When one's function is to teach the loftiest wisdom, it is difficult to resist the temptation to believe that until you have spoken, nothing has been… - Jacques Maritain

In point of fact, Western philosophy has never set itself free of Christianity: wherever Christianity did not have a hand in the construction of modern philosophy it served instead as a stumbling block.

Western humanism has religious and transcendent sources without which it is incomprehensible to itself.

We have just seen that perfection and contemplation imply each other by reason of love which is at once the essence of perfecton and “the source, the execize and the end” of contemplation. One can also show this mutual implication by the stressing the fact that under the regime of the gifts of the Holy Spirit is the state proper to perfection and to contemplation all at once. Saint Thomas teaches that the gifts of the Holy Spirit are necessary for salvation, because we are too weak all by ourselves always to use as we should even the theological virtues and the infused moral virtues. […] For, as saint Bonavenure tell us, “the gifts immediately dispose one to contemplation”.