heir guide the form in which it was
presented in the doctrine of the Church. The idea became more and more
deeply implanted in men's minds that Christianity was the revelation of
the unintelligible." And so, in truth, it is.

And why was this? Because faith--that is, Life--no longer felt sure of
itself. Neither traditionalism nor the theological positivism of Duns
Scotus sufficed for it; it sought to rationalize itself. And it sought
to establish its foundation--not, indeed, over against reason, where it
really is, but upon reason--that is to say, within reason--itself. The
nominalist or positivist or voluntarist position of Scotus--that which
maintains that law and truth depend, not so much upon the essence as
upon the free and inscrutable will of God--by accentuating its supreme
irrationality, placed religion in danger among the majority of believers
endowed with mature reason and not mere coalheavers. Hence the triumph
of the Thomist theological rationalism. It is no longer enough to
believe in the existence of God; but the sentence of anathema falls on
him who, though believing in it, does not believe that His existence is
demonstrable by rational arguments, or who believes that up to the
present nobody by means of these rational arguments has ever
demonstrated it irrefutably. However, in this connection the remark of
Pohle is perhaps capable of application: "If eternal salvation depended
upon mathematical axioms, we should have to expect that the most odious
human sophistry would attack their universal validity as violently as it
now attacks God, the soul, and Christ."[24]

The truth is, Catholicism oscillates between mysticism, which is the
inward experience of the living God in Christ, an intransmittible
experience, the danger of which, however, is that it absorbs our own
personality in God, and so does not save our vital longing--between
mysticism and the rationalism which it fights against (see Weizsaecker,
_op. cit._); it oscillates between religionized science and
scientificized religion. The apocalyptic enthusiasm changed little by
little into neo-platonic mysticism, which theology thrust further into
the background. It feared the excesses of the imagination which was
supplanting faith and creating gnostic extravagances. But it had to sign
a kind of pact with gnosticism and another with rationalism; neither
imagination nor reason allowed itself to be completely vanquished. And
thus the body of Catholic dogm