Here also the Gallery of Living Catholic Authors may be especially fruitful, in helping Catholic thought and literature, which would run some risk of self-complacency if it enclosed itself within a merely denominational field of readers, in helping it to enter and enlighten the common labor of the culture, art and thought of today. In the general field of Catholic literature, I should like to emphasize the role and importance of Catholic philosophy. There is no Christian mathematics nor Christian botany, yet, there is indeed a Christian philosophy, for philosophy is not only knowledge or science, but wisdom too. In the face of the dispersion and atomization of modern knowledge and modern life, the main task and benefit of Christian philosophy consists in making man overcome any dichotomy or inner confusion, and so attain his own internal unity. This appears first with regard to spiritual life.
Human knowledge is divided today into an infinity of specialized disciplines.
Thus for too many souls religion becomes a set of sacred formulae whose thoroughgoing reality is not intellectually grasped, or of pious practices whose transforming and quickening meaning is asleep, without any contact with our real existence. As in certain canvasses by Picasso, modern man has enormous, beautiful and perfect legs and arms, pink and muscled and glamorous, and the minute, timid and empty head of a bird. It is the work of philosophy to fill up the gaps between our diverse fields of training and to remedy the disparity in growth of the diverse members of our mental organism. Christian philosophy lays the natural foundations of that supernatural unity and peace which only Christ is able to give, and which flowers into divine contemplation. Similar observations must be made with regard to social and political life.