RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS
331
MEYER SCHAPIRO
The recurrent interest in religion today is a sign that the
great effort of emancipation that began three centuries ago has not
been successful, or at least has not completed its work. The reason
for this, I believe, is that it can succeed only when men are intel–
lectually free and masters of their own lives-which is hardly the
case today.
&
long as most men are subject to authority and fear,
the religious ideas will continue to exercise a strong attraction and
will
also
be used as an instrument of power. More than a hundred and
fifty years after the declaration of the rights of men, these rights are
still precarious and in large regions of the globe they are non–
existent; with the immense accomplishment of science and technology,
social life is full of profound anxieties. The chief carriers of assurance
-industry and the state-are among the greatest sources of fear. The
fact that freedom and security were passionately expected and
not achieved has made the reaction against the disappointing ideolo–
gies of progress all the more bitter. Still, we detect in some criticisms
of the idea of progress a satisfaction with its presumed failure, an
evidence that progress would be contrary to certain interests.
Modem culture, too, in spite of its decided lay character, is
not altogether unfavorable to religion. Centered in the individual and
deeply critical of social life (unlike older culture which served the
Church, the state or a closed civil community), its main themes are
the intimate world of the self and personal relationships as a com–
plete field independent of practical criteria and controls. In moments
of confidence, it affirms the self as a striving, growing, productive
force, eager for new experience; in moments of stress, it discovers
the genius of solitude and from the vantage-point of detachment or
doubt lays bare the unacknowledged chaos within the soul and the
impurities of social life. Religion as an ideal subjective realm presents
itself then as a congenial parallel world, also preoccupied with the
spirit and with human weakness and giving great weight to integrity
and self-knowledge. Personal values are primary in both; and states
similar to the modern's disenchantment, homelessness, despair, long–
ing for perfection and rest and for a transcendent realm, have been
probed with impressive power by religious minds in the past. From still
another point of view, the burden of the self in an unstable, atomized
