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ence, or as the absolute ground of existence (an absolute of which
nothing, however, can be demonstrably known), or, more mildly still,
as a perspective uniting the real and the ideal. All such notions are
wretched substitutes for the
mysterium tremendum
of a dying and
rising god. Though notions of that kind may serve the modernising
dialectician bent on saving something of religion by cutting its losses,
they starve the religious imagination by depriving it of its major as–
sets in ritual, myth and dogma. It seems to me that Stephen Dedalus,
in his stubborn innocence, is aware of the ineluctable facts of reli–
gion in a way that eludes the subtle dialecticians; and I have no doubt
that in this respect Stephen is wholly at one with his author. An–
other "horrible example of free thought" in modern fiction is Kiril–
lov, of
The Possessed,
who commits suicide because he will settle for
nothing less than God's actual existence. All his life long, the author
of
The Possessed
said of himself, he was tormented by the problem of
the existence of God.
Such stubborn innocence is alien, however, to the partisans of
tradition, who have learned not only how to by-pass Dostoevsky's
"problem" but also how to make it appear that the very formulation
of it is somehow in bad taste. Their way is simply to restore God to
His heaven by means of a mental operation speciously pragmatic so as
to secure for tradition its indispensable metaphysical basis. In other
words, if they believe in God it is mainly because such belief is logi–
cally implicit in their traditionalist alignment. One further step in
this analysis and we discover that it is not they, as individuals, in the
aloneness of their existential subjectivity, who have come to have
faith in God but, rather, that it is the tradition which is possessed of
that faith. The tradition does everything; they merely feed on its
heavenly manna.
What this suggests is that at bottom traditionalism is really a
form of perverted historicism, in the sense that it is fixated on some
period of the past idealised through the medium of the historical
imagination, that uniquely modem product. (The neo-classicist and
traditionalist school of Maurras was fixated on the period of Louis
XIV, for instance). Whitehead once remarked that there are two
ways of reading history, backwards and forwards, and that thinking
requires both methods. The traditionalists, however, are committed
to reading history only backwards, for they tend to regard nearly
