he is the eternalizing, the deifying, the religious Christ.  Harnack says of this Christ, the Christ of Nicene or Catholic Christology, that he is essentially docetic—­that is, apparential—­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 which this verse is carved: