p Christianity, which became the dominant and virtually the sole ideology of the European Middle Ages, absorbed the philosophical mysticism and irrationalism of the age of the final decay of the ancient world. "Christianity,” Engels points out, "was not imported from without, from Judea, and imposed upon the Greco-Roman world.... It is—at least in the form in which it has become a world religion—the most characteristic product of this world.”  [36•2  The apologists of Christianity called the new religion that ousted Greco-Roman polytheism philosophy. Their basic argument was that the fundamental problems of Christian doctrine (God, the creation of the world) had already been posed by Greek philosophy, but only Christianity could supply the true answers. Augustine, Tertullian and other "fathers of the Church" gave a theological interpretation and elaboration of the philosophical mysticism and irrationalism of neo-Platonism 37 and the other idealist doctrines related to it. Vulgarised neo-Platonism, eclectically combined with Epicureanism, scepticism and particularly stoicism, was the "theoretical source" of the Christian religion.  [37•1 

p Thus the New Testament or "divine revelation”, recounted by the apostles of Jesus Christ, turns out to be, as its historico-philosophical analysis shows, a theological revision of the philosophical theories of later antiquity, with the addition of numerous borrowings from other “ heathen” teachings. Nevertheless, to the medieval theologians and philosophers the Scriptures appeared to be radically different from the human wisdom of the ancients. This was the divine revelation, the indisputable source for all theorising about the divine and the things of this world. This meant that for the medieval thinker divine wisdom existed in a form accessible to man, i.e., expounded in the sacred books. The only problem was to be able to understand it, to interpret it correctly.

p Theology is the metaphilosophy of the European Middle Ages. Theology, according to Thomas Aquinas, descends from the divine to the terrestrial, while philosophy seeks to ascend from the terrestrial and temporal to the divine and absolute. Philosophy commands only the truths of reason, whereas theology expounds superrational although not irrational truths, whose source is Divine Reason. Philosophy inevitably becomes the handmaid of theology. Love of wisdom is transformed into an intellectualised religious feeling. Metaphysical wisdom can be only the interpretation of theological wisdom, authentically expounded in the Bible. The philosopher cannot therefore arrive at any new or unexpected conclusions; the conclusions are given in advance and all that has to be done is to lay a logical path towards them, i.e., to justify Christian dogma in the face of everyday common sense, which is afraid not to believe in miracles and the supernatural in general, and yet cannot conceive how all this is possible.  [38•1 

p The wisdom of the ancient Greeks, says Jacques Maritain, is restricted to the human scale. "It is, in fact, a philosophical wisdom that claims not to save us through unity with the Deity, but only to guide us along the path of rational cognition of the universe.”  [39•1  Religion, as we have seen, did not inspire ancient philosophy, and reflection on the Deity held little place in it even in those cases when it asserted that divine wisdom was infinitely superior to that of humanity.

p Jacques Maritain, of course, is not satisfied by the “worldly” wisdom to which the finest of the classical Greek philosophers, aspired. Such an interpretation of wisdom, he observes, tends towards a scientific understanding of reality, whereas the true wisdom is the wisdom of salvation, the wisdom of the saints. Maritain believes that the philosophers of the ancient East came near to this kind of wisdom in that they understood wisdom as the ascent of man from the terrestrial to the divine. Genuine wisdom, however, according to Maritain, is to be found only in Christianity and the forms of orthodox medieval theological and philosophical thought to which it gave birth. "The wisdom of the Old Testament,” he declares, "tells us that, at bottom, our personality exists only in humility and may be saved only thanks to the divine personality. . .. This supernatural wisdom is a wisdom that gives itself, that descends. . . .”  [39•2 

p In returning to the medieval mode of thought (we have in mind, of course, the dominant ideology of the Christian Middle Ages) Maritain sees a way of escape for capitalist society from the contradictions by which it is being torn apart.  [40•1  Maritain has high praise for the proposition of Thomas Aquinas on the three kinds of wisdom: divine (revelation), theological, and metaphysical; the last, of course, occupies the lowest place in the hierarchy. No wonder, then, that Maritain condemns Averroism, which he defines as "an attempt to separate philosophical wisdom from theological wisdom".  [40•2  Thus contemporary neo-Thomism leads us directly into the domain of the philosophical and theological notions that dominated the feudal society of Western Europe.

p The neo-Thomist Johannes Hirschberger presents the Middle Ages as existing in a state of infinite divine wisdom which manifests itself in everything, in the order of nature, society and so on. "As never before in any period of the spiritual history of the West, the whole world here lives in assurance concerning the existence of God, His wisdom, power and goodness, concerning the origin of the world, the reasonableness of its order and government, the nature of 41 man and his position in the Cosmos, the meaning of his life, the capacity of his spirit to know the world and to arrange his own life, concerning his dignity, freedom and immortality, the foundations of the law, the system of state power and the meaning of history. Unity and order are the hallmark of the time.”  [41•1 

p Needless to say, the idyllic existence described by this contemporary Catholic historian never actually existed. The Middle Ages knew the peasant wars, the wars between suzerains, between suzerains and vassals, between monarchs and the Pope of Rome. They knew also religious heresies, “worldly” free-thinking, and the Inquisition. But Hirschberger’s assertions, like the beliefs of Jacques Maritain, fairly accurately reproduce the predominant scholastic purview of the Middle Ages, the essence of which is well expressed in the Gospel dictum "Blessed are the poor in spirit”.

Dogmatic faith was indeed a synonym for all the wisdom accessible to man. Although Christian teaching maintained that man was created in the image of God, its true inspiration lay in the anti-humanist belief in the vanity of this world, i.e., of actual human life. Divine wisdom allegedly derived from infinite being and as opposed to the finite, transient life of man, which had to bear the additional burden of original sin, was a radical denial of “self-willed” human wisdom. Only the rise of the capitalist mode of production and the development of the natural sciences and mathematics were able to show philosophy a way of escape from the labyrinth of theology.