If it is by inspiration that idea takes bodily form, the word is made flesh, it follows that, given a common material, the greater the inspiration the greater will be the completed reality. Moreover, the greatest imaginable inspiration (that is, God Himself in entire perfection, rather than in isolated attributes) would demand and receive an infallible response. We have, therefore, in seeking for a religion that is unconscious art, to seek for a religion that claims direct, certain, and complete infallibility from God. There are many such religions, including the Catholic Church.

But the Catholic Church differs from the rest, not only in the actual authority for its infallibility (a matter beyond the province of metaphysics and aesthetics), but in the fact that it alone claims to be the Body of Christ, the Word made Flesh. Thus Catholicism, since it is a continuation and extension of the Incarnation, becomes not only a work of art, but the abstract type or pattern of all works of art. For, just as Christianity claims Christ to be the incarnation, the world of God in the world of flesh, so does Catholicism claim the Church as the incarnation of Christ in the world of history and institutions, though with this difference, that whereas Christ, being God, was perfect as man, there can be no such guarantee for the private lives of the personnel of institutions (however divine). In Christ God associated Himself only with man’s imperfections, but in the Church Christ associates Himself with man’s sins. Those who reject, ‘on spiritual grounds,’ the possibility of the incarnation of Christ in a ‘corporation,’ should be led to reject also the possibility of the incarnation of God in a human body and soul. Both these doctrines comprise the realization and justification of the supreme experience of the aesthetic world—that of the Word being made Flesh.