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PARTISAN REVIEW
scious remedy for social disorganization, it could be seen as a mere
symptom of the disorganization. Christ conquered the Roman Empire,
but he began by transforming the lives of a few fishermen. Part of
question 3 belongs here. There is no doubt that writers like Maurras
have made institutional religion suspect in the minds of many per–
sons: it becomes another political weapon. But this is no excuse for
discrediting the validity of historical insight as a means of religious
conversion in the individual. Countless are the roads to genuine be–
lief. Historical insight is one of them, even though it is not in itself
genuine belief. In many men today it has
directed the attention
to
spiritual possibilities which our pervasive naturalism had obscured;
and thus it has discovered a hitherto unexercised gift of faith. To
deny the progress from intellectual to intuitive belief is to commit
the genetic fallacy.
2. A difficult question, or rather several questions. I am not
sure that anything has
happened
to make religion more credible to
the modern mind. Yet there must be a causal reason for the fashion–
able, ostentatious religion of a man like Evelyn Waugh; but that
might lie rather in the literary
milieu,
in which literary naturalism
had played out in England, and new
literary
material had to be
found if one was going to be a success. An invidious speculation; and
perhaps Mr. Waugh, for the most unlikely reasons, has become a
genuine Christian: that is not for me but for God to decide. I can
only observe that there was nothing geilUine, not even the language,
in
Brideshead Revisited. .
From this level of comment it is hard to
proceed to the next phase of your question concerning a shift in
the intellectual hierarchy. Physics, at the apex of the present hierarchy,
may abdicate
if
it reaches the end of its theoretical progress, and
lapses into mere technology; but it would not follow that religion
would be automatically promoted. It would have to be
a
religion,
not an eclecticism. The latter would be mere institutionalism or
anthropology; or perhaps "myth."
3.
It
must be clear by now that the enduring values of society
cannot be created by religious institutions, but only perpetuated by
them; but I think that they cannot be otherwise perpetuated. What
you call the prophetic I would call the individual and the intuitive
renewal of the three theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity. To
what extent this renewal of man's "substantive form," of his unique
