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PARTISAN REVIEW
Tolstoy and Gandhi I see the logical convenience of the God-hypo–
thesis, it does not move me emotionally; nor do I feel a spiritual need
for it. I can believe that man is an end and not a means, and that
to love one another is the greatest duty and pleasure, without giving
this belief a religious basis. I suppose the period I feel closest to, in
my values, is the Enlightenment, from which all that is most at–
tractive in socialist as well as bourgeois-democratic doctrine derives.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS
In a sense, the Zeitgeist is never wrong. It is simply the
way history looks at itself, the coincidence between what is happen–
ing and what people think should happen. But there is a difference
between a local mood and a world mood, between intellectual fashion
and Zeitgeist. And the religious revival confronting us is so far
restricted to certain literary circles in America, with very little effect
on American thinking as a whole, none at all on European thought.
Speaking for myself, I do not feel touched at any vital point by the
question of religion as it has been raised. Perhaps this is because I
have just returned from a short stay in Europe, and I cannot help
seeing the turn to religion here as aside-show, though I cannot
exclude the possibility that my native heathenism has cut me off
from more than one variety of religious experience.
Anyway, this is how the whole thing strikes me. 1) It is primarily
a literary tour-de-force. 2) It is especially American. 3) It has very
little to do with American life as a whole. 4) It is neither a genuine
literary nor religious movement. 5) It is one symptom of a general
breakdown of beliefs and values. 6)
It
raises a lot of boring questions.
Let me take my last observation first. Since no new facts or
ideas about religion have emerged, the formal argument tends to
resurrect the cliches of undergraduate philosophy. I hate to recall
the long evenings of youth filled with debates over the existence of
God. And when the argument is not on a formal plane, it becomes
a question of how charmingly one can confess his ignorance and
sincerity, and present himself as a man of true feeling. I am not
implying that the religious experience of a superior writer is without
interest; on the contrary, it is often of great literary and biographical
interest, because of the tension between the search for a transcendent
