RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS
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everything that has happened since the elected period to be part of
a process of degeneration, as nothing less, in fact, than a falling
away from grace.
But is it actually possible to believe traditionally while living
in an untraditional society dominated by secular forces? Belief of
that kind is vulnerable both on objective and subjective grounds. It
neither offers new and challenging motives for effecting the recon–
ciliation of faith and knowledge; nor does it yield itself to immediacy
and the inescapable hazards of unqualified subjectivity as did the
faith of a rebel Christian like Kierkegaard, who, differentiating radic–
ally between the Christianity of the New Testament and that of
Christendom, sought to anchor his desperate and paradoxical be–
lief not in tradition, hierarchy, and authority but in God and the
revelation in Christ. Piety toward the past is what traditionalism
offers instead. Christendom is its all, while of Christianity it conceives
in a formal and remote fashion as an unattainable ideal, an ideal so
strictly divorced from all natural and historical processes that it can
be safely tucked away in eternity.
The center of gravity of traditionalism is seldom in religious
experience. Its center, clearly, is in the attachment to the social and
cultural order of some past age in which religion, in a highly
developed institutionalized form, played an integral part. Thus the
locus of value is displaced from the sacred or supernatural object to
the institutional factor. One might put it another way by saying that
to the traditionalists, whether of the Anglo-American school of Eliot
or the French school of Maurras, religion is merely the theory of
which certain social and ecclesiastical institutions are the practice:*
But long ago it was written that "he who cometh to God must believe
that He is"; and the proposition that "He is" is scarcely to be de–
duced from the plain historical fact, which no one has ever questioned,
that the men of past societies have believed in Him.
*
It is necessary to distinguish here between Eliot the poet and Eliot the
ideologue of tradition in such prose writings as
Notes towards the Definition of
Culture.
In Eliot's later poetry there is a strain of mystical religion the actuality
of which is not open to question. As an ideologue, however, he inclines toward
socio-historical formulations that bring him close to the position of Maurras. It
is particularly among the followers of Eliot, some of whom have performed
the remarkable feat of taking over his ideas on culture and society without
an equivalent commitment to religious belief, that the archaistic social attitudes
of traditionalism become the center of value.
