Out of all attacks on Christianity throughout history, probably the most popular – and

consequently, the most base – is the one according to which Christianity is naturally poised
against human nature.

While it owes much of its modern popularity mainly to the appeal it holds for adolescents and
their craving for promiscuity, there’s a less popular and, consequently, more profound aspect to
it after all.

Indeed, being natural or un-natural means something rather different from the ability or inability
to live out one’s imagination in the form of sexual fantasies – this being the bottom line of the
ideal promiscuous life because only fantasy can provide the variety of sensation the promiscuity
seeks.

Being natural or un-natural actually only tells us whether the principle in question does or does
not impose violence on the nature of the particular being it acts upon.

Formulated in this way, the accusation that Christianity is unnatural is in fact quite old.

Also, in its primary form, it has less to do with frowning at people having intercourse out of
wedlock or, as Nietzsche would see it later, with suppression of authentic urge unto creative
power with its uncreative negative; rather it has to do with fear that the birth of Christianity is an
attempt at absolute new beginning and, consequently, an absolute denial of the past.

One only has to throw a cursory glance at Plotinus’ Against the Gnostics or accusations of Celsus
to catch more than a glimpse of this fact.

The trust of the argument against Christian principle is that it is being novel or, at best, an
eclectic appropriation of palaios logos of ancients – Tradition of metaphysics understood as
common to both civilized Mediterranean/Middle Eastern peoples and some among barbarians –
embodied in what we now call Greek metaphysics.

One criterion for demonstrating the sacredness and naturalness of this Tradition was its ancient
origin.

For a Platonist of the late Antiquity innovation was rather a sign of ineptness than of perfection –
the doctrines he cherished were originally given to the sages who were above the common run of
men, because their knowledge was acquired through divine, or at least in some way superhuman,
inspiration; they were themselves understood as a revelation of sorts.

Therefore, the originality was not to be found in the act of individual creative novelty but in an
ability to draw oneself close to the origin.

The truth was essentially handed down; therefore its origin was necessarily in the past.
This mentality has nothing to do with modern conservatism, an intellectual and political attitude
unthinkable in its proper form outside of modernity and its unrelenting thrust towards the future,
although it is often being named as such by modern and contemporary scholars.

On the contrary, it originates in the ability of civilized ancients to recognize causes in their
effects and understand the eternal position the origin holds towards anything coming after it.

In human – therefore, temporal – terms this position can only be symbolized by the perennial
before, the eternal past.

For them hearing that somehow all of this has been turned upside down as God took, not merely
an appearance, but both body, nature and ancestry of the Jewish man of quite well defined
descent and then died from the punishment reserved for runaway slaves, must have seemed as
the tremor of spiritual earthquake.

One is tempted to suppose that they saw Christians as revolutionaries and there is a grain of truth
in this, anachronism notwithstanding.

Yet they were essentially wrong.

Christian principle upon which some nature is changed is this:

God acts upon particular nature only insofar as this nature remains what it is while being
perfected by the reforming divine energy.

Every created nature is good and any mode of acting contrary to its goodness – acting violently,
that is – is actually contrary to the act of its Creator.

This, in essence, is the core of the polemical answer of the ancient Christian apologist, no matter
was it put in the form of calling Plato “Attic Moses” or Moses “Hebrew Plato”. The original
principle behind it was not a negation, but an affirmation, which both Christians and their
opponents shared:

God is.

And, being what He is, He also always was.

However, if this is true, then the idea that before the resurrection of Christ, nobody had a clue
about the fact of the existence of God is not only wrong, but scandalous.

If the world is created, than its Creator must be in some way present in it, as the cause is in some
way always present in its effect; moreover, as we are talking about the eternal Creator, whose
energy is also eternal, then all the effects of his operations are united to His eternity by
something more than the mere stamp, to speak figuratively; in the Christian Tradition, as well as
the pre-Christian one, this was understood as something that can be, to a various extent,
apprehended by the light of methodical and/or inspired understanding, i.e. by the highest human
faculty of intellect.

Denying the lumen naturalis among Christians – and sure enough there was never a lack of those
who denied it – would therefore be tantamount to denying the origin of man, even more so than
for the pagan metaphysicians. Whereas an average Platonist could consider the man as being
provided with this power somewhat accidentally, as he understood creation in terms of
emanation of God’s abundance (His “un-envy” as Plotinus would puts it), where beauty of the
eternal living being of kosmos far transcends anything man can muster, the Christian Tradition
squarely elevates the human being in a very specific sense.

After all, the birth of the cosmic evil came to pass out of envy held towards man by a being
incommensurably superior to him in power and intelligence.

One of the reasons of the original non serveam of Lucifer was his refusal to acknowledge the
dignity of the embodied creature endowed with intelligence.

So what is then human nature and, consequently, what is natural to man?

It is something that pre-Christian understanding, even at its pinnacle, could not fully accept,
namely that man is the image of the Logos Himself and, indeed, that this Word of God is both
something being spoken and that in final analysis it is not really something but someone.

To see how two Traditions, or, to be more precise, two ages meet, we’ll invoke one quite
insightful passage from St. Thomas Aquinas:

“In Scripture, secular wisdom is often represented by water, but divine wisdom by wine. Now,
according to Is., chap. 1, the innkeepers are upbraided for mixing water with wine; therefore the
doctors are blameworthy for their mingling of philosophical doctrine with sacred Scripture.

It may be said: No conclusive argument can be drawn from figurative speech (…) Nevertheless it
can be said that when one of two things passes into the nature of another, the product is not
considered a mixture except when the nature of both is altered.

