New Essay Volume 3

Appendix 9. (1238)

[Philosophy and God]

The idea of God is made up of 1. a negative and 2. a symbolic part. Generally speaking, the symbolic part is composed of likenesses which take the place of the positive part and in some way make up for its absence. Both parts are present in religion, but the negative is the principal, fundamental part. If we remove the symbolic part, the negative part remains, although we have nothing to substitute for the part we have taken away. We can, however, meditate on the first part which is entirely made up of certain relationships between God and creatures.

Such meditations, although they provide us with ever more complete and wonderful knowledge of God, are never more than a development and analysis of the negative part. Nevertheless this whole development also enters of its nature into religion and the worship of God because it helps human beings to worship him with greater understanding and love.

Professor Cousin failed to indicate adequately the characteristics of religion and philosophy when he reduced the former to symbols and the latter to pure conceptions (Lesson, 17 April 1828). All pure conceptions about God obtained by meditation and reflection, however many they may be, form part of religion, and help worship, which is not restricted solely to symbols. On the other hand, if philosophy does away with symbols, it has nothing to put in their place. All that reflection can discover about God consists not in reducing symbols to conceptions, but in developing the negative part of the idea of God. Here symbols are discarded altogether. The negative part, in fact, consists in the relationships between God and ourselves.

It is true that this development is in part the work of time and results from the application of reflective thought on the first concepts of our direct thought. In this sense, the development we are speaking of does indeed pertain to philosophy in so far as it is carried out with the simple light of natural reason. This does not lessen its role in religion, however. There can be no opposition between reason and religion.

Surely there is no difficulty in granting that reason, or philosophy if we want to call it that, should be concerned with religious argument about God, the object of religion? This object does not cease to be religious, and become merely philosophical, as soon as reflection is turned upon it. Philosophy has no power to denature things by occupying itself with them; the God of philosophers is not less God, and the object of the intelligent soul's worship is not less the object of worship, when the soul applies its most noble part, its own intellective activity, to such an object.

The systematic division between philosophy and religion is false. Religion embraces the whole of God, and philosophy that part which is worked out with reasoning. The whole and the part are not in opposition, nor are they mutually exclusive. Religion existed before philosophy; the conclusions of philosophy, or rather natural reason, about religion were simply a greater development of religion itself. St. Thomas' sublime treatise on God did not cease to be religious despite the wonder of its depth of thought and the acumen of its reflection, nor was it ever considered other than theology.

We ought not to separate what is inseparable; we ought not to separate religion from what the human reason knows when it is applied to religion. Instead we should distinguish the successive states of religion itself, which has developed and been perfected across the centuries. At first, it was more symbolic; later, it contained more pure knowledge.

The continual increase of light coming from revelation until the coming of Jesus Christ himself was of course, of great assistance, but great help was found nevertheless in the use of reason strengthened by that light. Reason was not given to human beings by God to stagnate and remain useless.

Its object is the most noble truths - and God is the most noble truth of all. For the rest, natural reason was never alone in the world; human reflection has always had as its matter not only what is provided by natural direct thought, but whatever God has revealed of himself to us.