12 SOCIAL CULTURE 



To Christianity the doctrine of individual immortality is vital. 

 Without it the world-view of the church would suffer dissolution. 



The publication of the pantheistic version of Aristotle forced 

 Christian scholars to study seriously the Greek philosophy. Piety of 

 the heart and piety of the will did not suffice. Piety of the intellect 

 was needed, and it came in a series of thinkers who wrote the 

 expositions of Christian theology of which the Summa theologiae of 

 Thomas Aquinas is the great exemplar. Piety of the intellect over- 

 came the dangers of religious heresy. 



After an epoch of rapid philosophical development a period of 

 a too exclusive devotion to the piety of the intellect there came 

 a decadence in the piety of the will and the piety of the heart, and 

 when this began to have its visible effects in the neglect of the secular 

 interests of the church a reaction set in, which culminated in the 

 triumph of the pestilent doctrine of nominalism through the dialectic 

 skill of William of Occam, and as a consequence the great philosophy 

 of Saint Thomas of Aquino fell into neglect. But this gave an op- 

 portunity for the triumph of the study of secondary causes. Natural 

 science began new inventories of nature and new studies of mind 

 which set forth theories almost mechanical in their results. 



With nominalism no speculative investigations into the nature of 

 a First Cause are permissible. All that is left is an empirical study 

 of things and events, an inventory and a classification, theories 

 of forces, mechanical composition and decomposition of bodies, the 

 transformation of sensations into ideas. Ideas were regarded as of 

 the nature of mere opinions and of less truth than the sensations 

 which furnish the only vivid certainty esteemed to be of real worth. 



There is bound to arise a reaction against religious authority 

 whenever the church itself neglects the exposition of the intellectual 

 insights which are the most vital part of its contribution to civiliza- 

 tion. For if the Christian world-view is rendered untenable, the 

 piety of the will and the piety of the heart will soon decay. 



A series of skeptical reactions not only against the church, but 

 against the authority of the state, have taken place as a result of 

 this movement away from theology and towards an exclusive study 

 of secondary causes. * 



The German word Aufkldrung, or clearing-up of the mind, has 

 become more or less familiar to us as including the phases of this 

 revolt against authority. It holds to the study of secondary causes 

 and the neglect of the First Cause. 



VIII 



There has been only one great Aufkldrung, the French Revolution, 

 which swept together all the negative tendencies into one move- 

 ment of destruction to church and state. But there are numerous, 



