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PARTISAN REVIEW
point to some other sources and controls for our
more!).
which equally
need watching: to the capture of Christmas by the advertisers, and
the increasing surrender to the jukebox, for example. Against all these
invasions it is not surprising that a religious tradition should seem a
powerful support.
As
to the unity of such a tradition in the future,
it is worth remarking that Christianity has always been a highly
flexible religion, comprising from the first the most diverse traditions
-not least that of the ultimate responsibility of the instructed soul
for itself, and of the source of that instruction in its own knowledge
of its own nature.
4.
If
we suppose that "the poet in
ideal
perfection brings the
whole soul of man into operation," and that "religion is a chief
branch of the executive of the soul" (to use two of Coleridge's formu–
lations), connections of the imagination-"the prime agent of all
human Perception .. . a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act
of creation in the infinite I AM."-with religious feeling and ideas
are not hard to see. Stress upon myth among literary theorists may
well be their way of keeping one order of believings (the historic, for
example) from interference with others: interference both theoretical,
as when we weigh evidence with reference to a mystery; and practical,
as when the absence of evidence prevents the development of a
credence.
5. Similar remarks apply to other attempts to separate the
religious attitudes from belief-attitudes of other types with which they
have been conjoined. The other believings are many and various: his–
torical, psychological, metaphysical and moral .. . but these names
point to content. My suggestion is that they also point to mode, and
that to attend to mode would be to separate them.
The objection, which most people perhaps feel strongly, is that
these separations would leave our whole system of attitudes incohe–
sive, deprived of what is taken to be necessary mutual support. To
this the best theoretical reply may be that there are many modes of
mutual support.
Within
certain sub-systems of beliefs, logical coher–
ence is, of course, the necessary bond, though in physics, for example,
healthy development can require a joint use of incompatible concepts,
and a refusal to let logic prevent this. In physics, however, the in–
compatibles are themselves logical fabrics, and there is commonly an
assumption that this teaming up of incompatibles is a temporary
