Christianity & Philosophy

By Étienne Gilson To be in the world, but not of the world: Christ’s charge is both charter and conundrum. How is it possible to be in the world without being of it? This question looms especially large with regard to human intelligence. Because man has a mind and a will, he has been made just “a little less than the angels.” Yet it is also the case that because he has the powers to know and to love, he also has the power to fall from grace, thinking falsely, choosing wrongly. In Christianity and Philosophy, Étienne Gilson wrestles with this problem and its implications: philosophy and the healing of human nature; philosophy, from the Calvinist perspective, as a discipline wholly subjected to theology; philosophy, from the Catholic perspective, as a study “fitting to the excellence of faith and consonant with the dignity of human science” (Pope Leo XIII); philosophy as the handmaid of theology; and philosophy as a servant of Christ the King. The only way to make science, philosophy, or art good apologetics is to make them  good science, good philosophy and good art. Piety cannot replace technique. (Gerald B. Phelan) First published in 1939, the same year as Gilson’s Reason and Rev­elation in the Middle Ages, Christianity and Philosophy is a concentrated reflection on the relationship between faith and reason and on the challenges and promises alike of a properly Christian philosophy—what Gilson would in later years define as “that way of philosophizing in which the Christian faith and the human intellect join forces in a common investigation of philosophical truth.”   Étienne Gilson (1884–1978) was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy. One of the premier Catholic intellectuals of the twentieth century, he was founder of the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, member of the Académie française, and author of more than one hundred seventy books. * * * Paperback: 178pp. ISBN: 978-1685954925