that appeared in the previous year:37 But none of the Sectarians or none of those who worship antiquity as if it were a deity will refute this [eclectic philosophy], nor can they refute it, as I have shown to you on another occasion.38 Thus I embrace many new ideas and I reject many new ones. Many new ideas I introduce myself by making use of my liberty of philosophizing and by being guided by reason which accepts new and old ideas equally. If a reply were required, I could fittingly use the sharp-witted epigram of a man among us who is both an excellent theologian by virtue of his life and his doctrine, as well as a most elegant poet—an epigram with which he recently honored participants in a public disputation:39
Whoever, in oral debate, wants to protect the errors of the ancients
And boasts that everything he teaches is ancient
He, while he mocks the others by the name of innovators
Will graduate in the class of the obsolete.
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I know that it is not easy to introduce something new in theological matters because the peace within the church must not be disturbed, though novelty can be defended if it is put forward properly. But I deny having introduced any novelty in that sense and have submitted my Institutes to public censorship.
§34. Yet these calumnies allowed me to see that some had taken the concise brevity which I used in the first book as an opportunity to distort my words. I therefore not only expressed my meaning in the second and third books more elaborately than I had originally intended to, but also conferred privately on the matters in the first book with some friends, men whom I revere for their supreme zeal for piety which is the true theological virtue. I asked them to warn me in time if they detected anything there which was contrary to the articles of faith, or might seem to be so, or could be interpreted in a bad sense because it was ambiguously expressed, or which promoted some novelty dangerous to sacred doctrine. And they were very happy to do so, discussing various objections with me in a peaceful manner. I accepted these gratefully, and in order to explain what is expressed rather obscurely in the first book and to reaffirm what is doubtful, I can only communicate to you the ideas which came into my mind as a result and from my own rereading of that book. Insofar as possible, I do this very briefly and according to the rule that I either teach you how to avoid an objection through an appropriate interpretation of my intention or that I show that the opinion I defend, even if new, is not theological, and not even so new, but resting on the authority of men who are above suspicion, and often on that of our own theologians, even if this opinion is not commonly accepted.
§35. In chapter 1, §§3ff., I set out a much improved and corrected classification of faculties, and in §22 of the same chapter I assert that the common doctrine of the Peripatetics in this matter is full of endless errors. And I do not change my opinion on this matter now. However, this doctrine is certainly not theological, nor even new. For while I believed at the time that I had been the first to detect these errors, since I only remembered one error that my father pointed out in his history of metaphysics, published
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together with his metaphysical questions,40 namely that the Scholastics described their metaphysics as wisdom, when it was nothing other than a dictionary of terms, many of which do not serve wisdom, but sophistry. Another error he pointed out in his annotations on practical philosophy was that intelligence was listed among the theoretical faculties. Yet, while doing something else recently, I noticed an elegant meditation in the manuscripts of my blessed father, which showed that the other observations I had made on the common division of qualities were already made by him around 1660. On this account I congratulated myself on the similarity of my thoughts with those of my father. This discussion is a little too long to be inserted conveniently into this preface. Yet my point will become clear if I offer a summary of his intention and his procedure in the division of the qualities. He says:
There is on the one hand intellectual virtue, on the other the virtue of the will; among the intellectual virtues one is simple, that is, intelligence, which belongs equally to theoretical and practical principles, while the other is composite. This composite intellectual virtue is either theoretical—that is, wisdom and science—or practical—that is, prudence, the guide in moral affairs, and diligence, which is the guide in matters of art. The virtue of the will is either moral, the secondary subject of which is the sensitive appetite of desire or anger; or it is artificial, that is, art, the secondary subject of which is the locomotive power of the mind as well as the body.
§36. However, as far as I know, this observation is my own, for in the same chapter 1, §23, I disclose a blatant error, contrary to Christian theology, on the difference between theoretical and practical faculties: it is illuminated by dissertations 5 and 6 of the Platonic philosopher Maximus Tyrus.41 There you will discover many arguments which he formulated on the superiority of theoretical over practical philosophy and which smack of the pagan hypothesis that the essence of God consists in contemplation
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and that the approach of man to God is through theoretical contemplation. I remember that among the speeches of my blessed father there was one, the 21st,42 in which he himself defended the superiority of a life of theoretical contemplation. But it is not true that he disagrees with me; in fact, he confirms my opinions in many respects. The purpose of this speech is to demonstrate the superiority of the theoretical life based on the prerogative of the first table of the Decalogue over the second. We do not deny this prerogative, but we do deny that the first table pertains to a life based on theoretical contemplation, and so we disagree in the definition of the terms. For the entire Decalogue regulates human duties, and these are the subject not of theoretical philosophy, but of practical philosophy, and the duties of man toward God will always concern practice, not mere theory. Our blessed father’s statements concerning pagan opinion on the superiority of theoretical philosophy over practical at the beginning of the said speech do, however, amply confirm what we have posited in the said chapter 1, §§24ff.
§37. What requires some explanation, however, is my statement in §24, toward the end, that “it is a false opinion of the pagans that God’s essence consists in contemplation”—that is, pure contemplation—and one which does not have any action as its end. You must therefore beware of mocking my words, perhaps by inferring that I declare God’s essence to consist in external action and so avoid Charybdis by being wrecked on Scylla and adopt the error of those pagans who say God is necessarily joined to prime matter from all eternity. For, leaving aside other matters, this argument would apply only if God were human. But as God’s essence is infinitely superior to that of humans, you would not even be able to infer that (if I had denied completely that God contemplated, which, however, you see I have not done) because contemplation is not the essence of God; it must be action. Similarly you would not be able to infer that if someone says a stone cannot see, he concludes the stone to be blind. For just as there is something in between seeing and being blind—that is,
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not seeing—which can be predicated of the stone because of its imperfection, so I believe that there can be a third term between contemplation and human action in God which I do not know because of his supreme perfection. For, based on Scripture, I know nothing of God’s essence; but I admire it, and without philosophical knowledge I believe those things which Scripture has revealed to me about it. Now if it is permissible to speak in the human way of God’s infinite essence, then my father’s words in the said speech, pages 504ff., will be found to be very pleasing:
God is happy not only in contemplation, but also in action. For even if he undertook infinite tasks in one moment they would not burden this supremely powerful and pure being. God’s beatitude is derived from himself, not from elsewhere. We by contrast owe whatever we have that is good to God, not to ourselves. What worms we