Wherefore those who use philosophical doctrines in sacred Scripture in such a way as to
subject them to the service of faith, do not mix water with wine, but change water into
wine.” St. Thomas Aquinas, In Boethius De Trinitate, article 3.

Faith is essentially a state of readiness for being acted upon by one’s Origin.

On the other hand, philosophy – and I would posit that in this sense it is nothing else but palaios
logos of pre-Christian civilization – is the expression of the natural readiness of the human mind
for receiving the insight that God exists.
It is important to stress this habitual nature of both knowledge and faith, because modern
propensity to divide the two stems from inability to recognize what they share and what at the
same time distinguishes them, thus confusing something being distinct with something being
divided.

If what Platon and Aristotle called sense of wonder, or thaumazein, is the readiness of the soul to
be in awe before the effect by recognizing its original cause – apprehending the order of cosmos
by distinctly realizing where this order comes from – then denying any value to it is quite the
similar act to the one early enemies of Christianity employed against Christians themselves.

It is simply the denial that human nature is good of itself.

The so called “fideism” has much in common with its counterpart, the so called “rationalism”, in
that both stances are based on the disjunction separating what is originally one, albeit
intrinsically distinct.

This in itself comprises the act of violence because what is naturally one has been artificially
divided into two.

If I cannot help being in awe over the premonition of the origin of the world simply by being
correctly disposed towards the effects I found in it, then the state of awe is not simply an
emotional reaction but the epistemologically natural state of mind; philosophical wonder the
ancients talked about is not a more or less refined pleasure of the modern day scientist looking
through the microscope at molecular structure of the asshole of a rat – and the crudeness of the
example is quite appropriate because the idea is that only through stripping the corporeal being
of its qualities do we get to origins; on the contrary, it is a realization of the congeniality of the
light in which the things exist and the one through which we understand them.

The idea that Platon and Aristotle were less evolved specimens of the modern day scientist is
demonstrably false, because the awe is a form of knowledge and not a manifestation of human
taste for intricate patterns. This knowledge is an awareness of what is somehow given to man
and it in itself does not disclose what this essentially is, only that it is, for a simple reason that
cosmos does not talk to man – only its Creator does.

But this does not mean that it does not disclose Him in its truth, goodness, oneness and other
knowable metaphysical qualities Medieval doctors called transcendentalia. Sense of wonder is
an apprehension of those limits to the corporeal world that nevertheless both transcend and
imbibe it, and their congeniality with the light that discloses them.

This is something modern and postmodern natural sciences cannot disclose by themselves,
because it stems from the epistemological primacy of qualities which are neither morally nor
aesthetically neutral; the act of the Creator in the creature is not comprehensible from the form of
molecular structure – an object unperceivable by natural act of thinking – but in the common
principles that transcend both thinking and any particular being, yet are present in every act of
thinking and in every conceivable being.

What does it mean to subject this act of knowing to the act of faith, as Aquinas supposes?

Well, primarily it means denouncing the illusory discrepancy in the human nature – a division
that does not exist, but can convince us that it exist and thus severely impede the most important
insights man is obliged to acquire during his brief life.

The idea that true knowledge is “free from value judgments” and that, consequently,
transcendental forms cannot be in any way be known is impossible in the mode of classical
Greek metaphysics, both in its pagan and Christian form, because it grew out from the natural
intention of human nature and this intention is ordered towards its original cause.

If anything, precisely fideism and its unrelenting hatred for “Athens” as, supposedly, perennial
enemy of “Jerusalem” brings forth that peculiar detachment of natural habitual readiness of the
mind to seek the truth and its habitual readiness for receiving the supernatural act that reveals it
in corporis.

Out of all attacks on Christianity this (rather brief) side of history, the most popular – and,
consequently, the most base – is the one we name scientism, i.e. the idea that revelation is a man
made illusion that somehow blocks the way towards absolute knowledge of nature, both in the
general sense of physical world, “surrounding us”, and our own nature.

While it owes much of its modern popularity mainly to the appeal it holds for adolescents and
their craving for the unbridled freedom of imagination, there’s a less popular and, consequently,
more profound aspect to it after all.

First of all, understanding nature as “the surrounding” presupposes the modern problem of the
subject/object split: nature is divided into “external” world and the subject perceiving and
comprehending it, while the later in fact possesses nature only in the analogical sense. Although
“the surrounding” (periehon) was indeed known to the ancients, it was not per se the object of
science of physis; nature is in itself undivided and, as such, it is undividedly intrinsic both to the
knower and the known, that are understood as different only in the sense of being distinct but not
in the one of being divided.

If we deny any value to this natural habitual readiness of human intellect, what we get in its
stead?

Well, we transpose it in the realm of supernatural, obviously.

Transcendentals are either man made mirages or something out of this world.

The world itself is an infinite “other” to us, a closed system of “heterogeneous continuum”.
But the Scripture is something else.

It is the word of God containing the comprehensibility “outside” world does not have.

And then there comes about the profound attack on Christianity by means of Christianity: the
Bible is the only proper object of study where knowledge and faith meet, because it contains, not
only the whole of revelation, but also the complete intellectual explanation of revelation.

Moreover, the knowledge gained from the Bible is intellectual in the proper sense because
therein are exemplars of all things and human mind is indeed capable to contemplate those
exemplars when they are directly given – nay, written! – in the Scripture; one only needs to read
and interpret the whole thing properly and nothing else will be needed to put everything in its
own place.