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PARTISAN REVIEW
duct, the sanctioning of standards, the preservation of culture, spring
from the failure at the core of naturalism to experience life directly.
For those who are dead to it, nature offers no evidence of values, and
these must be imported from abroad. But this merely continues to
lower the repute in which spontaneous manifestations of nature–
especially the sexual-are held in our society, and it obstructs recog–
nition of the fact that the humane values are natural functions of
love. And above all, the cost of this religious importation is too great;
we must pay for it in the dying out of the sense of life, in a doom of
submission to a world ruled by dead men who, because they can
no longer feel love, can no longer feel anything, not even the terror
of the concentration camp, let alone sympathy and brotherhood for
other men.
ALLEN TATE
The PR symposium promises to turn the "intellectuals"
into amateur theologians; and I, for one, await with curiosity the
exhibits of the others to see whether I do better or worse than they.
At the outset I wish to make two confessions: 1) I procrastinated as
long as possible before undertaking the risks of the symposium, and
2) I deliberately refrained from organizing my views. I am here
trying to set down what without special effort I do believe.
In the first place, I believe in God the Father Almighty,
Creator of Heaven and Earth, and in Jesus Christ His only Son,
Our Lord. What it means to believe this is a complex problem: how
deeply I believe it, on what occasions I am conscious of the belief,
how often I doubt it, the extent to which the concomitant habit
of unbelief in other, contradictory dogmas qualifies my effective
use of the first clause of the Creed, I am not prepared to say. More–
over, as I look back upon my own verse, written over more than
twenty-five years, I see plainly that its main theme is man suffering
from unbelief; and I cannot for a moment suppose that this man is
some other than myself. I shall not probe this phase of the question;
yet I think that any "imaginative writer" of our time ought to take
it very seriously. What a poet does with the existent world-the
world he has got to see and know first of all-is more likely to reveal
