The Reconciliation of East and West

Extract

Père Daniélou has expressed in a recent book his opinion that the theology of the Holy Ghost, hitherto so little developed in the Church, will receive definitive form only when it has been formulated in the thought of India: that this indeed is the providential vocation of Indian thought, just as that of Greek thought has been to express the theology of the Incarnation.

This is certainly looking somewhat far ahead, but it will appear extravagant only to those who are wedded to a narrowly Western point of view. Such a point of view becomes ever less tenable in view of the rapid decline of Western civilisation in our day, and there is no respectable authority for persisting in it.

Human systems of thought, no less than the political systems described by Plato, have each their germs of decay which will eventually work themselves out unless neutralised by the influence of another system. While making due allowance for the influence of divine providence in the Christian thought of the West, we must not forget that grace worked by adapting and combining diverse natural elements, and has in fact so worked in producing the Catholic synthesis that we know, built up as it is with stones from Jerusalem, Athens, Antioch, Alexandria, Rome and many other places.

A thousand years of schism were bound to make our synthesis somewhat lopsided in a Westerly direction. The Latin scholastic element has been allowed to grow somewhat disproportionately and has not been slow in manifesting its peculiar danger: a too rigid conceptualism, tending towards rationalism and legalism.