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also occupied in his profession in converting this subjective material
into an a-historical objective form, its actual disorder into one pos–
sible order among others. This means that the artist
qua
artist is of all
people the most skeptical, because in his art he does not have to be–
lieve what he says, only entertain it as a possibility: e.g., if he writes
a poem about the Crucifixion, there is no means of knowing from
the poem whether he believes in it as a Christian must believe or
is using it as a convenient myth for organizing the emotions his
poem expresses, for in poetry dogma and myth are identical.
The Christian, on the other hand, who is not an artist is in–
clined to forget that, as Cardinal Newman wrote, "There cannot
really be a Christian literature for all literature is literature about
the natural man," and therefore to condemn literature which des–
cribes sinful emotion .and behavior or the triumph of the sinner in
this world. Further the relative subjectivity of aesthetic values tempts
the average man, Christian or not Christian, to suspect all art which
he does not like or understand of being heretical and subversive.
V.
Prophetic and Institutional Religion.
Man is both a historical creature creating novelty and a natural
creature suffering cyclical recurrence and no religion is viable which
does not do justice to both aspects.
A prophet is one through whom God speaks to awaken the
Church to a consciousness of its contemporary historical mission.
For this purpose it is not even necessary that the prophet himself be
a Christian; indeed, during the p.ast two hundred years most of the
great prophets, e.g. Voltaire, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, have been
actively hostile to Christianity and even those who, like Kierkegaard
and Dostoievsky, were members of a Christian Church, have been
of very doubtful orthodoxy.
Their
raison d'etre
depends on the existence of an institutional
religion by whom they may be heard. This institution with its un–
changing cycle of ritual and sacrament exists and must exist because
men are born, bear children and die and "human nature," as we
say, remains the same, through all historical change. Without
prophets religion degenerates into popular natural habit. Without a
church, it degenerates into a succession of highbrow spiritual fash–
ions reflecting the ideology of the moment. Without both, in fact,