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treat the whole matter as though God had been the notion of some
especially clever pragmatist who knew what it is good for . . . and
what it is good against.
It
just is not so. Either God exists and people
believe in Him-and this, then, is a more important fact than all of
culture and literature; or He does not exist and people do not be–
lieve in Him-and no literary or other imagination is likely to change
this situation for the benefit of culture and for the sake of the in–
tellectuals.
5. I do not know Malraux's recent writings, but I am quite
certain that Heidegger, being a philosopher and, certainly, like the
rest of us, without special information on the validity or invalidity
of "traditional religious beliefs," never explicitly "rejected" them.
On the other hand, I would really like to know who among the
great philosophers since Spinoza and Descartes-outside of Catholic
philosophy-accepted "traditional religious beliefs."
There has been much discussion of modern attempts "to make
viable certain attitudes that were formerly aspects of the religious
consciousness."
It
always has appeared to me to be beside the point.
After all, nobody has tried to preach the Christian virtue of humility
without the Christian God. On the other hand, it is obvious that as
long as Christian faith ruled unchallenged the consciousness of
man, all human attitudes were interpreted in religious and specifically
Christian terms.
If
we ourselves had to believe in the specific credo,
which was the unquestioned basis of Christian philosophy, in order
to understand it, then we should be forced to throw out more than one
thousand years of philosophical thought. I must admit I shall be in
fullest sympathy with a
Zeitgeist
that would bring the intellectuals to
the point of no longer considering the tremendous body of past
philosophy as the "errors of the past."
NEWTON ARVIN
"The new turn toward religion among the intellectuals"–
but one pauses at the very outset to ask the question,
"Is
it new?"
If
"new" here means "peculiar to the last decade or so," then I
should say that the term is inappropriate. Surely what one is dealing
with is quite as much a nineteenth-century as a twentieth-century
