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the conclusion that emerges time and again from the statistics Herberg
presents. Keep religion out of politics, out of business, out of public
ethics; retain the God of vagueness and good temper; worship and pray
as long as it is in taste and decorum. This becomes the image of the
religious revival.
It is beside the point to comment that this is no religion recogniz–
able to Augustine, Pascal, the Baal Shem, or Kierkegaard. Neither the
religion of philosophers, nor the religion of Abraham, Isaac, and J acob.
This observation need not be pressed. The serious question, it seems to
me, is can one ask for more at this moment?
There is in the history of the West a legitimate distinction to be
drawn between the ages of religious creativity and genius and the ages
of tradition and faith. The former transformed a society cast adrift,
shaped the uprooted, located their role in time and slanted their escha–
tological focu s beyond time to the point of consummation. The cataclysm
of Sinai (for indeed the historicity of Sinai is now beyond dispute) was
constituted by the divine wrenching of a people from formlessness to
form, from the passion of distraught and wandering hysterics into a
nation henceforth called "holy." Such transformation was repeated in the
career of Paul the Apostle and the dominion of Augustine and St.
Benedict, as well as in the age of the Reformation. The creativity of
these ages is, as in all creativity, the inspired seizure of the right mo–
ment, the taking of matter that yields to form, the giving of meaning,
and the inauguration of tradition.
The ages of faith commence at that moment in history when the
form is fixed , when the task shifts from that of founding to that of
perpetuating. Not enough that God should be present at Sinai, that the
thunder should rumble and the cry of the ram's horn break the heavens,
not enough that six hundred thousand should know that on this peak
is the Lord of Heaven and Earth. It is necessary that God speak, that
he fix for all time his Law. Nor is it enough that, for the Christian,
God break into time with the extremity of the perfect God-Man. Peter
must come to found a church and Paul to define its doctrines. It is to
later generations of scholastics, to Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas,
to bring the universe into the order of the dispensation, to surround
divinity with the admiring choir-stalls of philosophy, art, and literature.
These are the ages that take the sacrament into the market place, that
build communities out of commitment, form societies in
imitatio de:,
that elaborate the allegories of scripture, and define the subtleties of
natural law. The ages of faith, not mere ages of casuistry, spell out the
