RELIGION
AND
THE INTELLECTUALS
229
terpretations of the world which try to make sense of the meaning–
less suffering in human life. Although this is not the whole story, I
believe it does express something essential in the attitude of the re–
ligious person for whom suffering
must
have a meaning and no good
cause ever goes down to final defeat.
It
is true that some naturalists
have been shallow optimists-something easily remediable in the light
of more knowledge-but such a charge is peculiarly malapropos com–
ing from religious believers whose emotional compulsions have led
them to accept optimism on the vastest scale imaginable.
There are some reluctant naturalists with a hankering for the
genteel tradition who blame the "new failure of nerve" on the philoso–
phy of naturalism because it does not offer an adequate ,analysis of
the alienation of the modern intellectual and his moral predicaments.
How unwarranted such a view is becomes apparent when we reflect
upon the fact that philosophical naturalism has never been so far
removed from the crudities of reductive materialism as to-day. It
leaves unexplained why the modern intellectual in search of salva–
tion evinces such an obvious distaste towards the very attempt at
scientific explanation in history and psychology, and why he substi–
tutes for
it
not a more rigorous theoretical scheme, but, as his en–
thusiasm for Toynbee shows, extravagant myth. His dissatisfaction
is not intellectual but emotional. The critics who are homesick for
gentility look to naturalism to provide a faith to live by equivalent
to religious faith. This is precisely what naturalism cannot do if it
is honest to the facts of experience. They forget that religious faith
cannot be separated from religious belief or dogma, and ultimately
from the question of truth. Otherwise we have a serious fooling or a
discussion in religious terms of ethical or aesthetic subject matter.
Pruned of its sentimentalism, there is a deep insight in Feuer–
bach's philosophy of religion according to which the secret of theolo–
gy is (philosophical) anthropology. What Marx did was not to re–
nounce this insight but to show that the emotional needs of which re–
ligion was both an expression and gratification could not be dissociat–
ed from their cultural matrix. He overstated his position, and some
who imagine themselves his followers have made a grotesquerie of it.
So long as religion is freed from authoritarian institutional forms,
and conceived in personal terms, so long as its overbeliefs are a source
of innocent joy, a way of overcoming cosmic loneliness, a discipline
