230
PARTISAN REVIEW
of living with pain and evil, otherwise unendurable and irremediable,
so long as what functions as a vital illusion or poetic myth is not repre–
sented as a public truth to whose existence the once-born are blind,
so long as religion does not paralyze the desire and the will to strug–
gle against unnecessary cruelties of experience, it seems to me to fall
in an area of choice in which rational criticism may be suspended.
In this sense, a man's personal religion justifies itself to him in the
way his love does. Why should he want to make a public cult of it?
And why should we want him to prove that the object of his love
is the most lovely creature in the world? Nonetheless, it still remains
true that as a set of
cognitive
beliefs, religion is a speculative hypo–
thesis of an extremely low order of probability.
The belief that the acceptance of certain religious beliefs of a
non-empirical or transcendental character can be a guide to social
reorganization leads to intellectual confusion. It often obscures the
fact that a parochial power interest is operating behind a universal
claim. The most diverse patterns of social control are equally com–
patible with the same religious doctrines. There are Christian demo–
crats and Christian totalitarians who are at one in their acceptance
of religious mysteries. Who is prepared to show that Hromadka, the
Czech theologian on the Communist Action Committee which purged
the Charles University, was theologically heterodox?
Historically, it is undeniable that prophetic religion in the
Judaeo-Christian tradition has on occasions pleaded eloquently for
social reform in the
language
of supernatural faith. I submit, how–
ever, that
if
we survey history as a whole we will not appreciably dif–
fer with the judgment of Ernst Troeltsch in his summary of "the
lasting and eternal content of the Christian Ethos" as expressed in
his monumental
The So cial Teaching of the Christian Churches.
The Christian Ethos, according to Troeltsch, "recognizes differences
in social position, power and capacity, as a condition which has been
established by the inscrutable Will of God; and then transforms this
condition by the inner upbuilding of the personality, and the devel–
opment of the mutual sense of obligation, into an ethical cosmos."
But my point is not historical but logical. Not only are religious dogmas
no guide in settling specific issues of an economic or political char–
acter, from a wage dispute to the international control of nuclear
