A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living (Learning to Live)

by Luc Ferry

For Christians, truth is no longer accessed through the exercise of a human reason which can grasp the rational and ‘logical’ order of the cosmic totality by virtue of its being an eminent component of that same order. From now on, what will permit man to approach the divine, to know it and to contemplate it, belongs to a quite different order. What will count here, above all, is no longer intelligence but trust in the word of a man, the Man-God, Christ, who claims to be the son of God, the Logos incarnate. We are going to believe Him, because He is worthy of this act of faith – and the miracles He accomplishes will play their part in the credit which is accorded to Him. You will recall that trust originally meant ‘faith’. To contemplate God, the appropriate theoretical instrument is faith, not reason, and this means placing all our confidence in the words of Christ announcing the ‘good news’: according to which we shall be saved by faith and not by ‘works’; in other words, our all too human actions, however admirable these might be. It is no longer a case of thinking for oneself, but rather of placing trust in another. And in that, no doubt, lies the most profound and significant difference between philosophy and religion.