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PARTISAN REVIEW
the Utopian best and the existing worst. Nor is it important to consider
to what extent the current virulent ersatz religions are due to the weak–
ening of faith, as long as we remember that, where faith buttresses a
strong church and
is
buttressed by it, the Ersatz has no entrance.
Don't you think that Dr. Fuchs, Alger Hiss,
et al,
have embraced
Communism not because of but despite what it is, to "live tensely under
the discipline that such a faith instills in them?" Have you not heard
with Ortega the "formidable cry rising like the howling of innumerable
dogs to the stars, asking for someone or something to
impose
an occu–
pation, a duty"? What superfaith is required to
believe-quia absur–
dum-that
religion will be replaced by the reasonable naturalism by
which you live! More faith than I have, more, I think, than you can
afford and be reasonable.
Max Weber taught us that the institutional structure of the Church
is indispensable to absorb or eliminate the charismatic rebels or com–
peting destructive myths which continuously threaten civilization. Emile
Durkheim
taught us that
without
a myth around which group-sustained
values may center, people find their lives meaningless,
their
activities
futile, their existence fragmented, and
their beliefs
fragmentary. For a
time the institutionalized faith which relates us to each other and to
past and future may be replaced by individual
compulsions;
and for
some even by stark acceptance of their aloneness. But without the dikes
of the past, left from past floods, the wave of the future soon engulfs
those who do not drown themselves voluntarily.
Religion and the Church have greatly weakened their hold on
man's mind. But not redemptionism.
It
has merely been secularized.
People no longer place the
pie
in the sky. They want it here and now;
they no longer project their needs, wishes, and confusions onto the
heavens but
into
this mundane universe. They demand specific measures
to change
it.
They want salvation here, now and "scientifically."
They come to prefer para-scientific to religious ideologies. Sometimes
pseudo-economic, sometimes pseudo-biological, sometimes pseudo-psy–
chological ones. Sometimes only the trivial or sordid: to seek forgive–
ness and through grace repair their impotence, people continue to appeal
to omnipotent panaceas; but what loss of dignity
in
the change from the
cathedral to the "functionalist" soap box or to the orgone box!
Nor are the secular religions confined to
trivialities.
The replace–
ment of the Holy Father with the father of the people, of the College
of Cardinals with the
Politburo,
involves nothing less than new and
indefinitely prolonged dark ages.
We should allow some twilight here and there, even some dark
