220
PARTISAN REVIEW
It
is
in fact a religious phenomenon which is taking place, com–
parable
in
many ways to the brewing of such myths as those of Jesus
Christ or of Quetzalcoatl. First, the coming of the Messiah, conceived
in a long period of neurotic despair,
is
sublimated into an anxious
expectancy. Then comes the man whom legend will deify. The rescue
of human reason demands an elucidation of the religious phenomenon,
not merely a negation of it. It
is
all up with man's most immediate
future if it is not understood that beyond the issue of the present
conflict the general crisis-of which this war, as much on the ideologi–
cal as on the economic plane, is but a minor episode-must be sur–
mounted.
FOR AN ENCYCLOPJEDIA: AGAINST THE ACADEMIES
"Thus, because brains are insufficiently scoured of Christianity and its
scabs, it seems, at the end of this first third of the twentieth century,
that the Encyclopa:dia must be rewritten.'-RENE CREVEL-Le
Clauecin
de Diderot,
1932.
I remember writing one day, in about 1931 I think: 'All that is
done agaim;t religion is well done.' Today I confess that I was grossly
mi~takcn.
For centuries all that has been done against religion has
not only been nearly always badly done, but must be started com–
pletely afresh. It is not enough, as I then thought, heedlessly to pile
up reasonings, professions of atheism or anti-religious sallies in the
hope that sooner or later brains would scrape themselves clean.
If
this sufficed I can think of nothing with a more ravaging power of
negation to any religion than the admirable question: 'Could God,
who is omniscient and omnipotent, create a stone so heavy that he
could not lift it?'
But even 'God's' suicide would not cure the neurosis of religion.
The real problem of divinity no longer seems to me to reside in the
personification of the forces of nil.ture, the forces outside man. Know–
ledge of these forces has tended to depersonalize them more and more
and to strip them of their more threatening aspect. Goethe's
Erlkonig
could. be rewritten: it is rather the psychological process of
inner
secession which conditions the general anguish of today.
The illne.ss approached it<> acute state only with the almost uni–
versal triumph of monotheism, substituting intellectual for childlike
religions. Until then all that was divine and sacred remained outside
ma.T1, it did not seriously encroach on
his
inner self. There was no
precise connection between the gods and prevailing ideas of human
ethics. The multiplicity of gods and the extreme diversity of rites and
worship guaranteed man's indivisibility. The attempt to condense all
