RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS
471
collapse. The argument is encountered even in serious writing: des–
troy the universally acknowledged source of morality and there can
no longer be either justification for moral preference or objective
standard of moral categories. Aside from the fact that it ignores
the historical evidence that morality managed to collapse in those
epochs when it was acknowledged to stem from a universal source,
this argument must be rejected because it is fundamentally auth–
oritarian in nature: man can behave only under the whip of a
celestial overseer. A morality which does not arise from the conscious
making of its adherents is unworthy of acceptance; if man cannot
evolve both a sustaining morality and a society in which to realize
it, then he might as well be left in his muddle.
One "pragmatic" test of the religious trend might be valuable:
does conversion change significantly the intellectuals' style of life?
As far as I can see, most of those intellectuals who turn to religion
remain as sceptical, "alienated," and anxiety-riddcn as those who do
not. Their conversion does not seem to relieve them even of those
tensions supposedly unique to the sceptic. Their moral behavior is
neither better nor worse than that of any of the rest of us. They fail
to find in religion what is supposed to be one of its great values: an
enriching community; few of them try to relate themselves to a con–
gregation, as, in terms of their dedication, they should. At least
in
their public behavior, their conversion has not seriously affected their
lives; they are
in
the same fix as the rest of us. (I am not in a
position
to judge what the religious trend has done to sexuality
during the past few decades, but I am convinced that at least the
Christian tradition is profoundly opposed to a healthy unfolding of
free sexuality-on that Lawrence was right.)
A literature may be nourished by a faith or ideology long after
faith has decayed and ideology curdled; Eliot's poetry is undoubtedly
enriched by his religious faith. But this is not to say that religion
could now bring into existence a burgeoning new culture; the his–
torical conditions for such a culture, not the least of which would be
the sponsorship of a rising social class, are quite absent.
In criticism the religious revival seems to me mostly harmful.
It has resulted in much vague talk about Christian values, neither
defined nor instanced, and in a great deal of party-line readings by
critics who once rightly objected to tendentious readings from another
