RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS III
ROBERT GORHAM DAVIS
If
religion means electing for the future (with the help of
God's sufficient grace) an eternity of bliss rather than an eternity
of torment, then nothing else, obviously, is of the slightest importance.
Only an infinitesimal minority in Christendom, however, have acted
as
if
this were true. For a larger minority religion has meant im–
mediate mystical experience, agonizing and satisfying, whose sub–
jective paths have run remarkably parallel in the higher religions,
including those like Buddhism and some forms of Brahmanism in
which there is no belief in a personal God. For the mass of men
religion is primarily social rather than mor.al or spiritual, but pro–
vides through ritual a sense of communion with other human be–
ings, with the natural world, and with unseen powers.
Religion, believed in, takes clear precedence over philosophy,
science and politics. It not only has the superhuman and the eternal
as its referents, but
it
involves man on all levels, rationally, practically,
imaginatively, expressively, emotionally and subliminally. In psychic
scope it is like art, and like
art
it creates an ideal and symbolic
projective structure which disposes satisfyingly of the forces of id
and superego. Also like art it draws strength from the infantile
world of animism, magic, the archetypal family situation and the
potency of the wish. But art cannot be a substitute for religion. Be–
cause of its institutional character and the credence it commands,
religion far more profoundly conditions attitudes and more sub–
stantially joins the dreaming and waking world, the self and the
totality of otherness outside the self. Art is indebted to religion not
only for the emotional force of shared symbols, but for the sus–
tenance provided the creative imagination by habits of mind which
give primary value to things unseen, to sympathetic magic, and to
