certainty ’; Mr. Tyrrell even maintains that ’the great mass of our beliefs are reversible, and depend for their stability on the action or permission of the will.’  But philosophy is for them mainly a controversial weapon.  It gives them the means of justifying their position as Catholics who wish to remain loyal to their Church and her formularies, but no longer believe in the miracles which the Church has always regarded as matters of fact.  Nevertheless, an attempt must be made to explain a point of view which, to the plain man, is very strange and unfamiliar.

Two words are constantly in the mouth of Modernist controversialists in speaking of their opponents.  The adherents of the traditional theology are ‘intellectualists,’ and their conception of reality is ‘static.’  The meaning of the latter charge may perhaps be best explained from Laberthonniere’s brilliantly written essay, ’Le Realisme Chretien et l’Idealisme Grec.’  The Greeks, he says, were insatiable in their desire to see, like children.  Blessedness, for them, consisted in a complete vision of reality; and, since thought is the highest kind of vision, salvation was conceived of by them as the unbroken contemplation of the perfectly true, good, and beautiful.  Hence arose the philosophy of ‘concepts’; they idealised nature by considering it sub specie aeternitatis.  Reality resided in the unchanging ideas; the mutable, the particular, the individual was for them an embarrassment, a ’scandal of thought.’  The sage always tries to escape from the moving world of becoming into the static world of being.  But an ideal world, so conceived, can only be an abstraction, an impoverishment of reality.  Such an idealism gives us neither a science of origins nor a science of ends.  Greek wisdom sought eternity and forgot time; it sought that which never dies, and found that which never lives.

’An abstract doctrine, like that of Greek philosophy or of Spinoza, consists always in substituting for reality, by simplification, ideas or concepts which they think statically in their logical relations, regarding them at the same time as adequate representations and as essences immovably defined.’[76]

Hellenised Christianity, proceeds our critic, regarded the incarnation statically, as a fact in past history.  But the real Christ is an object of faith.  ’He introduces into us the principles of that which we ought to be.  That which He reveals, He makes in revealing it.’  In other words, Christ, and the God whom He reveals, are a power or force rather than a fact.  ‘A God who has nothing to become has nothing to do.’  God is not the idea of ideas, but the being of beings and the life of our life.  He is not a supreme notion, but a supreme life and an immanent action.  He is not the ‘unmoved mover,’ but He is in the movement itself as its principle and end.  While the Greeks conceived the world sub specie aeternitatis, God is conceived by modern thought sub specie temporis.  God’s eternity is not a sort of arrested time in which there is no more life; it is, on the contrary, the maximum of life.