469
IRVING HOWE
In most of the recent literary manifestations of religious
feeling there
is
a conspicuous scarcity of credible reference to that
old hero: God. Intellectuals attracted to religion invoke theology,
myth, metaphysics and psychoanalysis, but seldom publicly ask or
answer the central question facing anyone who professes to faith in
the twentieth century: do I, how can I, believe in the existence of
God? In a previous age religious discussion could take for granted His
existence and consequently assume its subject to be the proper fulfil–
ment of His will. This latter assumption
is
now possible only to
those whose faith is mere complacence or those who tread the choreo–
graphy of dogma to avoid the problem of belief.
Only confusion can result from a denial that religion requires,
a.~
its inalienable premise, the acceptance of a supernatural being or
force: white-whiskered patriarch or nonpersonal mover, it does not
matter.
It
is therefore difficult to take very seriously the religious
claims of those intellectuals who, even as they shuffle the theological
cards of Guilt, Redemption and Original Sin, seem quite unable to
credit the reality of God. Their God is usually a creature pro–
jecting their anxiety, Himself rather embarrassed before the prob–
lem of His reality. Cocteau writes to Maritain that "All I know that
suit Him are extreme art and Orders"; and while this rather
limited knowledge may reveal something about Cocteau, how many
readers of his letter to Maritain can believe them a vehicle of true
faith?
The same difficulty inheres even, and perhaps particularly, in
the most serious religious expression of our day, the theology of
crisis. From the point of view of the serious believer,
is
there not a
danger that this theology, with its unresolved dialectic of faith and
doubt, might too easily become an anodyne indefinitely postponing a
resolution of the crisis in belief? The modern religious intellectual
rightly feeh Dostoevsky to be an ancestor, for no one knew better than
he the symbiotic relationship between faith and scepticism in the heart
of the religious aspirant. But I doubt that Dostoevsky would take
kindly to the religious claims of twentieth-century intellectuals, for
it
is
precisely the mark of his seriousness that his alter-ego Shatov,
while unable in honesty to utter a blunt statement of belief, yet
recognizes that the mere struggle for belief is not an adequate basis
