RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS
463
no more have created and maintained the cosmos than the Yahveh
who walked in gardens could have done so.
In
the second place, ever since the publication of Kant's first
Critique,
and possibly earlier, the gap between essence and existence,
between logic and fact, between reason and observation, has been
widened rather than narrowed. This gap may be called either an
absurdity or a mystery, and the noun one uses will depend largely on
one's temperament. Though such gaps do not seem scandalous to me,
they do seem scandalous to many of my colleagues in the various
departments of philosophy throughout the country. But the absurdity
can be wiped out if one attributes it to the creative power of a divine
will, which by its very divinity is not open to scrutiny and to which
one must submit oneself in humility. The mystery is equally potent
in generating other mysteries, until one flatly states that at what will
be called "the heart of the universe" there is operating a power
whose plans, desires, motives and so on are all inaccessible to the
reason. The anti-intellectualism of the second half of the nineteenth
century was one of the most powerful trends of the times. There
arise immediately to one's memory names like those of Vaihinger,
Peirce, Bradley, James, Freud, Henri Poincare, as well as those of
their teachers and disciples. The flight from reason was certainly
justified in some of its forms. But as far as the leaders of culture
were concerned, it often entailed a flight into un-reason. For not even
today has Dewey's philosophical reconstruction been fulfilled.
But how easy was it for a man educated in a theistic tradition, a
tradition which had modified his whole vocabulary, to identify the
non-rational heart of things with the one being which had operated
non-rationally. And after giving "real assent" to the existence of
such a being, what was there to prevent his attributing to it all the
other mysterious traits which religion had endowed it with? To
swallow the central causal mystery and to gag at the peripheral
theological mysteries was to show an inexcusable cowardice. What is
more unacceptable in the Incarnation or the Blessed Trinity or trans–
substantiation than in the existence of an anthropomorphic cause of
all things? When one has reached the realm of un-reason, one can
either stop short or else begin elaborating a mythology.
A dissenter at this point might remark that as far as mythology is
concerned, one had a large choice. One could resort to Pagan or
