RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS
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phenomenon. I know that it is habitual for the intellectuals in ques–
tion to allude to the nineteenth century as an age of triumphant
"positivism," yet in actual fact it was anything but that, and our
contemporary religionists are really the heirs of all those German
Romantics (Novalis, F. von Schlegel, Tieck, and others ) who turned
to or dallied with Catholicism, of Joseph de Maistre and the "Catho–
lic Reaction" in France, of the Tractarians and the later High
Church writers in England. From one point of view this does not
matter in the least; from another, it is important to set the record
straight, and it makes some difference if one sees these apparently
recent tendencies as a very late phase of the nineteenth-century revolt
against rationalism and secularity, and not as the first phase of a
movement that can be expected to extend indefinitely into the future.
That it will do so seems to me extremely unlikely. It appears
to me, in other words, to be what the questionnaire calls a "temporary
phenomenon"-not wholly dissimilar to the attempt under Julian
the Apostate, in the fourth century, to bring about a revival of
paganism. This is far from meaning that it is not of serious signifi–
cance or that it can be disposed of merely as a Failure of Nerve. For
one thing, the nerves of even the most imperturbable might, not in–
comprehensibly, have been deeply shaken in the last thirty-six years
and especially in the last four or five, and moreover the positive con–
tent of the great religions is far too rich and, mythically speaking, too
splendid to be exploded at the touch of a skeptical phrase. In this
light it is surely unnecessary to pursue very far the question why a
movement backward toward some one or other of the great historical
faiths has continued into our own decade. On the contrary, it would
have been much more puzzling if the deepening spiritual misery of the
age since the great revolutions began, at the end of the eighteenth
century, had not borne just this fruit.
When one contemplates the entire setting, with all its terrors,
one finds it impossible to speak of this phenomenon
in
any terms but
those of respect and forbearance. Certainly one does not wish to
emulate the contemptuousness with which religious writers habitually
speak of forms of secular thought which clearly they do not see in
their
entire setting. And it is idle to pretend that the secular culture
which has slowly been coming into existence since the Renaissance
has yet become adequate to the whole life of man, that either on
