RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS
475
attached to cultural progress and democracy. But, having lost their
faith in an invincible force guaranteeing the realization of all these
values, they will be troubled. Just because they cannot achieve faith
in salvation, they will look back with nostalgia upon the ages which
had unbroken faith. Intact faith, though impossible to achieve, will
appear to them as good in itself, and religion as something valuable
rather than sinister.
It
is the man who has no religion as a working
faith who will show sympathy to all religions and to the idea of
religion as such. The religious man has no "idea" of religion; he has
his
faith which embodies salvation, and he rejects all rival faiths as
embodiments of evil. It seems to me that nostalgic longing for
religion
is
more characteristic of today's typical intellectual than
the possession of religion. This is why he asks such questions as
whether culture and the good society can exist without some religious
underpinning; this is why he "envies" (as Pierre Emmanuel recently
put it) those who lack both moral righteousness and intellectual
honesty but have faith and enthusiasm.
This longing for religion assumes many forms among present-day
intellectuals. Some
try
to rehabilitate religion in terms of "scientific"
standards of validity: has not psychology shown, with William
James, that "religious experience"
is
a perfectly straightforward form
of experience, with unique pragmatic results? has not physics shown,
with Schroedinger, that material mass is not the stuff of everything?
Others probe epistemology, and conclude that, since no axioms can
be disproved, it is no intellectual sin to adopt religious axioms, how–
ever extravagant. All such efforts are undertaken in the expectation
that they will ultimately help the intellectual to overcome his in–
ability to believe. I do not think that faith can be achieved in this
way; but it is symptomatic of the position of the contemporary in–
tellectual that he is diligently exploring all avenues that might lead
him to the secret chamber where the coveted Grail is stored.
The plain fact is that one cannot lose two religions- the tradi–
tional one, and the flamboyant utopianism of the progressive intel–
lectual-without having a bad conscience about it. It is this bad
conscience which, I think, is at the base of today's "turn towards
religion." Some other considerations are also involved. Man has a
deep need for salvation, and when the worst comes to the worst and
the fate of society
is
about to be decided by mobilized masses, the
