RELIGION AND THE IIHELLECTUALS
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a more particular kind of breakdown than the "social one," though
it
must refer back to that. For our free society no longer gives
spiritual support to the individual (the other kind does, but at what
a price), and our established secular creeds are frozen hard in their
own, self-idolizing, formulas. Necessarily, there has been an appeal
from materialism to what Blake called the spiritual imagination–
that which rescues the gods from their beginnings in superstition,
and the continuum of our inner life from the "mind-forg'd manacles."
When man is deprived both of security and emotional wholeness,
but is still regarded as a machine, in a world of machines, he will
revolt--sometimes to amazing extremes, and even if he is a scientist–
to reclaim his marvellous and indestructible belief in himself as a
spiritual being. In our time, when Socialism has been identified
with "human engineering," Communism with slavery, liberalism
with academic "humanism," and naturalism with the worship of
scientific method, many intellectuals, without any conceptual belief
in
God, have been forced to attack the pseudo-order of mind always
in control of nature that has been created by the scientific materialists.
And in this sense, too, though I am outside orthodox religion, I
still find more understanding, among religious writers, of what the
human situation is about, of what man is like, than from positivists,
laboratory psychologists, instrumentalists, etc.
2. Religion is not more "credible" than it was, and not less;
it has always been credible. Tolstoy said it: "God is the name of my
desire." He exists for many gifted intellectuals, for reasons which
are inherently their own. The religious faculty is like any other, in
at least this respect: some people have it not at all, and cannot under–
stand why others should have it. Many are devoured by it; many
more are saved. Whatever churches or synagogues may say, the
authentic believers
prove
that religion is intrinsically a private mat–
ter. How can I presume to say whether what they believe is "valid"
or not when a) it is not they but the "advanced" and "progressive"
people who have defended the most terrible crimes in the name of
"reason" and "science" b) when everything I know about the his–
tory of sincerely religious persons shows that faith is not based on
deduction and "proof," but on the vagaries of personal experience?
The assumption behind your second question is that a "scientific at–
titude of mind" can free men from worshipping at mysteries. But
