RELIGION AND THE INTELLEOTUALS
221
guiding principle is sound. Even religious values are values that men
choose.
If
life is to be worth living we have to make it so ourselves.
R. P.
BLACKMUR
If
your first statement is correct observation, it ought to
carry with it a sense that the substance of religion has again become
part of secular experience-just as we may imagine that in some
ages the life of the world became part of religious experience; for
the relation may tilt either way. Of course, the common distinction
between the religious and secular worlds, that they are disparate, is
false
and
begs
every question you ask. It is interesting from this point
of view, that your statement should hinge upon the phrase "the new
tum toward religion," where the notion in the word
turn
has in it
so many living ancestors, Christian, Hebrew, and Greek. The notion
is practical: as one turns to God for help; it is spiritual: as one turns
to new life; and it is aesthetic: as when in Greek tragedy or the
modern novel, by some deep turn of the being, some reversal of
role, one discovers what one is. In each case, whether practical,
spiritual, or aesthetic, the turn is dramatic: it shows forth in action,
it imitates, the force working in the self which is greater than the
self. Religion is the experience of that force and the response to it as
reality or God. The institutions of religion, the Churches, develop
and transmit an actual treasury of skills in the use of that force on
behalf of their believers without regard to the quality of individual ex–
perience. I would suppose that the force was always greater than in–
dividual understanding, and greater than even a universal Church
can control. Hence the lies told in need and greed; the bid and
grasp at power. Hence also the rituals and the worship and the great
dramatic images of behavior and aspiration, the passionate grasp
at reality, both what exists and what is not yet created, in the mimetic
act we call religion. That the grasp
is
in the end nails in the palm or
even fingers in air in no way diminishes the reality, the force, which
is still there, a quality of the most secular experience, whether the in–
tellectuals think so when they "tum" to it or not.
If
the above remarks are taken as both a neutral statement about
religion and as an expression of bias towards it by this particular
