TRADITION AND THE MODERN AGE
65
What Kierkegaard wanted was to assert the dignity of faith
against modem reason and reasoning, as Marx desired to assert again
the dignity of human action against modem historical contemplation
and relativization, and as Nietzsche wanted to assert the dignity of
human life against the impotence of modem man. The traditional
oppositions of
fides
and
intellectus
and of
theoria
and
praxis
took their
respective revenges upon Kierkegaard and Marx, just as the opposi–
tion between the transcendent and the sensuously given took its re–
venge upon Nietzsche, not because these oppositions still had roots
in valid human experience, but, on the contrary, because they had
become mere concepts outside of which, however, no comprehensive
thought seemed possible at all.
That these three outstanding and conscious rebellions against a
tradition which had lost its
arche,
its beginning and principle, should
have ended in self-defeat, is no reason to question the greatness of
the enterprises nor their relevance to the understanding of the modem
world. Each attempt, in its particular way, took account of those
traits of modernity which were incompatible with our tradition, and
this even before modernity in all its aspects had fully revealed itself.
Kierkegaard knew that the incompatibility of modem science with
traditional beliefs does not lie in any specific scientific findings, all
of which can be integrated into religious systems and absorbed by
religious beliefs for the reason that they will never be able to answer
the questions which religion raises. He knew that this incompatibility
lay, rather, in the conflict between a spirit of doubt and distrust
which ultimately can trust only what it has made itself and the tra–
ditional unquestioning confidence in what has been given and appears
in its true being to man's reason and senses. Modem science, in
Marx's words, would "be superfluous if the appearance and essence
of things coincided." Because our traditional religion
is
essentially
a revealed religion and holds, in harmony with ancient philosophy,
that truth is what reveals itself, that truth
is
revelation (even though
the meanings of this revelation may be as different as the philoso–
phers'
azetheia
and
dilosis
are from the early Christians' eschatological
expectations for an
apokalypsi
in the Second Coming), modern sci–
ence has become much more formidable an enemy of religion than
traditional philosophy, even in its most rationalistic versions, ever
