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PARTISAN REVIEW
hidden implications of the creative moment, take the whole of man
and fix his function and destiny.
Martin Buber has suggested in his essay "What is Man?" that
there are two intellectual traditions discernible in the history of the
human spirit: those of habitation and those of homelessness. In the
former man is at home in the world. The world is familiar, accessible,
at the disposal of man. His categories fit, his principles work, the uni–
verse is described and located. The traditions of homelessness dislocate
the fixities of the spirit. In such traditions man's independence and
creativity are reasserted. The ages of religious upheaval, when the
spirit of man is disengaged from its moorings, bring forth the religious
genius, the genius not born to contemplate, but to lead. So Buddha,
Moses, Jesus, Paul, Luther.
The American religion, the religion that is more than Protestantism,
Catholicism, and Judaism, by being none and undercutting all, is a
religion without God, although a religion with faith.
It
is the faith, as
Herberg notes, in faith, in workability, in "it all turning out right."
It is the faith in the garbled mystique of the nation-the melange of
hymns, anthems, flags, heroes, and holidays. God, not the object of
union, is the great ratifier, the great approver of our devices.
The problem is that modern man is neither at home in the world
nor adrift, neither with principles that illumine and inform the universe
with meaning nor with anxieties, sufficiently pressing, to cause him to
seek. The third generation, to whom Will Herberg rightly dedicates his
book, is the critical generation.
If
they wish the religion of the wanderer,
they must first pass through the agonies of the wanderer.
If
they wish
the anchor of tradition, they cannot form tradition
cum salt us,
they
must take one that is at hand and return it to its course. More likely
than either choice will be the lonely way of the single man.
It
is he who,
quietly, unspectacularly, changes nothing but makes the change pos–
sible; who illumines the contradictions of the age, sets men back to their
finitude, brings them to their confrontation. It is they who die with
parchments of ecstatic confession sewn into the lining of their garments.
Herberg's
Protestant-Catholic-Jew,
constructed with care and bril–
liance, leads me to one conclusion: the American religious revival is
the revival of the husk, the outer garment. It remains to be seen what
is sewn in the lining.
Arthur A. Cohen
