262
PARTISAN REVIEW
satisfactory conceptual or symbolic substitute for dogma (belief being,
after all, by definition dogmatic). This euhemeristic tendency is a re–
deeming feature of our iconoclasm, and a partial antidote against its
ill
effects, but it will inevitably fail, for the simple reason that one can–
not have one's cake and eat it. The profound cultural discord and dis–
order of our time have resulted not merely in a neurotic failure of con–
ceptual power but in an attenuated relation between mind and the
reality of which mind is a function. It is, in some measure at least, a
metaphysical condition, as Eliot, Auden and others have seen, and per–
haps one of its incurable symptoms is our habitual identification of the
metaphysical with the neurotic.
Cassirer, at any rate, derives his importance from the fact that he
has an immense gift for this sort of euhemerism-or, if you prefer,
epistemology. His work bears other insignia of decadence. The product
of a grea t tradition, it deviates from that tradition sufficiently and in
such a way as to suggest its exhaustion-the depletion, perhaps, of a
major type of philosophic discourse. In passages like this, for example,
Cassirer is abstract without being specific in a way that his exemplars
very rarely were:
Philosophy cannot give up its search for a fundamental unity in this
ideal world. But it does not confound this unity with simplicity. It does
not overlook the tensions and frictions, the strong contrasts and deep
conflicts between the various powers of man. These cannot be reduced to a
common denominator. They tend in different directions and obey different
principles. But this multiplicity and disparateness does not denote discord
or disharmony. All these functions complete and complement one another.
. . . The dissonant is in harmony with itself; the contraries are not mutu–
ally exclusive, but interdependent: "harmony in contrariety, as in the
case of the bow and the lyre."
1v!ARTIN LEBOWITZ
THE SAINTLY FAILING
MEN AND SAINTS.
By Charles Peguy. Translated by Anne and julian
Green. Pantheon.
$2.75.
I
N SOME
simple and profound remarks on the Scene of Supplication in
Greek poetry, Peguy shows that it is the suppliant not the supplicated
who dominates the scene, has the grand words, utters the bold threats.
This is because the supplicated tyrant is isolated in his egotistical success
and happiness; he does not represent anything; he is marked by Fatality.
But the suppliant represents and draws on deep strength; this is because
he has been handled, kneaded, manipulated by the superhuman fingers
of the gods. And this, I think, was the picture that Peguy had of him–
self: a suppliant defeated by modern society-he said repeatedly that he
was defeated-but also as representing a deep and formidable truth.
