struggling with the world 147modern Eu ro pe an philosophy that it can be considered the most prom-
inent and distinctive axis of this philosophical tradition if anything
can be.Th e doctrine of the two regimes has not come in a single, constant form.
Rather it has advanced, in the course of the history of Western thought,
in four great waves. In each of them, it has had a specifi c meaning and a
characteristic motive. Despite the diff erences, there is enough overlap of
both meaning and motive to take the four waves as movements in the
same direction. Let me call these four waves the nominalist, the Carte-
sian, the Kantian, and the historicist.
Th e nominalist wave arrived with the nominalist Christian theology
of the fourteenth and fi ft eenth centuries. (Given the controversies that
application of the term nominalism to certain currents of late medieval
thought has sparked, one might also call it the dualist wave, if the word
dualism did not carry even heavier baggage.) Th is theology, in which
we may fi nd the original inspiration of many of the most infl uential
ideas of later secular thought, taught, among other things, a radical di-
vergence between the realms of nature and of grace. At least in the
hands of those who were later labeled Aristotelian Averroists, it also
argued an equally sharp disjunction between the truths known to rea-
son and to faith: a self- contained naturalism and a fi deism barred
against rational challenge became reverse sides of each other.
Th e domain of grace was the one in which God’s perfect freedom
communicated with the fl awed freedom of his human creatures, endow-
ing them with the means by which to increase their share in his life. Na-
ture, however, even nature within man himself, remained spiritless and
incapable of participating in this ascent. Because it was spiritless, it
could later become the object of natural science and of its search for
immutable laws. On the other side of this divide between the orders of
nature and of grace stood immaterial spirit.
Classical ontology in general and Aristotle in par tic u lar had been en-
listed in the ser vice of an attempt to render as Christian (or Jewish or Is-
lamic) philosophy the dialectic of transcendence and of immanence. Th e
centerpiece of this attempt was the appeal to a conception of intelligible
forms, residing in the phenomena but going beyond them. Such a view