LESLIE FIEDLER
they ·had been made demons by fiat, but now they
stirred
again
in discontent. Especially the Great Mother-cast down by the
most patriarchal of all
r~ligions(to
the Hebrews, she was Lilith,
the bride of darkness), ambiguously redeemed as the Blessed
Virgin ·and denied once more by a Hebraizing Protestantism–
clamored ·to be honored once more. The very distinction between
GOd and
Devil,
on which
tlu~
psychic balance of Europe had for
so long been
staked,
was threatened. It did not matter that some
people (chiefly women) continued to go
to
church, or even that
there were revivals within the framework of surviving sects;
fewer and fewer men lived by the legends of the church, and the
images of saints represented not living myths but "mythology"
in a literary sense, tales to be read for amusement or "analyzed"
in the light of the teachings of anthropology or psychology.
There remained only the job of carrying the news of God's death
to
those who had not yet heard the word.
The effeot of the growing awareness (an awareness, to be
sure, at first shared by only a handful of advanced thinkers) of
this
cosmic catastrophe was double: a sense of exhilaration and
a spasm of terror,
to
which 'correspond the two initial and over–
lapping stages of the Break-through. There was first of all the
conviction of the Age of Reason and its spokesmen, the
philo–
sophes,
grave~diggers
of the Christian God, that they-and
all
of
mankind-were at last
free,
free of the superstition and ignor–
ance
so long sponsored by the priests for their own selfish ends.
Those demons into '· which the early Christian apologists had
translated the gods 'of antiquity seemed to the
philosophes
idle
inventions of the Church itself: bugaboos to scare the pious into
unquestioning' subservience. Even the Christian God seemed to
them such a contrivance, demonic and irrational. In the imag–
ined
universe presided over by their own "Author of Creation,"
there could be no place for mystery or blackness. Once
"l'in–
lame,"
the scandalous Church, had been crushed, all monsters
would be eliminated forever, and man could take up
his
long,
