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Boston, and New York City where it led the crusade against the em–
ployment of Bertrand Russell.
Your history is as defective as your politics. I hold no brief for
Savonarola, but, to do him historic justice, he was no foe of the
Renaissance as his friendships with some of its great figures show. And
he was a nobler creature than the venal Bishop of Rome who destroyed
him after extorting from his racked body Moscow-like confessions. But
we do not have to choose between the corruptions and insincere mythology
of Alexander VI, and the superstitious prophecies of Savonarola even
if we believe that it is far worse to burn human beings than to burn
trinkets. In the interests of the scientific truth which leads you to pro–
claim the necessity of mass belief in scientific untruth, it seems to me
you should admit that the history of the Church as a defender of
cultural and intellectual freedom is until very recently in the main a
history of persecution and heresy hunts. Or are you already rewriting
church history for the masses as a corollary of your new insight into
the liberating function of vital illusions?
Nor have you properly learned the logic of organization from your
unavowed Machiavellian masters. Even if you could guarantee us a
free-thinking Pope with a fondness for heretical argument, once the
Church was safe from the tidal wave of Bolshevism what further guar–
antee is there that he wouldn't throw you and your friends to the dogs
of orthodoxy whenever organizational needs demanded it? Viewed
empirically, the Church exists for the sake of the Church and not for
the sake of your freedom or mine.
If
the mas es of people are as in–
herently credulous as you suppose, they will always lack the sophistica–
tion to tolerate the serious fooling you recommend to their pastors. In
the presence of apparent hypocrisy and the ambiguitics of poetic faith,
with its suspended belief and analogical truth, fanaticism emerges with
an exalted sincerity. What you are inviting with your theology of fiction
is a recurring alternation of Reformations and Counter-Reformations–
a progressive competition in doctrinal absurdities to bc used as weapons
in a conflict for institutional power.
You misunderstand my position. It is not transcendental dogmas of
the Church, which with a little logic can be squared with any practice,
that threaten the structure of our intellectual and personal freedoms,
but its organizational needs and claims. Santayana, certainly no enemy
of the Church, which in its current weakness must tolerate both his
materialistic and Platonic heresies, once wrote:
"If
the Catholic Church
ever became dominant in America, it would without doubt, by virtue
of
it~
concrete mission
I
transform American life and institutions. In
