480
PARTISAN REVIEW
It is at this juncture that Chambers ceases to think politically, giv–
ing in entirely to his mystic proclivities. One doubts that he has ever been
really at home in politics, if we take politics to be a delimited form of
social thought and action. It was in the course of his search for whole–
ness and identity that he joined the Communists, reading a transcendent
meaning into their political passions. He admits that while in the Party
he avoided reading all "books critical of Communism" and also that he
had never sought to influence policy. Nor did his activity as spy-courier
in the Party's secret apparatus make any urgent claims upon his
political sense. Unconcerned with politics in its hard empirical aspects,
he is essentially a mystic swept into the world of parties and move–
ments by the crazy pressures of the age.
What he is unable to see in his present mood is that the appeal to
religion, however valid in its own sphere, turns into the merest surrogate
when made to do the work of politics. It is well known that the religious
consciousness is reconcilable to so many contradictory and even antago–
nistic concepts of society that the attempt to hold it to any particular
social or political orientation is nearly useless. There is no substitute
for politics, just as for those who must have it there is no substitute for
religion. It is true that religious believers have every reason to be
hostile to Communism; yet the motive of belief forms but one strand
in a complex of motives. Believers, like all men, live in the real world of
varied and pressing needs and interests, of which the material interest is
surely the last that we can afford to underrate; and all too frequently
the predominant concerns of men are such that the acknowledged duty to
their faith is easily thrust aside. In 1917 the Russian peasants, though
traditionally far from irreligious, backed the Bolsheviks despite all
churchly admonition-the petitions of orthodoxy counted as nothing
against the promise of peace, bread, and land. Clearly, Lenin's pro–
fessed atheism in no way deterred the peasants in their support of the
Revolution; and now large sections of the peasantry of Italy and other
countries show the same lack of inhibition in voting the Communist
ticket. The breakup of traditional societies is a salient feature of our
time, and no impromptu summons can recall these societies to the
ancient faith. Of what relevance are the propositions of Christian
theology in China or India, or in areas like the Middle East, where the
crumbling of the social order unlooses the rage of masses and Stalinist
ambition feeds on hunger and despair?
I t is futile to expect religion to undertake the radical task of re–
organizing the world. Its institutional practices are remote from such
aims, and its doctrines have hardened in the mold of otherworldliness.
