philosophy, to abandon authority for the reason. We should not seek to be
Lutherans or Calvinists, but simply Christians, and we should judge on
rational grounds, instead of following Aristotle, Averroës, or Thomas
Aquinas. Anyone who does not aim at the harmony of theology and philosophy,
is neither a Christian nor a philosopher. One and the same God is the
primal source of both rational and revealed truth. Philosophy is the basis
of theology, theology the criterion and complement of philosophy. The one
starts with effects evident to the senses and leads to the suprasensible,
to the First Cause; the other follows the reverse course. To philosophy
belongs all that Adam knew or could know before the fall; had there been no
sin, there would have been no other than philosophical knowledge. But after
the fall, the reason, which informs us, it is true, of the moral law, but
not of the divine purpose of salvation, would have led us to despair, since
neither punishment nor virtue could justify us, if revelation did not teach
us the wonders of grace and redemption. Although Taurellus thus softens the
opposition between theology and philosophy, which had been most sharply
expressed in the doctrine of "twofold truth" (that which is true in
philosophy may be false in theology, and conversely), and endeavors to
bring the two into harmony, the antithesis between God and the world still
remains for him immovably fixed. God is not things, though he is all. He
is pure affirmation; all without him is composed, as it were, of being and
nothing, and can neither be nor be known independently: _negatio non nihil
est, alias nec esset nec intelligeretur, sed limitatio est affirmationis_.
Simple being or simple affirmation is equivalent to infinity, eternity,
unity, uniqueness,--properties which do not belong to the world. He who
posits things as eternal, sublates God. God and the world are opposed to
each other as infinite cause and finite effect. Moreover, as it is our
spirit which philosophizes and not God's spirit in us, so the faith through
which man appropriates Christ's merit is a free action of the human spirit,
the capacity for which is inborn, not infused from above; in it, God acts