me a tragic defect in recent American
political analysis-failure, often merely
pettish and perverse, to take the spe–
cifically Christian inheritance of Euro–
pean thought seriously.
To miss the power that Christian
groups still exert, or that Christian
habits of mind still enforce, is, it seems
to me, to miss out on a whole dimen–
sion of politics.
We have to remember that for how
many centuries the Roman Catholic
Church was not only an intellectual
monitor but a tangible, visible, sacra–
mental reality. The Protestant protest
against that sacramentalism by no
means destroyed it; it certainly, for one
thing, did not destroy the churches
themselves ; and what dominate the e.ye
necessarily sets up its resonances in the
mind. I daresay
" Cuius regio, eius reli–
gio"
is still a more decisive key to
German thought than any innovations
of Frederick the Great or Bismarck.
Except in the writing of Reinhold
Neibuhr, the extent to which Marx
drew on the Christian prophetic tra–
dition does not seem to have been suf–
ficiently understood by American in–
tellectuals. Our American moralistic
Protestantism has not prepared us to
feel the power and influence of sacra-
Hannah Arendt
THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS
Robert Morse
OUR MUTUAL FRIEND
mental Christianity. By this, I do not
mean to imply the Catholic system of
sacraments, a business that can be
quite mechanical and which may cap–
itulate as in most cases it has, to the
spirit
of Protestant moralism for the
sake of uniformity. No, I mean a con–
sciousness of the Church as the com–
munity of the elect, of Christ as New
Being, etc. These are the deepest tenets
of Christianity, and they were hardly
touched by the Darwinian, Spencerian
fervor of the nineteenth century. They
were abandoned as material for im–
mediate meditation and exercise but
they were not fundamentally shaken.
The historical criticism of the century
has vindicated the historicity of all
that is needed to preserve this sacra–
mental sense. Nietzsche's criticism, as
I guess I've said and written too often,
left Christ out entirely-and was there–
fore strangely complimentary to Kierke–
gaard's. Most of the best, youthful writ–
ing of Hegel is specifically religious
apologetics-of a dubious sort, it is
true-but profoundly influenced by
Christian habits of mind even in its
extravagances. Most of Rimbaud's
Un
Saison en Enfer
is about his position
vis-a-vis Christianity, but what does
American Rimbaud criticism say about
Rudolf Kassner
RILKE: A REMINISCENCE
Fredrick Brantley
A DISTANT VICTORY
m
coming numbers of PARTISAN REVIEW
734
