RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS
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cepting and the way of transcending this predicament. The first way
can be called negative-religious, the second positive-religious. On
one of these ways we find all those intellectuals whose belief in the
mastery of rational man over his destiny has broken down and who
reject a compromise between their former belief and their new in–
sight, who are not satisfied by a restricted and moderate optimism
about the potentialities of man and history.-The negative-religious
way is the way of despair and heroism. Its heroism is the acceptance
of its despair. But since nobody can live in an absolute despair about
meaning and being, one consolation is accepted by those who have
chosen this way: As intellectuals they can express the despair of
existence artistically or philosophically, and can create a meaning of
the meaningless. The heroism of despair transcends despair through
the power of the intellectual in expressing it, not in outcries, but in
creative forms. By this expression of despair the intellectual is saved
from the radicalism of the despair he expresses. For two reasons
one can call this attitude negative-religious. Despair is
negative–
religious insofar as within it all finite securities break down and lose
their power of preventing the question of the infinite, of the ultimate
meaning of existence. The expression of despair is
negative-religious
insofar as it tries to transcend the situation of absolute despair by
expressing it although confirming it, at the same time. These inner
contradictions of the negative religious attitude drive the intellectual,
towards the other, the positive-religious way. Not all of them take this
way, but all of them have experienced the negative preparation for
it. The positive religious way transcends the human predicament
radically by transforming it into a question to which religion gives
the answer. On this way the despaired character of man's predica–
ment is acknowledged. But man is not considered to be the last
word about man. Within the symbols of historical religion an answer
is
seen which accepts and transcends the human situation, its despair
and its self-destruction.
But the modern intellectual could not honestly accept religion,
in spite of all that drives him to it if religion were what it was sup–
posed to be in the atheistic criticism of previous generations. Religion
has revealed its meaning to the modern intellectual as something
which is neither a matter of dishonesty nor of escapism. Religion–
at least in some of its recent interpreters-is a whole of symbols in
