The Catholic World, Vol. 07, April 1868 to September, 1868Various
Religion
The Catholic World, Vol. 07, April 1868 to September, 1868
Various
Catholic Church -- Periodicals
The reviewer says, p. 544, "We proceed to another specimen of the
critic's accuracy; 'M. Cousin says pantheism is the divinization
of nature, taken in its totality as God, But this is sheer
atheism.'" Are we wrong? Here is what Cousin says in his own
language: "Le panthéism est _proprement_ la divinisation du
tout, le grand tout donné comme Dieu, l'universe Dieu de la
plupart de mes adversaires, de Saint-Simon, par example. C'est au
fond un veritable athéisme." [Footnote 41] If he elsewhere gives
a different definition, that is the reviewer's affair, not ours.
We never pretended that Cousin never contradicts himself, or
undertook to reconcile him with himself; but the reviewer should
not be over-hasty in charging inaccuracy, misrepresentation, or
ignorance where none is evident. He may be caught himself. The
reviewer stares at us for saying Cousin's "exposition of the
Alexandrian philosophy is a marvel of misapprehension." Can the
reviewer say it is not? Has he studied that philosophy? We
repeat, it is a marvel of misapprehension, both of Christian
theology and of that philosophy itself. The Neoplatonists were
pantheists and emanationists, and Cousin says the creation they
asserted was a creation proper. Let that suffice to save us from
the scathing lash of the reviewer.
[Footnote 41: _Fragments Philosophiques_, t i. pp. 18,
19.]
8. We said, in our article, "It was a great misfortune for M.
Cousin that what little he knew of Catholic theology, caught up,
apparently, at second hand, served only to mislead him. The great
controversies on Catholic dogmas have enlightened the darkest
passages of psychology and ontology, and placed the Catholic
theologian on a vantage-ground of which they who know it not are
incapable of conceiving. Before him your Descartes, Spinozas,
Kants, Fichtes, Hegels, and Cousins dwindle into pigmies." The
reviewer replies to this:
"This is something new indeed, and we think the great Gallican
churchmen of the seventeenth century, whom Cousin understood so
intimately, and for whom he had so sincere an admiration, would
be the last to claim an exclusive vantage-ground from their
knowledge of the controversies on Catholic dogma. For these
men, alike of the Oratory and of Port Royal, were Cartesians,
and their faith was interwoven with their philosophy; it was
not in opposition to it. And they knew that that philosophy was
based upon a thorough understanding of the great 'controversies
on Catholic dogma,' which had been carried on in the schools by
laymen as well as by ecclesiastics.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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