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PARTISAN REVIEW
Can culture be purely Christian? It partakes of varied cultural
elements.
4. Correspondences in contrasting religions make it instinctive
to examine comparatively, myth, literature, and religion-in which
examination one is impressed by the findings of mythographers as
demarcating worship from ingenuity.
5.
If
everything literary were deleted, in which there is some
thought of deity, "literature" would be a puny residue; one could al–
most say that each striking literary work is some phase of the desire
to resist or affirm "religion."
That belief in God is not easy, is seemingly one of God's in–
justices; and self-evidently, imposed piety results in the opposite.
Coercion and religious complacency are serious enemies of religion
-whereas persecution invariably favors spiritual conviction. But this
is certain, any attempted substituting of self for deity, is a forlorn hope.
I.
A. RICHARDS
One of the more manageable interests of this Symposium
will be
in
comparisons of the assumptions, tacit or expressed, of the
participants. To make these comparisons the easier, I will follow
the Editors' set of five suits in laying some of my cards on the
table.
1. I am ready to accept most of the positions from which
we may talk of Causes. It would be a folly to forego a word so con–
venient for intellectual chat. And on this level I will remark that
there has been no failure but a world-wide and unparalleled triumph
of a "real radical movement"; that fundamental social improvement
is being realized, as never; and that the organization of society looks
at last like a dream about to come true. Whether it is this success
which is frightening us back into religion might be as worth discussing
as the less depressing alternative, but there could be no outcome in
improved understanding. This is not one of those simplified, abstracted
questions to which a strict causal inquiry applies.
2. I would suggest that the changes (which I agree are oc–
curring) are less in what is believed than in
the modes of believing.
