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PARTISAN REVIEW
ersatz concocted by pride: for to
obey
divine Truth speaking to man
and in man is exactly what gods like the above-mentioned authors
cannot accept.
What does
supernatural
mean?-A God-given participation–
impossible to the mere forces of nature- in the very life of God.
Grace is this participation,-eternal life begun here below. Faith is
participation
in
God's very knowledge, Charity participation in
God's very love. We can conceive of a merely natural religion, founded
simply on the capacity of the human mind to know God as the
primary Cause of things. Yet in actual fact no natural religion did
ever exist separately from supra-rational or extra-rational beliefs, and
the hidden action of grace within the human soul was always and
everywhere at work. (Be it noted, furthermore, that in a merely
natural religion there would be at least one explicit-natural–
belief: in the existence of God. Or do we look for a religious con–
sciousness without belief even in the existence of God? Well, we
have it: the
reli~ous
consciousness of the unique Party, either wop
shipping the Fuehrer or the movement of history). Now as regards
the regions of the world which have received the message of the
Judeo-Christian revelation, the question for them is not whether
religious consciousness "can be maintained without an explicit credo
postulating the supernatural"; but what kind of mess religious con–
sciousness could become without sticking to the truth known, or–
to use Newman's expression-while "sinning against the light."
I would conclude in saying that there is something presupposed
by and more fundamental than the sympathetic attitude toward
religion expressed in the literary world. I mean the quest for religious
truth which exists in the readers, and the aspiration which manifests
itself everywhere, in literary as well as non-literary, intellectual as
well as non-intellectual people, by sporadic yet significant indications,
toward spiritual life and contemplation. Not only
in
the form of
aspiration, but also of realization. I am aware that this thirst for con–
templative experience is now widespread in this country. Such a
fact is one of the rare facts in the world that make me hopeful; it
even gives me some pride, for I foresaw it. It has been my conten–
tion, for many years, that in this country, behind all the externals of
pragmatism and restless activity, a huge vital desire for internal life,
