RELIGION AND THE I NTEL LECTUALS IV
WILLIAM BARRETT
What, after this pandemonium of voices, remains to be
said? or could possibly have been left unsaid? An editor who has seen
the separate contributions cross his desk might feel stung to answer
this or that point already made, but as a contributor he has to
place himself on the same footing as everyone else. Nevertheless, on
the whole symposium itself there is a permissible comment that
illumines the central issue: namely, the character of this historical
period and the possibility of a real religious revival within it. What
strikes me most about the symposium is the amazing dissonance of
the participant voices: one might roughly classify the contributions
under the two headings, pro or con, but such a classification would
hardly do justice to the extraordinary diversity of orientations,
points of departure, presuppositions, types of experience appealed to,
etc., etc. Talk about cultural pluralism! Well, we have it, and our
problem may now be to get beyond it. In a real Age of Faith a
symposium like this could not have been held-even apart from the
prohibitions of the ecclesiastical police- because men's doubts and
differences would move in a much narrower orbit. We are what
we are mostly from the unconscious influences we soak up-and in
the matter of religion too: in Ages of Faith everybody is religious
as a simple spontaneous act of being, and the strength of religion is
precisely when it works as a concrete and cohesive fact of feeling,
lived without being questioned, and surrounding the individual's
life at every moment from birth to death.
If
we were free to choose,
we might prefer such an Age of Faith, whether pagan or Christian,
when religion
is
there for the whole people like the air they breathe,
for in such periods our energies might be more intense, direct,
fructifying, even if our horizons were more narrow. But this kind of
choice we never have; centuries of rational criticism have done their
work and given us this world in which we now live; and we must
remember this when we see the efforts of a few contemporary intel-
