w
shall I describe it? It has been expressed, as far as it could be, by
those great incomparable souls who we admit have beheld and still
behold.... We reach a point at which we acknowledge how true is what
we have been commanded to believe and how well and beneficently we
have been brought up by our mother, the Church, and of what benefit
was the milk given by the Apostle Paul to the little ones...." (It is
beyond the scope of this book to give an account of the alternative
method which is evolved from the Mystery Wisdom, enriched through the
Christ event. The description of this method will be found in _An
Outline of Occult Science_, see advt., front page.) Whereas in
pre-Christian times one who wished to seek the spiritual basis of
existence was necessarily directed to the way of the Mysteries,
Augustine was able to say, even to those souls who could find no such
path within themselves, "Go as far as you can on the path of knowledge
with your human powers, thence trust (faith) will carry you up into
the higher spiritual regions." It was only going one step further to
say, it is natural to the human soul only to be able to arrive at a
certain stage of knowledge through its own powers: thence it can only
advance further through trust, through faith in written and oral
tradition. This step was taken by the spiritual movement which
assigned to knowledge a certain sphere above which the soul could not
rise by its own efforts, but everything which lay beyond this domain
was made an object of faith which has to be supported by written and
oral tradition and by confidence in its representatives. Thomas
Aquinas, the greatest teacher within the Church (1224-1274), has set
forth this doctrine in his writings in a variety of ways. His main
point is that human knowledge can only attain to that which led
Augustine to self-knowledge, to the certainty of the divine. The
nature of the divine and its relation to the world is given by
revealed theology, which is not accessible to man's own researches and
is, as the substance of faith, superior to all knowledge.

The origin of this point of view may be studied in the theology of
John Scotus Erigena, who lived in the ninth century at the court of
Charles the Bald, and who represents a natural transition from the
earliest ideas of Christianity to the ideas of Thomas Aquinas. His
conception of the universe is couched in the spirit of Neo-Platonism.
In his treatise _De Divisione Naturae_,