RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS
481
principle and the writer's purely secular experience. But ,even so, the
experience of religion is not necessarily more interesting than, say, the
experience of death, or sex, or psychoanalysis.
What is actually at stake is not the question of religion, but
the question of temperament, of allegiance to one or another literary
school, and of general uprootedness. For what we have now in
America is not so much a turn to religion as a turn to religiosity,
which is not at all the same thing. There has been virtually no serious
presentation of the problems of belief, faith, creed, the value of exist–
ing religious institutions. Only T. S. Eliot has made such an effort,
and he has done so in terms of British institutions and traditions.
Nor can there be said to be any widespread or deeply-rooted revival
of reliiPon in this country, crucially involving the life of the nation
and the life of the individual. I have not been able to observe any
difference between the way of life of those who profess some kind
of religious belief or feeling and those who do not--or any difference
between their beliefs on other questions except that many writers
who have taken to religion are generally devoted to the "new
criticism," to some theory of myth, and to the idea of tradition that
stems from T. S. Eliot and his followers in this country. The conse–
quences of religious belief seem to be mainly literary, which smacb
more of art fetishism than of true belief. And I, for one, can not
be impressed by a faith or a morality that finds its justifications in
the strategies of literature. Besides, .the result so far of the new
religiosity is not a religious literature but a religious attitude to
literature, which is a reversal of the situation that produced the
great religious art of the past. Dante, for example, did not have a
religious attitude to literature; on the contrary, many of the purposes
and consequences of the Divine Comedy were terribly secular. It is
simply that Dante's faith was one dimension in the range and fervor
of his experience.
So far as I could observe there has not been any religious revival
in Europe comparable to what is taking place here. Nor has there ever
been one. For one thing, the church has a more vital relation to both
the public and private lives of the people, and, generally, the asser–
tion of a religious position, far from being a literary act, has serious
social consequences. Also Europe today needs an active faith even
more than America, because the terrible dilemmas of European life
