JAMES AGEE
If
my shapeless comments can be of any interest or use,
it will be because the amateur and the amphibian should be repre–
sented in such a discussion. By amphibian I mean that I have reli–
gious background and am "pro-religious"-though not on the whole
delighted by this so-called revival-but doubt that I will return to
religion. The amateur is a common type among intellectuals; the
amphibian may be; I think both may be capable of some percep–
tions which the trained thinker and the convinced partisan may
overlook.
1. The first two suggestions could count directly towards the
conversion only of those whose chief concerns and hopes had thus
been canceled; fewer, I suspect, even among intellectuals, than one
has supposed. The third suggestion covers a lot of ground, and must
indirectly account for many conversions; but I doubt that anyone
is converted
because
he feels there has been such a breakdown or
because he thinks of religion as a social medicine. I suppose that in
its essence any conversion, valid or no, takes place so deeply and
privately within the individual that not even he can account for it
quite coherently, and that not even the most important or prevalent
reasons can be guessed at. No reasons I can think of could account
directly for conversion; all might help make various people fertile
for conversion. Some of these reasons are permanent; most involve
a loss of certitude or faith in one aspect or another of what may for
convenience be called "the modem mind." Often the disenchant–
ment is not with "the modern mind" at whatever its best may be,
but with the corruptions and confusions which proliferate from all
mastering ideas; which seem to delude intellectuals as well as non–
intellectuals, and which make up much of the texture and quality of
conduct and of living. (One has only to think of the nightmarishly
irrational misuses of "the scientific attitude" and of "reason," against
works of
art
and against human problems and individuals; of the
equally absurd anti-rationalists; and of the seepage of unrecognized
emotion, wishful thought, naive faith, ill-examined premise, etc.,
which compromises so much nominal rationalism.) Religion can of
course be misused as ruinously as "science" or "reason," and as
frequently is; but most prospective converts from the churchly
