“It seems to be the fact that a new way of life or a new view of Reality is felt intuitively before it is comprehended intellectually, that a philosophy is the last product of a mature culture, the crown of a long process of social development, not its foundation. It is Religion and Art that we can best see the vital intention of the living culture….
The Greek statue must be first conceived, then lived, then made, and last of all thought. There you have the whole cycle of creative Hellenic culture. First Religion, then Society, then Art, and finally Philosophy. Not that one of these is cause and the others effects. They are all different aspects or functions of one life.”
Christopher Dawson
Enquiries Into Religion & Culture — pg. 99, 100
1.) I probably would take exception to Dawson’s claim that ‘not one of these is cause.’ I would insist that theology is cause. “As a man thinketh in his heart so he is.”
2.) The inuitive precedes logically the intellectual for the same reason the ontological precedes the epistemological. Epistemological explanation is the apparatus used in order to communicate what has been ontologically impressed upon us by God. It is a old argument about which is prior to the other but as long as we insist that the two correspond I agree that the intuitive precedes the intellectual expression. Michael Polanyi, in his works teases out this same idea.
