The fundamental error of this age is the denial of creation, and, theologically expressed, is, with the vulgar, atheism, and with the cultivated and refined, pantheism. Atheism is the denial of unity, and pantheism the denial of plurality or diversity, and both alike deny creation, and seek to explain the universe by the principle of self-generation or self-development. What is really denied is God THE CREATOR.
There are, no doubt, moral causes that have led in part to this denial, but with them we have at present nothing to do. The assertion of moral causes is more effective in preventing men from abandoning the truth and falling into error than in recovering and leading back to the truth those who have lost it, or know not where to find it. We lose our labor when we begin our efforts, as philosophers, to convert those who are in error by assuring them that they have erred only through moral perversity or hatred of the true and the good, the just and the holy, especially in an age when conscience is fast asleep. We aim at convincing, not at convicting, and therefore take up only the intellectual causes which lead to the denial of creation. Among these causes, we shall, no doubt, find materialism and a pseudo-spiritualism both playing their part; but the real causes, we apprehend, are in the fact that the philosophic tradition, which has come down to us from gentilism, has never been fully harmonized with the Christian tradition, which has come down to us through the church.
Gentilism had lost sight of God the Creator, and confounded creation with generation, emanation, or formation. Why the gentiles were led into this error would be an interesting chapter in the history of the wanderings of the human mind; but we have no space at present for the inquiry. It is enough, for our present purpose, to establish the fact that the gentiles did fall into it. The conception of creation is found in none of the heathen mythologies, learned or unlearned, of which we have any knowledge; and that they do not recognize a creative God, may be inferred from the fact that in them all, so far as known, was worshipped, under obscure symbols, the generative forces or functions of nature. In no gentile philosophy, not even in Plato or Aristotle, do you find any conception of God the Creator. Père Gratry, indeed, thinks he finds the fact of creation recognized by Plato, especially in the Timaeus; but though we have read time and again that most important of Plato's dialogues, we have never found the fact of creation in it; all we can find in it bearing on this point is what Plato, as we understand him, uniformly teaches, the identity of the idea with the essence or causa essentialis of the thing. As, for instance, the idea of a man is the real, essential man himself; and is simply the idea in the divine mind, impressed on a preexisting matter, as the seal upon wax. God creates neither the idea nor the matter. The idea is himself; the matter is eternal. Aristotle does not essentially differ from Plato on this point. The individual existence, according to him, is composed of matter and form; the form alone is substantial, and matter is simply its passive recipient. The substantial forms are supplied, but not created by the divine intelligence. In no form of heathenism that existed before the Christian era have we found any conception of creation. The conception or tradition of creation was retained only by the patriarchs and the synagogue, and has been restored to the converted gentiles by the Christian church alone.
St. Augustine, and after him the great medieval doctors—especially the greatest of them all, the Angel of the schools—labored assiduously, and up to a certain point successfully, to amend the least debased gentile philosophy so as to make it harmonize with Christian theology and tradition. They took from gentile philosophy the elements it had retained from the ancient wisdom, supplied their defects with elements taken from the Christian tradition, and formed a really Christian philosophy, which still subsists in union with theology.
This work of harmonizing faith and philosophy, or, perhaps, more correctly, of constructing a philosophy in harmony with faith and theology, was nearly, if not quite completed by the great western scholastics or medieval doctors; but, unhappily, the East, separated from the centre of unity, or holding to it only loosely and by fits and starts, did not share in the great intellectual movement of the West. It made little or no progress in harmonizing gentile philosophy and Christian theology. It retained and studied the gentile philosophers, especially of the Platonic and Neoplatonic schools; and when the Greek scholars, after the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, in 1453, sought refuge in the West, they brought with them, not only their schism, but their unmitigated gentile philosophy, corrupted the western schools, and unsettled to a fearful extent the confidence of scholars in the scholastic philosophy. We owe the false systems of spiritualism and materialism, of atheism and pantheism, to what is called the Revival of Letters in the fifteenth century, or the Greek invasion of western Christendom.
The scholastics, especially St. Thomas, had transformed the peripatetic philosophy into a Christian philosophy; but the other Greek schools had remained pagan; and it was precisely these other schools, especially the Platonic, and Neoplatonic, or Alexandrian eclecticism, that now revived in their unchristianized form, and were opposed to the Aristotelian philosophy as modified by the schoolmen. Some of the early fathers were more inclined to Plato than to Aristotle, but none of these, not Clemens Alexandrinus, Origen, or even St. Augustine, had harmonized throughout Plato's philosophy with Christianity, and we should greatly wrong St. Augustine, at least, if we called him a systematic Platonist.
With the study of Plato was revived in western Europe a false and exaggerated spiritualism, and a philosophy which denied creation as a truth of philosophy, and admitted it only as a doctrine of revelation. The authority of the scholastic philosophy was weakened, a decided tendency in pantheistic direction to thought was given, and the way was prepared for Giordano Bruno, as well as for the Protestant apostasy. We say apostasy, because Luther's movement was really an apostasy, as its historical developments have amply proved. With Plato was revived the Academy with its scepticism, Sextus Empiricus, and after him Epicurus; and before the close of the sixteenth century, Europe was overrun with false mystics, sceptics, pantheists, and atheists, who abounded all through the seventeenth century, in spite of a very decided reaction in favor of faith and the church. What is worthy of special note is, that in all this period of two centuries and a half it was no uncommon thing to find men who, as philosophers, denied the immortality of the soul, which as believers they asserted; or combining a childlike faith with nearly universal scepticism, as we see in Montaigne.
Gradually, however, men began to see that, while they acknowledged a discrepancy between what they held as philosophy and the Christian faith, they could not retain both; that they must give up the one or the other. England, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, swarmed with free thinkers who denied all divine revelation; and France, in the eighteenth century, rejected the church, rejected the Bible, suppressed Christian worship, rebuilt the Pantheon, and voted death to be an eternal sleep. But the eighteenth century was born of the seventeenth, as the seventeenth was born of the sixteenth, as the sixteenth was born of the revival of Greek letters and philosophy, thoroughly impregnated with paganism, supposed by unthinking men to be the most glorious event in modern history, saving, always, Luther's Reformation.
In the seventeenth century, Descartes undertook to reform and reconstruct philosophy after a new method. He undertook to erect philosophy into a complete science in the rational order, independent of revelation. If he recognized the creative act of God, or God as creator, it was as a theologian, not as a philosopher; for certainly he does not start with the creative act as a first principle, nor does he, nor can he, arrive at it by his method. God as creator cannot be deduced from cogito, ergo sum; for, without presupposing God as my creator, I cannot assert that I exist. Gentilism had so far revived that it was able to take possession of philosophy the moment it was detached from Christian theology and declared an independent science; and as that has no conception of creation, the tradition preserved by Jews and Christians was at once relegated from philosophy to theologian, from science to faith. Hence we fail to find creation recognized as a philosophical truth in the system of his disciple Malebranche, a profounder philosopher than Descartes himself. The prince of modern sophists, Spinoza, adopting as his starting point the definition of substance given by Descartes, demonstrates but too easily that there can be only one substance, and that there can be no creation, or that nothing does or can exist except the one substance and its attributes, modes, or affections. Calling the one substance God, he arrived at once at pantheism, now so prevalent.