New Testament is full of it, and tells us how the Apostles are sanctified through personal contact with Our Blessed Lord. The personal and intimate love of Him is the dynamic influence that explains everything in their lives. The pages of the New Testament point out the way by which everyone who aims at holiness may learn. The reason the non-Catholic does not perceive it is, perhaps, because he is handicapped by a sort of historically pessimistic view of human nature. His view might be summed up in this that we are essentially less holy than the Apostles; that our process of sanctification is, as it were, something different of its very nature. While we would be on the common ground with them if they only meant to say that we are not as holy as the Apostles, we begin to part company with them when they fail to see that the way the Apostles became holy is the way by which everyone who becomes holy travels; that, while we may not attain to their intensity, we are sanctified through the same process as they. Having no clear understanding of the lives of the saints is a sad thing for them, for it breaks the truth of the continuity and uninterruptedness of Our Blessed Lord's nearness to us; it prevents them from seeing that the making of a saint or a holy person is a thing that never changes. Could they get a little glimpse of a Teresa or an Augustine, or for that matter of any saint, they would see that there is no warrant for their pessimism, that God, who was near to the Apostles-habitu inventus ut homo— is not very far away from each of us. Unfortunately, however, Protestantism has done this sad disservice, that where men ought to be free to learn anything they like, it has closed off for them the pages of the supernatural as revealed in the lives of the saints. In these days of the New Psychology some non-Catholics are opening their lives again, but approaching them with a mind full of fads, and empty of sense and dignity, they cannot discern the supernatural, or distinguish between heroicity and neurosis. Their only remnant of what we may call traditional Christianity, as far as the supernatural life is concerned,

is confined to the Apostles, though many have not even this residue of respect for holy persons, and will analyse and psycho-analyse the Apostles themselves.

The few, however, who have still a little reverence will read the Bible, and take up the pessimistic attitude that while certain relations existed between Christ and the Apostles, they have never been since, and never shall be again. For them it is not merely as if Christ's deposit of revelation, but His personal contact with mankind, were broken with the death of the last Apostle, and the supernatural life is for them a thing that was some two thousand years ago and is over and done with ever since. Now it is clear that to make them see what error they are in requires not only scientific knowledge of what grace and the supernatural life mean, but a control of English that will enable us to present this truth in such a manner that they will attend to it, not perhaps for abstract love of truth, but for the very attractiveness with which we write, for the gratification of that unconscious and inarticulate interest which we arouse. We must give it to them as a thing seen through what they know of life in common with ourselves. Shall we achieve the same result by presenting a point of Catholic truth by way of a thesis: giving them the censure attached to the thesis, thundering our irrefutable syllogism, marshalling the adversarii only to disperse them again in confusion and defeat? We can speak most correctly by so doing, but to the mind of him who may chance to hear us there will be in what we say a divorce from life and reality as he knows it; and because he will not, naturally, put himself like a schoolboy under our charge, our words will be weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable.'

In writing the above it is not as if the writer forgot the essential advantage of being able to use our theology as a means of communicating the truth to our own people, but owing to the circumstances of the Church in England, living as it does in the midst of a public life that is saturated with non-Catholicism, it serves as an additional

incentive to acquire a greater mastery of that tongue that voices life around us. Nor should one attach to it an importance beyond its merits. No one can subscribe without great reservations to the slogan of 'the conversion of England by books '-or words for that matter; for that can surely only be achieved by the grace of God, made operative through the members of the Church, for grace is the source of life and growth in the Church. One thing, however, we can claim for it, and that is, that this command of language will be able to prevent our knowledge of God's word from being frozen within us; we shall be able to melt it, to make it flow into the minds and hearts of others, so that our study shall be profitable, and when we see eager faces raised to us, thirsting for God's word, we shall be able to give them, to quench that thirst, a fountain of living water springing up into life everlasting (John iv. 14).

JOHN P. MURPHY.

THE VALUE OF SCHOLASTIC PHILO

IN

SOPHY IN MODERN CONDITIONS

BY REV. DENIS FAHEY, C.S.SP., D.D., D.PH.

I-THE

'FORM' OF SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY

A.-The Scholastic Method

N the prologue to the Summa St. Thomas tells us that it is his intention to treat of Catholic doctrine in the form best adapted to the needs and capacity of beginners- eo modo tradere secundum quod congruit ad eruditionem incipientium.' Now this cannot mean that the Angelic Doctor treats only simple matters in the Summa and avoids difficult questions. No; for he discusses therein the most abstruse material of the whole range of knowledge. But what is adapted to beginners in the Summa is the method of exposition, the nervous syllogistic style, the division by means of question and article, the constant care to define and distinguish as the author goes along; in a word, the vigilant marking-off of all the stages of the mind's progress in the acquisition of knowledge. It is a distinct pedagogical method, for everything is there arranged to strengthen an intelligence that is being formed to think and reason.

What, then, we may ask, were the reasons for adopting this method of exposition? The question is worth answering, for the answer will help to dissipate an amount of prejudice against Scholastic Philosophy and make it clear that instead of having its origin in medieval barbarism and want of culture, the scholastic method is the fruit of profoundest wisdom and is founded on a solid pedagogical basis. Who has not read the epigrams of some humanist or other on the rude and barbarous jargon of the Schools? Who has not heard of the mortal weariness that came over him, as he traversed these unvarying lifeless pages, with

never an oasis of passionate appeal to break the tiresome journey through an arid waste of syllogisms and distinctions? Yet were the principles guiding the Schoolmen well-grounded firstly, in the philosophy of Language, and, secondly, in Rational Psychology. Let us consider each in turn.

B.-Scholastic Method and the Philosophy of Language.— Firstly, the Philosophy of Language. We make use of very different kinds of propositions to express what we think and what we feel. The first kind of proposition and the most important is called propositio enuntiativa, the proposition which makes a statement by the indicative mood of the verb. Its unique function is to express the conception of the intelligence, id quod in intellectu habetur.1 And this concept it expresses, leaving out of account the relations it has with the other faculties of the soul and the sentiments it may awaken therein.

The other propositions which enter into speech, viz., the imperative, the interrogative, etc., express an emotion or affection of the soul: ad exprimendum affectum, as St. Thomas puts it. It is not the thought itself that they express, but the sentiments and acts that follow upon it, such as love, hatred, desire, entreaty, admiration, command: non significant ipsum conceptum intellectus sed quemdam ordinem ad hoc consequentem.'

Now, the Schoolmen had in view exclusively the knowledge of Truth. Hence, their language is the simple, unadorned affirmation of the Truth. Everything that expresses a sentiment, a passionate movement, an impression of the writer is, therefore, excluded as being out of place in Pure Science. They want to express the objective Truth, the objective order of Being, and so leave out of consideration all other aspects of the objective order.

Quite other must be an orator's treatment of a subject. He must not limit himself to the proof or the demonstration of the Truth, but must make appeal to the passions

1 St. Thomas, Comm. in Peri Hermenéias, i. lect i.

2 Ibid., i. lect. vii.

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