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have prepared the twentieth century mind for its acceptance. Just
those elements in Catholicism which most shocked protestants and
rationalists-the miraculous cures and visions, the cults of saints and
relics, the adoration of the Virgin-make it most meaningful for
readers of
The Golden Bough
and
Totem and Taboo.
The Niceno–
Constantinopolitan Creed opens the door to the totem feast, the
rites of Attis and Dionysius and the sacrifice of the saviour-hero,
born of the union of earth and sky. The dogmatic church is primary,
for through the continuing revelation of centuries of imaginative
and psychic experience it has brought biblical and apocryphal legends
into accord with man's widest ritualistic satisfactions and deepest
mythic needs. Freudian psychoanalysis has given way to a post–
Jungian psycho-synthesis where elements which Freud would have
freed are repossessed for the unconscious, which is now seen to lead,
not to the parental bedroom but, rather, with proper disciplining
and dogmatic guidance, directly to transcendental reality, to, as
Evelyn Underhill says, the Metaphysical Object.
All that opposes the regressive elements in this development is
the spirit of Renaissance humanism, of the rationalism and good
sense of the Enlightenment, of the speculative freedom and in–
dividualism of Protestantism or liberalism, and of the scientific meth–
ods of inquiry of the nineteenth century. These have been under heavy
attack in recent decades, but they have been sustained socially by
the great achievements of science and industry, by the freeing of
man from brutal drudgery and ill-health, and by increasing democ–
racy, equality and education. Stalinist Communism has given lib–
eralism a rude check, which is probably beneficial, for it had grown
shallow and complacent. But liberalism's enemies have chosen this
moment for conquest in the name of the false alternatives of Moscow
or Rome, materialistic totalitarianism or medievalism, truth or Truth.
The method is entirely attack and not defense, and recent con–
verts to Catholicism appear to have leaped over two centuries of
critical thought as if they had never occurred. It is considered stuffy
and in bad taste not only to bring up the problems which Gibbon
and Voltaire and Paine treated satirically, but also those which so
deeply troubled Loisy and Tyrrell and the other Modernists. Yet the
events upon which the Church founds its dogmatic
claims
occurred
in historic times. It is becoming as difficult to discuss such matters
