RELIGION AND THE INTELL
I am not much interested in
among intellectuals. Nor even in any
new
orientation
toward religion. What is of interest,
fNili
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view of faith, are the souls, and their orientation toward
ctet1dty.
other terms, events which, by their very nature, do not take . e
in "history," but in what Berdjaev called "metahistory."
The
time
or measure of duration, the tempo of the Gospel, of faith, of souls,
is not the time or the tempo of the new trends or new turns in
artistic, philosophical or literary production.
At this point permit me to confess that I greatly appreciate the
objectivity of your questionnaire, but that the way in which it
proceeds is a little puzzling for me. You ask what constellation of
historical causes, or particular events, can explain why some of our
contemporaries are intent on the word of God. Well, as I see it, what
needs to be explained is why human beings are
not
always and every–
where intent on the word of God. Does one ask what historical
causes can explain the fact that men are interested in food? This is
not a matter of history, but of physiology.
Human reason naturally knows the existence of God. Divine
grace is knocking at every door, and offers each man the gift of
faith. The workings of reason, and the workings of grace, these are
the
causes
to be considered. They are permanent causes. The rest
is accidental.
The basic importance of the accidental or historical causes lies
in the fact that either they afford or they remove obstacles hampering
the normal action of the permanent causes. For the time being, it is
to
the removal of obstacles
that many of the accidental causes seem
to contribute. In particular, it is probable that the explosion of a few
atom bombs has shaken in a number of minds one of the big
modern obstacles to religion, namely the idea of
salvation through
science,
or the concept that the progress of human science was bound
automatically to make man and the world good and happy. It is but
just that a brute prejudice should have been shattered by a brute
event.
Politics.-People
have realized that atheistic radicalism logically
winds up in totalitarianism; they have also realized that religious
faith and inspiration still play a vital part in the life of nations and
their struggle against enslavement. So the atheistic "emancipation of
