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PARTISAN REVIEW
the spiritual or on the imaginative level it is yet to be compared, in
depth or in grandeur, with the religious cultures which preceded it.
The challenge of religious dogma and orthodoxy cannot be met and
countered by a doctrinaire defense of secularism as we have hitherto
known it, simply. It is to the possible, and gravely necessary, develop–
ments of the future that appeal must, beyond a certain point, be
made. One rejects the claims of orthodox or supernaturalist religion
partly because it promises to perpetuate and intensify, not to heal,
the deep fracture in the consciousness of modern men; that it promises
to make permanent and insuperable a dividedness that has already
come close to bringing on the final ruin.
"I must abolish
knowledge,"
said Kant, "to make room for
be–
lief';
and unorthodox as he certainly was, Kant managed to express
in this gnomic manner the work of division and destruction that any
supernaturalist religion is now fated to perform. It is quite true that
men cannot live without "belief" in some sense, but it is equally
true that they cannot live without "knowledge," and the fact is that
the intellectual substructure of supernaturalist religions, including
Christianity, has now been washed away. There were many centuries
during which it was possible to accept the Christian myths not only
"on faith" or as articles of "belief" but with the critical intelligence:
it should be a commonplace that this is no longer true. It is possible
to accept them now only by surrendering to a dualism (between the
natural and the non-natural) that violates, instead of confirming, the
knowledge
it has taken so many generations, and so much labor, to
gather together. That knowledge is far from complete; it is not an
absolute knowledge; there are no finalities in it. And the
belief
that
can be based on it is not the kind of belief that is demanded by
those who temperamentally insist on Certainty. But it is the only kind
of belief that, in our period, does not benumb and ultimately paralyze
the
mind.
The writings of contemporary theologians and their followers
(the orthodox intellectuals) are impressive on a hundred grounds,
and they cannot be spoken of slightingly. But on the ultimately im–
portant grounds, the ontological and metaphysical grounds, they
end by being wholly unimpressive. One can follow these writers in
their defense of dogma, doctrine, Christian legendry, and the like,
only by agreeing not to ask the essential questions: How can these
