abstract One, delighting only in abstract ones, but a Creator 

 delighting in creators, commanding true believers to engage in the 

 eternal work of the First Cause, namely, by multiplying his creative 

 and educative work. 



Thus from one or another form of impiety of the intellect there 

 arise collisions with the church from age to age. 



A closer and closer definition of the dogma arises out of the struggle. 



One of the greatest epochs of struggle in the church arose in the 

 Time of the importation of Arabian pantheism into Spain, and thence 

 into the other parts of Europe by reason of resort of Christian youth 

 to the medical schools established by the Arabs. 



The great commentators on Aristotle, Avicenna and Averrhoes, 

 came to notice and caused great anxiety by their interpretation of 

 Aristotle's doctrine of the active reason (i/ovs TTOT/TIKOS), which they 

 held to exist only in God; and upon the death of the individual, 

 the passive soul or reason (W>s Tra^i/cds) , which is conceived by 

 them as a temporary manifestation of the active reason, withdrew, 

 and was absorbed into the deity, losing its individual being. 



1 See Goethe's Faust, " Scene in Heaven " (part n, act v, scene 7), Pater Pro- 

 fundus and Pater Seraphicus. 



