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PAHISAN REVIEW
baptismal certificate. Religion is no cure for stupidity. And since there
are great non-religious figures and great secular cultures, religion
is
no more a qualification creatively than
it
is
in criticism.
The argument that religion is necessary for culture is sometimes
advanced in the limited but familiar form of "the tragic sense of life."
Only the religious point of view can raise the vision of life to the
grandeur of tragedy. The naturalistic perspective brings life into
focus only as a blind, meaningless or mediocre transaction, a vision
lacking in dignity or value and therefore in everything that makes
life worth while in the specifically human sense. This argument is
utterly cockeyed, and is advanced only because of the widespread
prejudice against naturalism. Actually, the very opposite is true.
For if man is not wholly of nature, if he has one foot planted in
some better, higher realm, what is tragic about death or any other
predicament of the natural world? What meaning has any natural
frustration, in terms of this argument, except as
.a
prelude to super–
natural fulfilment? I fail to see how anyone can have even a suspicion
of the tragic sense of life unless he is already deeply committed to
naturalism; unless death and frustration have a finality, an irreducible
meaning for him-which only naturalism allows. It follows from this
that naturalism is implicated in any genuine religious philosophy.
Everything else is pie in the sky.
Human values must be derived from nature as the sufficient
ground. There is no other derivation, and even the most unworldly
religions fall back ultimately on some connection with life, though
this is often so weak
~t
is hard to recognize. The natural derivation
of value is no academic issue, a matter of premise and conclusion
with a theory hanging between the two. It must be experienced
directly, the dependence of everything on nature must be felt con–
cretely within one's own life, before naturalism can be anything
more than an attitude, and a superficial one at that.But there can be
no naturalistic dogma, for our sense of nature, our ability to experi–
ence it, does not remain fixed, and the true intellectual expression
must retain something of the character of dialogue. (But here I
can speak only for myself.) An example from Berdyaev is relevant.
In
Slavery and Freedom
Berdyaev opposes to all the modes of
slavery into which man can fall the personalistic ideal of freedom,
found not
in
this world or any part of nature, but
in
the higher
