From Charlotte W. Cole (17 August 1943)

Text in English to type

[36] Dear Mr. Polanyi,

I've delayed visiting you several months, because I've been feebly trying to do a paper for you; but now it looks certain that I wont be writing a paper for several more months, and by then it seems you will be in England. And I'm sure the crusor wouldn't know what to make of all the notes I'd want to send you with it. He'd probably think it was some particularly diabolical code. So, just for my own satisfaction and some measure of self-respect, I'd like to give you a brief and incomplete report of what I had in mind.

The idea started from reading Rebecca Wests “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon”, a book about Yugoslavia which you may have heard Mr. Drucker mention (as he did in a footnote in a Harper's article - I enjoyed yours very much, by the way, having just finished Davies' at the time) and which you may have read. I've read at several times and have come to respect and accept many of her ideas, but there was one which I thought I'd better verify for myself, concerning St Paul and the theory of Atonement. Since what states far better than I can paraphrase, I'll quote the relevant parts:

"All your western thought is founded on this {compulsive} pretense that pain is the proper price of any good thing. Here it could be seen how the meaning of the Crucifixion had been hidden from us, though it was written clear. A supremely good man was born on Earth, a man who was without cruelty, who could have thought mankind, to live in perpetual happiness; and because we are infatuated with this idea of sacrifice, of shedding innocent blood to secure innocent advantages, we found nothing better to do with this passport to deliverance than destroy him. … Our shame would be absolute, were it not that the crime we intended cannot in fact be committed. It is not possible to kill goodness. There is always more of it, it does not take {flight} from our accused earth, it perpetually asks us to take what we need from it. …

"…there was an enemy of love and Christ

[…] (…) [37] [38] [39]

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Reference:
KPA: 47/13, 36-39