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The Two
Humanities
by Vicenzo Gioberti
One can distinguish two orders of humanities:
One of nature and one of grace. Stemming both from
one man they grew successively. But the natural
order, having lost any moral unity, propagates by
generation, while the predestined order propagates
by election and maintains the spiritual unity which
confers on it its privilege. The former is a
material society consisting more of bodies than of
souls, lacking as it does the integrity of the
ideal principle. The latter is a spiritual society,
a council of intelligences that originate in the
Idea and that are strictly united within only one
body. Both proceed from one Individual and pass
successively through the threefold ring of the
family, the nation and the assemblage of nations.
Both are tending toward a great universality of the
future from which both are still far off. Both are
progressive and move from the individual unity in
order to reach the universal unity. Unity is their
beginning and their end. Divided in their march
toward the future type, they are imperfect; for one
is lacking the unity characteristic of the elected
race, the other, embracing only one part of
humanity, does not possess all the variety
characteristic of the natural race. But when each
of them will have completed its course, they will
merge again and will complete each other naturally.
The natural species will become, still in the order
of time, the elected species and the restored
primitive unity of our species will be led to its
ultimate perfection. At the present moment, the
Church through election and spiritual generation
represents the human race set up in a superhuman
fashion. It can be defined, in this respect, as the
reorganization of the human generation divided and
reunited by grace by means of the ideal unity.
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A
History of Philosophy: Volume IX: Modern Philosophy
from the French Revolution to Sartre, Camus, and
Levi-Strauss, by Frederick Copleston
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