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PAR .TISAN REVIEW
tists"-a general wish among critics. And as I have noted above,
the identification of so many gods as aspects of one idea finally makes
it difficult to believe in any god at all.
5. Everything I have already said shows pretty clearly that I
do separate "the religious consciousness (as an attitude toward man
and human life) from religious beliefs." And while I can hardly
pretend that this offers much consolation, and least of all that it may
give "cultural leadership" to others, I can no more shake off my
respect for the "religious consciousness" than I can bend mine to the
authority of any organized religion.
Is the separation possible? Is it meaningful? It has been both for
a long time, even in many artists and deeply religious persons com–
mitted to a formal belief, and certainly among many more who were
not. The example that always comes home to me is the late Beethoven,
whose religious sensibility seems to me the highest possible expression
given by any modern individual, outside the established faiths, to
the quest for a deeper relatedness, to a truly
personal
faith.
As
Pascal was too good a scientist to make a religion of science, so
Beethoven transcended music, for he could not make a religion of it.
In that haunting note he put to the slow movement of opus 132,
Beethoven addressed himself to the spirit of Divinity itself-"to the
Godhead,"
an die Gottheit-in
a hymn of thanksgiving that he had
recovered from sickness to do his proper work in the world. In our
time of annihilation, of the many deaths, of increasing terror against
the very spirit of life itself, I have come slowly and painfully, but with
increasing sureness, to accept that idea of gratitude as the well–
spring of existence. It disposes of man's insincere pride, for we can–
not be grateful to ourselves for life, and invokes the Godhead that
is real because it is present to the intermediacy of our situation.
Gratitude that we are here, that we are still here, and have a man's
work to do. Gratitude to that which is always
given
us, in a world
where nothing can be taken for granted, except death, and the
fact that we did not make that world itself. To invoke the source,
in gratitude that we are
here,
is to confront with our whole being
a human situation not less difficult than we had thought it, but one
that is newly astonishing, and alive with our own joy.
