RELI<PION AND THE INTELL ECTUALS
461
Schoolmen labored for centuries at the doctrines of the Incarnation
and Trinity, but without removing their essential self-contradiction,
and I don't expect that anyone will do any better in the future. No
doubt, our civilization has erred in placing too great a value upon
truth
under all circumstances and to all people;
but history, including
this historical value, has formed me, and while I do not insist on it
as a value for others, I have to live with my own bedrock literalness
of mind, unable to accept anything whose literal consequences I can–
not believe. Here again we come back to the fact from which I
started: that the historical climate sets the situation in which religion
too must exist and realize itself.
I am not very comfortable either about harboring a private
religion. I would prefer it otherwise, since religion
is
most valuable in
human community, when alive in a whole people. But what we must
not forget is that history has witnessed as radical revolutions in
religion as in governments, economies, and human knowledge.
If
mankind gets past its presen t crisis, if the threat of Communism dis–
appears and a genuine era of freedom ensues, out of that new
liberty a new religion might be born, as different from what we have
now as Christianity was from paganism. In the meantime one can
only wait: the creative waiting in which one struggles to send one's
roots deeper into life and reconquer for oneself, in the openness
toward Being, the primitive simplicities that our civilization has
almost entirely lost and without which life itsclf has no meaning–
no, none at all.
GEORGE BOAS
In considering the return to religion of the "leaders of
culture" in English speaking countries, the question of genuine
conversion must not be omitted. Conversions occur in all ranks of
society, in all professions and trades, from agnosticism to Roman
Catholicism, from one Protestant sect to another, and, I believe,
,
from Roman Catholicism to Protestant sects. They occur in the
young, the middle aged, the old, and the dying. They occur when one
is healthy and vigorous and, at least in the case of Jean Cocteau,
when under the influence of drugs. There seems to be, in short, no
