240
PARTISAN REVIEW
Since nobody has gone so far as to
claim
that a new revelation
is at hand, or that a prophetic
pneuma
is sweeping the world, as it
swept the Christian world in the era of the Reformation or the
Jewish world with the rise of Hasidism, one is perhaps justified in
summing up the so-called religious revival as the high talk of literary
men and journalists about the necessity of returning to traditional
Christianity. (Here again one is struck by the fact that the emphasis
in all this talk is not so much on the truth of traditional Christianity
as on the allegedly beneficent consequences of its restoration. The
argument from consequences, so grossly pragmatic, is thus inevitably
laid hold of by the very same people who ostensibly reject the prag–
matic mode of thought as philosophically vulgar and spiritually in–
admissible.) There have also been a number of conversions-a fact
not very important as a sign 'of cultural change if it were not for the
attitudes of ingratiation and appeasement toward the converts and
the entire phenomenon of conversion now manifest in intellectual
circles. Not so long ago this phenomenon was generally regarded
with amused bafflement or unconcern. That is a difference worth
noting, as it is exactly the
Zeitgeist
which accounts for it. It is note–
worthy, too, that among the new converts there is no exigent religious
individualism
a
la Tolstoy, no prophets or visionaries, no grand
and courageous reformulation of ethical demands. Nothing of that
sort is to be expected, for nearly all the converts have reached their
present state through a process of historical retrospection which has
apparently brought home to them the power and sublimity of the
traditions and institutions of Christendom.
&
usual, it is the literary men who are in the vanguard of
the movement. In certain literary quarters the idea of tradition has
lately taken on an honorific meaning that empties it of all empirical
content. Thus
({the
tradition"-as it is spoken of in some of our
literary reviews, with the definite article stressing an exclusiveness
staggering in its presumption and historical naivete-has been trans–
mogrified into a patent ideological construction. It has come to
stand for a special kind of higher reality, no less, bristling with
magico-religious associations on the one hand and promises of aristo–
cratic investiture on the other. Of course, the number of intellectuals
now taking up tradition is much smaller than the number that took
up revolution in the thirties. Still the trend is unmistakable, particular-
