RELIGION .AiND THE INTELLECTUALS
251
the quality and orders of belief that he actually holds than any
consciously organized statement. I have alluded to a concomitant
habit of unbelief: in my own writing this is an habitual rejection
of certain naturalistic dogmas about the nature of man; yet I tend
to depict man as compromised and indeed overwhelmed by them,
in the sense that his disasters are probably the result of his failure to
possess and to be possessed by a controlling sense of the presence
of redemptive powers in his experience.
It would be fair to ask what I make of the rest of the Athanasian
Creed. There are times when I make something of all of it, or of parts
of it; times when parts of it seem blank; just as in certain ages men
have entertained more easily than in others modes of belief which
made it possible to accept without difficulty items of the creed
which we are uncertain about today. No two Christians, either in or
out of the Church, believe the Creed in the same way. Do I be–
lieve in the Resurrection of the Body? I think I do; but I do not
believe it as Dante did; and Dante himself did not believe it as St.
Thomas or Albertus Magnus believed it. His
effective
belief in the
Resurrection of the Body must have been a minor heresy; for the
imaginative
necessity of projecting the spirits (in those lower spheres
blanketed by the Earth's shadow) through "corporeal manifesta–
tion," gave to the spirits their bodies before the Day of Judgment.
The Communion of Saints (the second dogma of greatest difficulty
for modern men) I take to be a doctrine which provides for the
enormous variations in the modes of human belief, based upon the
premise that no one mind can compass the entire range of Christian
dogma in terms of immediate experience. We select our saints (or
they are selected by the calendar) because of an intuitive perception
of our personal needs. It is our way of placing our potential heresy
in the perspective of the whole.
If
we love birds and animals too
well, and formulate a series of propositions to justify that love, we
are likely to duplicate certain tenets of Manicheism; but if we
merely contemplate St. Francis in the act of feeding the birds, the
danger of heresy is slight; the activities of the other saints are the
perpetual correctives of fanaticism.
So far I have said nothing to answer the five questions; what
I have said seemed necessary if my answers are to be comprehensible.
1.
If
the revival of religion (if there
is
a revival) is the con-
