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PAR,TISAN REVIEW
for religion. Some religious intellectuals who are ready to replace
faith by need have recently taken Kafka as their Jacob-figure, but
it should be remembered that even if one grants that Kafka's struggle
was for God, Jacob wrestled
with
God. Is there not a point, then, at
which the theology of crisis, at least as taken by literary people, may
come to seem a reflection of an ineradicable prevalence of scepticism?
And this is the essential weakness of the modern religious intel–
lectuals: that with a few exceptions such as Eliot, they do not seem
finally to believe. They are engaged in a herculean effort to shake
off the nineteenth century but, whatever else, they will not revive
the dead God. For modern man has lost the possibility of belief: all
that remains is ritual and desperate striving. Our real task is to ful–
fil the nineteenth century; our fate , whatever its terminus, is mun–
dane.
The trend to a literary religion without God directs our attention
to two significant weaknesses in our culture. There is a fatal resistance
to ideas in contemporary American writing, which usually reacts to
the burden of mind either by caving in or gradually discarding most
of the burden. The religious component of our recent writing strikes
me as largely unserious and impressionistic, sometimes lugubriously
flippant, often a mere exercise in dialectic as thoroughly rationalist
in spirit as the thought of the deplored sceptics. I have, for quite
accidental reasons, particularly noticed this in the articles of those
young Jewish intellectuals who are preparing to return to the God
of Moses, sometimes along the path of the Baal Shem Tov. (The
Jewish revival is different from its Christian counterpart largely in
its greater sentimentality. )
The other weakness in our literary culture which the religious
revival aggravates is our addiction to a "pragmatic" mode of
thought. Most of the recent religionists do not ask us to accept God
because they are ready to assert that the statement
God exists
is
true, but because they feel it might be useful or good to behave as
if it were. I take this approach to religion, as to anything else, as a
sign of intellectual disintegration, akin to the brittle quest for novelty
which leads readers to ask not
Is this author right?
but
Does he have
anything new to say?
The most prevalent, and to me most objectionable, of such
"pragmatic" justifications of religion is that, without it, morality must
