WHITTAKER CHAMBERS
481
In truth, we have nothing to go on but the rational disciplines of the
secular mind as, alone and imperiled, it confronts its freedom in a
universe stripped of supernatural sanctions. Chambers' melodramatic
formula---'God or Stalin?-is of no help to us in our modern predicament.
He reproaches Western civilization for its "three centuries of ration–
alism." Now rationalism has its fallacies, to be sure, but is it fair to
hold it to account for the horrors of the Russian police state, which has
behind it not even one, much less three centuries, of rationalism? Soviet
society bears the indelible stamp of the long Russian past of feudal–
bureaucratic rule, an absolutist rule of the mind as of the body. Of
course, the Marxist teaching is not exempt from censure for the conse–
quences of the Revolution. It should be added, however, that this
teaching, Western in its main origins and holding a heavy charge of
Judaeo-Christian ethics, has suffered a strange metamorphosis in its
Muscovite captivity. And now, in its movement deeper into the East,
it is seized upon, with all the fervor of native absolutism, by the back–
ward, semi-mendicant intelligentsia of the Asian countries. This in–
telligentsia, untrained in habits of social responsibility and unformed
in the traditions of humanist and rationalist thought, has converted
Marxism into a dogma of nothing less than incendiary content. Its de–
tachment from the West is virtually complete.
Chambers allows for no modulations in his attacks on the rationalist
and naturalist trends in Western culture. For him the only issue is
atheism, even where the disorder is patently economic and social. His
religious-political plea is made unconvincing by the very terms it is
cast in, terms belonging to that type of religious conservatism which
ordinarily finds its complement in political reaction. It may well be
that the religious mind has a significant part to play in "the crisis of
history," but the intervention of that mind will do religion no good if the
Christian credentials are used to no better purpose than to consecrate, as
the late Emmanuel Mounier put it, "the appeal to pre-existing ideas
and established powers."
Mounier, a French Catholic thinker of radical tendency, saw with
uncommon lucidity the dangers that threaten the religious mind in
its turn to political projects. He protested against the idealist habit of
thought by which the activity of men in nature and society is reduced
to no more than a reflection of the spirit, and he warned against
enlisting the religious tradition in defense of the conservative cult of the
past-a defense by prestige which sooner or later exposes the defenders
to vengeful blows. Not at all alarmed by the fact that his analysis of
the present crisis coincided in some respects with that of the secular
