ntial--because the process of the
divinization of the man in Christ was made in the interests of
eschatology. But which is the real Christ? Is it, indeed, that so-called
historical Christ of rationalist exegesis who is diluted for us in a
myth or in a social atom?

This same Harnack, a Protestant rationalist, tells us that Arianism or
Unitarianism would have been the death of Christianity, reducing it to
cosmology and ethics, and that it served only as a bridge whereby the
learned might pass over to Catholicism--that is to say, from reason to
faith. To this same learned historian of dogmas it appears to be an
indication of a perverse state of things that the man Athanasius, who
saved Christianity as the religion of a living communion with God,
should have obliterated the Jesus of Nazareth, the historical Jesus,
whom neither Paul nor Athanasius knew personally, nor yet Harnack
himself. Among Protestants, this historical Jesus is subjected to the
scalpel of criticism, while the Catholic Christ lives, the really
historical Christ, he who lives throughout the centuries guaranteeing
the faith in personal immortality and personal salvation.

And Athanasius had the supreme audacity of faith, that of asserting
things mutually contradictory: "The complete contradiction that exists
in the _homoousios_ carried in its train a whole army of
contradictions which increased as thought advanced," says Harnack. Yes,
so it was, and so it had to be. And he adds: "Dogma took leave for ever
of clear thinking and tenable concepts, and habituated itself to the
contra-rational." In truth, it drew closer to life, which is
contra-rational and opposed to clear thinking. Not only are judgements
of worth never rationalizable--they are anti-rational.

At Nicaea, then, as afterwards at the Vatican, victory rested with the
idiots--taking this word in its proper, primitive, and etymological
sense--the simple-minded, the rude and headstrong bishops, the
representatives of the genuine human spirit, the popular spirit, the
spirit that does not want to die, in spite of whatever reason may say,
and that seeks a guarantee, the most material possible, for this desire.

_Quid ad aeternitatem?_ This is the capital question. And the Creed ends
with that phrase, _resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi
saeculi_--the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.
In the cemetery of Mallona, in my native town of Bilbao, there is a
tombstone on whi