RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS
107
tyranny of "the modem mind" to an honest-to-God religion are apt
to think of "the modem mind" at its worst and of religion at its
best.
Singly or in various combinations, the following might help to
ripen for conversion intellectuals of various levels and temperaments.
Individualism.
The genuine individualist is virtually extinct;
the word, and delusions of understanding, defending and teaching
it, are fashionable. Among likely converts I would suppose many
who realize this and many who enthusiastically fail to: those in
flight from and in search of individualism, genuine and spurious.
Those who want to lose themselves can of course do so, in
religion, with exceptional speed and convenience. But many who
want to find or develop themselves probably begin to realize that,
excepting the dying humanistic tradition, the feeble romantic revival,
and an all but catatonic isolation, religion, in spite of all it claims
to the contrary (the Vatican inveighs against Stalinism, of
all
things,
as individualistic), is all the individualist has left.
It
is much more
than that. Granted always that he happens to be capable of, and to
desire, religious faith, religion offers the individualist an incompar–
ably well-equipped gymnasium, laboratory and university: and those
are only the beginnings.
Materialistic optimism.
Those who find
it
(to put it mildly)
unjustified; those who imagine that if only God is added as frosting,
they and the world can still eat and have this stale cake; those who,
having enjoyed enough of the best it can bring, are disenchanted or
even merely surfeited.
"Science."
Those who have outgrown the still popular delusion
that "science" is potentially omnipotent and omniscient-i.e., is
God. Those who, more pathetically, have outlived the millennial
glow of hope or certainty that ultimately, indeed pretty soon, Science
would settle all the imponderables and solve all the problems of
living.
«Reason."
Ditto; also many who, in excess of revulsion, became
anti-rationalists (or "anti-intellectuals"), and who now realize they
threw out the baby with the bath. (Religion is not a denial of
Reason but a conscious collaboration of Reason with Faith. In
the rationalist at his best the collaboration does not exist. More
generally it exists but is unconscious.)
