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PARTISAN REVIEW
intellectual, there is a natural sequence of further remarks pertinent
to the topics you propose for comment.
1. I should not suppose that the revival of religion is in any
way a result of the failure of radical politics, nor that religion could
remedy any breakdown in the organization of society. I should pre–
fer to believe that political failure and breakdown in organization
resulted from prior or parallel failure of response to religious ex–
perience. Both purpose and decision ought to be related to the ex–
perience of major force in its secular phase. I think it more likely
that the intellectual revival of religion is rather an effort to escape
contact with major force-the substance of experience-by a rush, or
a retreat, into what are taken to be non-intellectual formulas for that
experience. There is no sense-and only a mock-renunciation-in giv–
ing up the experiment of a secular society merely because one version
of it seems to have failed in politics and economics. All societies that
exist are secular societies, and every experiment in the series is bound
to fail, neither those which pretend to be religious nor those which
insist on being secular any more surely. The problem is to find
where and what the religion is in the given experiment.
It
is that
religion, wherever and whatever it is, that gives the substance to be
organized and subjected to politics.
As
we feel that force we become
capable of the dramatic gestures of decision and purpose and choice.
2. Change and catastrophe may cause change in the convictions
of intellectuals and
if
severe enough may include a restoration of that
frame of conviction originally expressed in the mysteries of the Incar–
nation, the Trinity, and the Resurrection, but which
m~ght,
or
might not, again be expressed in such mysteries. It is the restoration
of assent to what was always there, but what, to the intellectual lately,
has become objects for belief only to other people. But it does no good
merely to take up with such convictions; they have to be earned by
observation and
mimesis,
they have to be made, as all convictions
ought to be, the sense of inward mastery of outward experience. An
age of faith, if that is what is wanted, comes about when religious
convictions are a part of-incarnate in- secular experience. When the
religious and the secular are kept separate, or when one greatly
dominates the other, you get either pyrrhonism or despair; in terms
of the Christian mystery of the Trinity, you lack the Holy Ghost.
If
the mind of the modern intellectual is moving towards the
