224
PARTISAN REVIEW
thought or worship in which
it
has been experienced and has merely
pretended to be pure at its rasher moments of asserted omnicom–
petence (its moments of greatest impurity), so any new phase into
which the tradition may enter will also be impure, or, in the language
of your topic, "pluralistic." It would be interesting to hazard the
next probable form of Christianity; I hazard the same sort of
aesthetic revival as seems to be taking place in literature and in
philosophies like those of Whitehead. Orthodoxy is the absorption
and dramatic unification as well as the .purging of fresh heresies; and
what little of orthodoxy we have is that one of our possessions most
subject to corruption. It is lucky we have institutions to take the
burden of corruption. The Church is what we reform when we
cannot ourselves reform.
4. I do not see any great amount of religious revival in litera–
ture. Literature is a carrier of ideas, and deals with the experience of
ideas. But writers, especially the "unconscious" or inspired class, are
very self-conscious about their ideas, including those which have, as
Mr. Eliot says, begun to stink. Contemporary writing is in this sense
full of ideas. I do not think that Mr. Waugh, Mr. Greene, or Father
Merton have very much religion
in
their writings, though they have
many religious ideas, which they believe implement very inadequate
reports of the actuality of religious and other experience. Mr. Waugh's
little thread ·pulls puppets. I do think that Eliot's poetry, which has
no threads, and Joyce's novels are religious quite apart from their
ideas; and I think Thomas Mann's
Doctor Faustus
has the special
turbulence of religious experience, as I believe there is a religious
disastrousness in the fictions of Andre Gide.
5.
If
it is remembered that the natural and the supernatural
relate realms of experience very differently available to the human
mind, that they therefore employ different modes of belief, and that
they strike differently at different times in the history of the mind,
then it ought to follow that this topic belongs to the study of belief
not religion. In our time we call what we do not believe superpatural,
but most people who take to it do not bother about belief at all. On
the other hand, at all times, what has been truly believed has been be–
lieved naturally and secularly. What we cannot turn to, what we
cannot imitate, as
in
poetry, even though it is hidden, we are not
likely to think of as religion.
