it was possible, to base dogmas upon reason, to show at least that if they were indeed super-rational they were not contra-rational, and they were reinforced with a philosophical foundation of Aristotelian-Neoplatonic thirteenth-century philosophy.  And such is the Thomism recommended by Leo XIII.  And now the question is not one of the enforcement of dogma but of its philosophical, medieval, and Thomist interpretation.  It is not enough to believe that in receiving the consecrated Host we receive the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ; we must needs negotiate all those difficulties of transubstantiation and substance separated from accidents, and so break with the whole of the modern rational conception of substantiality.

But for this, implicit faith suffices—­the faith of the coalheaver,[23] the faith of those who, like St. Teresa (Vida, cap. xxv. 2), do not wish to avail themselves of theology.  “Do not ask me the reason of that, for I am ignorant; Holy Mother Church possesses doctors who will know how to answer you,” as we were made to learn in the Catechism.  It was for this, among other things, that the priesthood was instituted, that the teaching Church might be the depositary—­“reservoir instead of river,” as Phillips Brooks said—­of theological secrets.  “The work of the Nicene Creed,” says Harnack (Dogmengeschichte, ii. 1, cap. vii. 3), “was a victory of the priesthood over the faith of the Christian people.  The doctrine of the Logos had already become unintelligible to those who were not theologians.  The setting up of the Niceno-Cappadocian formula as the fundamental confession of the Church made it perfectly impossible for the Catholic laity to get an inner comprehension of the Christian Faith, taking as their 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]