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strait gate of the Mosaic Law and, before very long, the Catholic
mystics re-enthroned the Queen of Heaven whom Jeremiah had
long before abased to the dust, he hoped for ever. Nevertheless, the
Catholic Church has made no doctrinal change of any importance
since the counter-Reformation; nor has the Protestant Church since
the Reformation, and in neither Church has there been any official
attempt to revise even the glaringly unhistorical passages in the Gos–
pels. Intellectuals who turn Catholic and submit to Church discipline
have to admit that their confessor knows not only his sacred, but
his profane, history better than they do. They must, in fact, surrender
their critical rights, and cease to be intellectuals.
This is not to suggest that religion and the intellect can never
be reconciled. But if certain writers find that ethics and ritual alone
are insufficient and that something more is needed for their spiritual
well-being, they should try to make scholarly sense of the Gospel and
see to what religious conclusions that leads them; and if they find
that it cannot be re-stated in a manner acceptable alike to the his–
torian, the anthropologist and the poet, they should be content to let
it go down the flume, and turn elsewhere.
I am all for religious mysteries, as is natural in a poet, but find
Catholic mysticism as difficult to accept as Catholic history. Any
intellectual who has studied, say, Frazer's
Golden Bough
and Har–
rison's
Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion
must be aware
that the pluralistic development of Christianity has confused the
language of myth, or poetry, with the language of prose, or history,
mainly by the identification of Jesus the Galilean with the "Saviour"
of the Greek mysteries, and the ascribing to him of supernatural
powers.
The concept of the supernatural is a disease of religion. True
religion is of natural origin and linked practically with the seasons,
though it implies occasional states of abnormal ecstasy which can be
celebrated only in the language of myth. The later Greek mythologists
recorded that the hen-halcyon, after carrying her dead mate on her
back with plaintive cries, builds a nest at midwinter on the divinely
stilled waters of the sea, and hatches out her young which, immediate–
ly, take to their wings. Pliny, in his
Natural History,
adds that pow–
dered halcyon nests are sovereign against leprosy. That halcyons do
not build nests in the sea, or indeed anywhere else and that halcyon
