"[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 dogma became a system of contradictions, more
or less successfully harmonized. The Trinity was a kind of pact between
monotheism and polytheism, and humanity and divinity sealed a peace in
Christ, nature covenanted with grace, grace with free will, free will
with the Divine prescience, and so on. And it is perhaps true, as
Hermann says (_loc. cit._), that "as soon as we develop religious
thought to its logical conclusions, it enters into conflict with other
ideas which belong equally to the life of religion." And this it is that
gives to Catholicism its profound vital dialectic.
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