AN OPEN LETTER TO SIDNEY HOOK
611
corners, to avoid the total darkness that may follow your insistence on
enlightenment. For the blaze of reason which you are inviting is sure
to cause an emotional short circuit, or hysterical blindness. The more
interested you are in enlightenment, the more you should favor the
distribution of obscuring glasses to those otherwise unable to stand
the glare. Further, I hold with Leopardi (and perhaps Eliot) :
ed
e
men vano
Della menzogna
ii
vero? A noi di lieti
Inganni e di felici ombre soccorsc
Natura stessa: e
iii
dove l'insano
Costume ai forti errori esca non porse,
Negli ozi oscuri e nudi
M uta la gente
i
gloriosi studio
*
Perhaps
in
some dim future people will stop believing in redemp–
tion altogether; they may learn to accept the inherent features of life
without crying
«miserere mihi"
and
«apel'ite mihi portas iustitiae.'.'
They may no longer need to believe that God "justly secret and secretly
just" will sometime open the gates to paradise. (They may even give
up their faith in "democratic socialism.") There is nothing inevitable
in the need for myth.
It
just exists as a matter of fact, and I see no
evidence for its weakening in the proximate future.
If
that is so, surely
the faith propagated by the Church is the best of those available and
effective (and just as the Church is the best alternative for those who
want freedom to survive, Democracy is the best alternative for those
who want the Church to survive). The Church has already lost a great
deal of effectiveness. We must do our best to avoid weakening it further.
The ancient splendor of that many-layered apostolic rock on which a
super-structure of logic and absurdit), has accumulated through the
ages is now one of the few remaining citadels. Behind it,
if
not within
it, we may be able to preserve some freedom.
Perhaps you will object that I am pragmatic (in Bertrand Russell's
crude, but meaningful, interpretation of the word). Indeed in these
concrete matters, I tend to be as pragmatic as you are only in abstract
ones. But one need not become a
camelot du roi.
nor confide one's mind
and soul wholly to the Church to admit what you are at once too proud
*
Leopardi's lines come from his "Ode to a Ball Player" and may be rendered
as follows:
"and are truths less vain than lies? Nature itself helps us with encouraging
deceits and comforting illusions: and where unhealthy social ideas do not tol–
erate fortifying illusions people transmute their glorious endeavours into obscure
and futile pastimes."
