PARTISAN REVIEW
The truth of the matter is that the creative imagination, dealing with
experience according to its own laws, makes discoveries which the
praying, the believing soul does not acknowledge. There is a sense
in which the creative imagination is repugnant to Christianity and to
any fixed and embodied myth. It is a question of time and space, of
the dramatic, the dynamic qualities of existence.
By this train of thought we are led back to the considerations
with which these notes opened. The literary function of the Catholic
faith in the nineteenth century was to provide occasions for blas–
phemy. But indeed has there ever been a period in which the literary
mind stood in any simple and direct relation to the Catholic faith?
A number of modem studies suggest that even Dante cultivated a
secret doctrine in conflict with the official teaching. Throughout the
Christian era, literature and heresy have flourished together, the
Provenc;al poets with the Albigenses, Norman-Celtic romance with
the cult of the Sangraal, the Italian renaissance with nco-Platonism
and the renaissance elsewhere with the Lutheran and Calvinist re–
formations. Or, if a poet has not been a heretic, at least he has been
a great sinner and rebel, like Franc;ois Villon and the later succession
of
poetes maudits.
Or else he gives way to despair in order to increase
the dramatic tension between himself and the vision before which he
tends to melt into a lyrical stasis. Dostoevsky had to bury himself in
the Siberian mines, with Dmitri Karamazov. In imagination, he had
to sink down out of the presence even of the natural light. "And then
we men underground will sing from the bowels of the earth a glorious
hymn to God, with Whom is joy." Kierkegaard based his theology
on despair. The Christian myth is undramatic, like the story of the
prodigal son. Within the pattern of Christianity, only sin, despair, and
heresy release the imagination.
When a new tradition of absolute faith begins, as it began in
France with Bloy, may we not then expect that it will conceal a
heresy? All heresies begin with a desire to purify and strengthen
the faith.
There is Manichaeism of the ordinary kind in Bloy, the Mani–
chaeism which condemns the natural order as evil in itself. There is
also
a political Manichaeism which divides the world between the
poor and the bourgeoisie. The poor are represented by Christ, Who
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