RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS
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pretty good case could be made out for writing off the human race ·
right now; but since we are implicated in the facts, we can't afford
quite that much objectivity. The greatest shift in the intellectual
climate from the nineteenth to the twentieth century is probably the
slow and gradual loss of the once passionate hope in human pos–
sibilities. Where the nineteenth century was exalted and tormented by
that absorbing question, What might man become?-we today are
willing to settle for simply hanging on. The question everywhere in
the background today and not very far in the background either, is
one of survival.
This atmosphere is created mainly by world Communism, the
expanding presence of which points up every insecurity we have. It
surprises me that the contributors to this symposium have tended
to deal with a possible religious revival in one or other of its ancient
forms, whereas it is more likely that if a new religious wave were to
sweep mankind again, it would be radically different from anything
in the past. William James proposed as a pragmatic test of the
genuineness of a religious feeling its capacity to transform the
whole person. Communism meets this test very well. I knew one
young woman who was a dipsomaniac, tried psychoanalysis, which
did not work, then became converted to Communism and the
bottle was no longer necessary to her, for her life had now acquired
a meaning. Communism provides the individual, as religions did in
the past, with a total structure outside himself to which he can
belong. Moreover, it makes available to its faithful that wonderfully
healing sublimation of resentments that was one of the most ex–
traordinary psychological achievements of past religions, which, in
love of the sinner but hatred of the sin, could draw and quarter
their infidel victims with the fiery joy of self-righteousness. Only the
Communist today has the wonderful catharsis, an Evil against which
he may discharge all his hatreds, while at the same time he is able to
hide from himself, by his sanctimonious love of the masses, the fact
that he is principally a creature of resentments.
All this may lead the reader to believe that I stand altogether
outside of any religious faith, and it may now come as something
of a surprise when I say that, like a good many other people in the
modem world, I have my own private religion. There would be no
excuse for burdening the reader with any details of this except that
