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PARTISAN REVIEW
beautiful paradoxes of the Trinity and Transubstantiation, lends
itself particularly well. Once we believe in these, we are absolved
of any except the most empirical crimes against the rules of evidence,
Thomas Aquinas to the contrary notwithstanding. We can believe
once more in the data of our feelings, and the art whose substance
they furnish becomes "responsible" again.
In
theory at least, the dis–
association of sensibility is healed.
I have, of course, simplified the process, repeating what is already
well known, in order to describe it. The fact is that no amount of de–
voutness is able, in these times, to protect religious sanctions or
symbols in art from the pressure of naturalism with its rules of
evidence. This is shown by the irony omnipresent in successful con–
temporary poetry, religious and otherwise: that irony which remains
literary art's last defense against the disassociation of sensibility. And
woe to the poet who lets this irony lapse.
The mysteries of religion have still other specious charms for
the modern artist. They promise profundity. Science has told us
nothing about the absolute ground of being, and I can well see how,
in view of this, some people might find superficial the sureness and
clarity that science displays in treating what
is
knowable. The
knowable, that about which verifiable propositions can be formulated,
may strike them as shallow simply because it can be known. This
kind of sensibility, is however, relatively new. It dates from Romantic–
ism and the beginning of bourgeois society's refusal to confront the
difference between its ideals and its actuality;
it
was only then that
the unknowable became identified with the "profound," which in
its turn was established as a genre almost-the genre of the allusive
and illusive, of vaguenesses, hints, of clues that lead nowhere, of
assumptions that are neither defined nor corroborated, of big words.
We arc through with the big words and what they advertise; their
aesthetic credit, at least, is exhausted. But in the name of "pro–
fundity" we still long to dissolve our art and ourselves in some ulti–
mate vagueness or confusion. And what promises this better than
religion? Yet the aspiration is an aesthetic, not a moral or religious
one.
