Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/270

 PHILOSOPHY AMONG THE JESUITS. 257 part of space ; yet their senses cry aloud that nothing can be undividedly present in several separate places. They believe that one unchangeable Person, the Word of God, was born, suffered and died ; yet their senses affirm that all such processes imply variation and change. They believe that the appearances of bread and of wine conceal the body and the blood of Jesus Christ ; and yet their senses warn them that what appears to be bread is bread, that what seems wine is wine in very deed. At every step there is a conflict between the ideas and judgments which the senses tend to produce, and the ideas and judgments that are evolved under the influence of faith. I here purposely abstain from passing judgment upon the principles from which St. Ignatius started ; I merely notice that he was consistent with himself and strictly logical all along. The standpoint from which he views everything having thus been indicated, it will hardly appear surprising that he arrived at the conclusion that Scholastic Philosophy was to be made much of. 1 It is a well-known fact that no system of philosophy is so little at variance with the dogmas of the Church of Rome as the doctrine of Aristotle. Other systems of doctrine may perhaps be wrested into compliance with the mysteries of that faith : Peripateticism lent itself to the transformation. If anyone wishes to study the process, and observe with what ease this change was brought about, he has only to read St. Thomas Aquinas's commentaries on Aristotle ; on the completion of which the Sorbonne raised the prohibition it had so long laid upon the works of the Grecian philosopher. It may be that this facility of adapta- tion was solely due to the assimilative genius of Aquinas ; still I am much mistaken if the doctrine itself, as Aristotle gave it to the world, did not count for a great deal in the success of the operation. But while St. Ignatius, in the rules he lays down, inclines visibly to the Scholastic Philosophy, he does not exclude the different manner of doctrine professed by most Fathers of the early Church, which he calls Positive Theology. This is by no means an inconsistency on his part ; still less is it a departure from his primal idea of upholding the Church, to which both the ancient Fathers and the School- men of more recent date are equally necessary. But though he attributes to the former the important task of strengthen- ing the heart and determining the will by their eloquence, he still gives the palm to the latter for whatever concerns 1 See the Exercitia : Regulce ad rectt sentiendum, &c., towards the end. 17