61 2
PA RTISAN RE VIEW
and too humble to own up to: that few men are possessed of the intel–
lectual strength required to give significance to their lives without having
it imposed in some part from outside.
But then, is this ecclesiastical imposition really universal and identi–
cal for all? Haven't you, yourself, argued that it is not, that it allows
many, if not all interpretations? Is the pattern that God is supposed to
weave for us through the sacred texts really-as Kant thought-hetero–
nomous? May it not be the pre-text of our autonomy? Without the
sacred thread the garment has no texture. Not autonomy, but anomy is
the effect; and then a new collective myth far more coercive and totali–
tarian than the one which wisdom and time have deprived of a great
deal of belligerence. In a society conceiving life as a race, more than
ever there is a need for faith to rationalize "that the race is not to the
swift ... but time and chance happeneth to them all." Your stark
acceptance cannot perform this function for most. (Nor can the des–
perately trivial and trivially desperate eudaemonism into which most
have fallen.) Your belief that it can is a testimony to your own moving
faith.
Ernest van den Haag
REJOINDER TO MR . VAN DEN HAAG
We are living in a time when not only power corrupts but
ideas, too.
It
may be that the corruptions of power in the twentieth
century are not unrelated to the generic contempt for human beings
of which your attitude is a specific expression. Every thing that can be
said for your position has already been said by the Grand Inquisitor
in Dostoyevsky's
Brothers Karamazov.
And much more persuasively said
because his defense of myth, miracle and priestly authority in social life
is motivated by a desire-that often may be quite genuine-for human
happiness. But to defend, as you do, organized irrationalism in behalf
of human freedom is an intellectual absurdity-a cruel paradox which
requires that we forget whatever we know about history, social institu–
tions and human beings.
