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PARTISAN REVIEW
and frustration. The important question is whether we are dealing
here with such a temporary phenomenon or whether we have in
fact arrived at a new historic orientation, and, finally, whether there
are just and valid reasons for this orientation.
In publishing a symposium on this subject,
PARTISAN
REVIEW
merely wishes to put forward certain queries that will provoke and
guide a meaningful discussion. The aim is to submit an important
issue to the best inteliectual opinion. We realize, moreover, that on
an issue so very complex it is undesirable to pin our contributors down
to any kind of catechismal questions and answers. The subject of the
symposium is likely to bring forward a deeply personal response,
which cannot very well be confined within the framework of a sim–
ple question-and-answer pattern. Accordingly, the topics that follow
fall into certain large groups and are intended to suggest major as–
pects of this complex subject, with the hope that the contributors
will touch upon all or several of these aspects by way of discursive
comment.
1.
From a naturalistic point of view, all events (including
those of history) have their causes, and the present revival of religion
would not be an exception. What do you think are the causes of the
present trend? Is it due to the worldwide failure and defeat of a
real radical movement in politics? To a renunciation of hopes for
any fundamental social improvement? Or to some kind of break–
down in the organization of modern society, to which religion would
seem to supply a remedy?
2. Granting that social changes or catastrophes may bring peo–
ple to consider religion more sympathetically, the fact still remains
that the trend in question here is one among intellectuals, who have
undergone a change in
convictions.
What has happened to make re–
ligion more credible than it formerly was to the modern mind? The
credibility of certain religious mysteries like the Incarnation and the
Trinity would certainly not seem to be changed by any new data,
scientific or otherwise; but there may be other parts of religion whose
general credibility is changed by fundamental changes in the climate
of opinion.
Do
you consider these latter changes valid?
Does
this
new trend imply that the scientific attitude of mind
is
being forsaken? Or that drastic limits are being set to it? Or is
