232
PARTISAN REVIEW
more human control of the material conditions of life, it permits
each individual "to save" his soul in his own way.
ALFRED KAliN
Perhaps it will be possible for me to answer your questions
-if only because they are so loaded with a disdainfully "sensible"
positivism that they make it easier to say what it is I
don)t
believe.
1. Of course there is a revival of religion, or at least of an
interest in religion-and hardly .among intellectuals alone, perhaps not
mostly among intellectuals, I would say from my experiences as a
reporter in America and England during the war. And of course,
"from a naturalistic point of view," this "trend" has its "causes"
(though all causes are not necessarily knowable) , .and has plainly been
accelerated by the unparalleled catastrophes of our time, which
have brought home to every sensitive individual the one issue of
human survival, have made us search again to the
roots
of the
human order. But-to speak here only of intellectuals-:-there are so
many sincerely religious ones in the world, and not all of them have
renounced "hopes for any fundamental social improvement." On the
contrary, it was precisely a Gandhi and a Bernanos, as it is a Silone,
a Mauriac, an Emmanuel Mounier, a Cripps, a Niebuhr, even the
Labor-voting Eliot, I trust most not to renounce "hopes for any
fundamental social improvement." True, there are many ex-Marxists
who have replaced one theology with another. But I doubt very
much if most of them were ever objectively concerned with anyone's
social
improvement.
I have noticed that just as they once airily dis–
posed of half the modern world's cultural treasures as "bourgeois
ideology," so they can now refer to Freudianism as a theory of human
nature based merely "on hysterics and neurotics." And true, there are
many intellectuals--outside the monastic orders-for whom religion
itself supplies a "remedy" for the breakdown of our society; but
they are not very convincing either in their religion, or in what they
claim to feel about human suffering in our society. They are really
trying to indoctrinate our society-that is, to make
it
theirs-rather
than to transform it.
In the largest sense, the revival of interest in religion stems from
