RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS
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individual Catholics were, and no doubt still are, totalitarians; but
not as Catholics, or because they are Catholic. The Roman Catholic
Church, as an organized institution, is politically and spiritually alien
to me. Yet I would have no hesitation in joining with groups of
Catholic democrats-as the free trade unions of the world have just
done-against totalitarianism. I can disagree with Catholics; totali–
tarianism permits no argument.
The religious tradition of our civilization
is
pluralistic, even
among many Christians and non-orthodox Jews. It will obviously
become more so, among individuals of every creed, for despite the
vested arrogance of orthodoxy the general development of religious
doctrine has been towards pluralism. Unfortunately, as the tissue–
thin and merely ethical faith of so many liberal Jews and Protestants
shows, pluralism can be an excuse and synonym for no faith at all.
One must discriminate between religious pluralism as insight within
a particular structure of faith (the old Quakers, Kierkegaard,
Martin Buber) and pluralism as the indiscriminate coupling of
psychological affinities, as in Salomon Reinach's "Orpheus," Wil–
liam James's "Varieties Of Religious Experience," and many text–
books of myth.
4. Religion and Literature. Much as I admire and enjoy
many writers who are not in the least religious, those who have
meant most to me are those concerned enough with religion to affirm,
as Proust does on the death of Bergotte, that "everything is ar–
ranged in this life as though we entered it carrying the burden of obli–
gations contracted in a former life ... laws to which every profound
work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only
-and still !-to fools." And still, I do not consider the others "fools,"
for I know this to be an idiosyncrasy of my personal taste. No, there
is "no special dependence of the literary imagination upon religious
feeling and ideas"-as witness Shakespeare, and Henry James, and
even the "mystical" Yeats. Where there are religious ideas, there may
be very little feeling (Hawthorne); or where there is religious feeling,
no real ideas (Gide). Religion, I repeat, is essentially an occurrence
within, a personal experience, especially among the most personal
beings in the world, artists. The present emphasis upon myth among
literary theorists does not usually, I would gather, stem from any
faith of their own; most of them, indeed, seek rather to be "scien-
