RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS
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restoration of this kind of conviction it ought to strengthen, not
limit, the scientific attitude by reminding it of purpose, giving oc–
casion for decision, and raising dramatic urgency to choice. Only
bad religion condemns science, only bad science quarrels with religion.
The relation is not ?f mastery or primacy but of complementarity or
phase. The whole trouble with the intellectual hierarchy is that it
is
built in an ascending scale, when it ought to be conceived as a set
of shifting positions about an unknown center. Theology is queen only
if by position we see all things in her. The best hierarchy would be
the higgle-de-piggledy we know; but that we do not dare, only God.
3. Culture and religion. Certainly the kind of history we know
puts culture and religion into relation; Mr. Eliot believes that culture
is the incarnation of the religion of .a people, never at any moment
complete, even, one would suppose, in the religious phase. Certainly
none of the history we know suggests that there cannot be a culture
without a
positive
religion. Certainly, if by positive religion we mean
the Church, there have been cultures without positive religion. But
there seems usually the felt need for institutional forms to transmit
and develop and make secularly available the religious force or
numinosum,
whether as magic, or as ritual, or as the wisdom of the
psyche-whatever it
is
seized and driven by the force. What I assume
is meant by prophetic religion would seldom reach the people,
whether as individuals or in mass, without the medium of the
Church; .and this is true even when the Church corrupts the voice of
the prophet or the candor of the saint. (It is not much different with
literature: we should know very little of Aristotle, or Dante, or
Shakespeare, or James Joyce, and so on, if these authors had not
been institutionalized: we should not see them at all, if we did not
see them through corruption darkly; and we all know what happens
when the independent mind, like Tolstoy's, takes the Gospels as a pos–
sible present Christianity.) And on the other hand, the individual
prophets would not be likely to appear without the Church to fight,
appease, or reform. The institution of the Church (like the institution
of literature) is what survives until the next prophet or saint comes
along to bring it new life in a new phase; and of course, the Church
may smother at least as often as it inspires the candidate.
It
follows
from this, I think, that as the Christian tradition housed in the
Christian Church has never been pure in any form of image or
