Religion and the Intellectual: A Strange New Respect
Miller, Stephen
..................................................................................................................................................... Stephen Miller RELIGION AND THE...
...Samuel Johnson was the towering exception...
...There is even a great work of religious art produced by a nonbeliever-Henri Matisse's chapel at Vence...
...In the middle of the nineteenth century, Matthew Arnold moaned in "Dover Beach" that he could hear the "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of the "Sea of Faith...
...the writers who attended Johnson's club were for the most part surprised and puzzled by his intense religiosity-his fear of even discussing the question of the afterlife...
...Although the Victorians-especially Arnold, Tennyson, and George Eliot-got all worked up about the disappearance of God, religion had not really played an important part in English intellectual life for more than 150 years...
...Faith in the power of psychology to transform man's life into a life without prejudice and guilt was a powerful strain in American intellectual circles in the postwar era, but it has not borne fruit...
...To my mind the answer is obvious: the Enlightenment is over...
...It was very important, Oscar Wilde knew, to be earnest...
...writers must cultivate High Seriousness (Arnold's phrase), and man must strive to do his duty even though God was no longer looking over his shoulder...
...What Arnold did know, however, was that in the circles he frequented those who believed in God were the exception, not the rule...
...It is not that most writers and thinkers are opposed to scientific and technological progress...
...Until recently-until, really, the publication of The Gulag Archipelago-some writers who were opposed to capitalism could dream that the magic wand of Marxian socialism would dispel alienation, anomie, oppression, and poverty...
...he had no way of gauging the religious beliefs of the average Englishman...
...In the 1960s the preachers of psychological-or, to be more accurate, psycho-political-liberation were many: Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman, Charles Reich, R.D...
...A few French thinkers-Jacques Derrida, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Michel Foucault-have rushed in to fill_ the breach, but whatever one thinks of their work they cannot take the place of Marx and Freud, the last of the Great Explainers (Burckhardt would say Terrible Simplifiers...
...quite achieving it...
...We have become utterly disenchanted with the preachers of liberation-psychological or political...
...The Sea of Faith has not quite receded, and in the literary and intellectual world there is a growing disposition to take religion seriously, if not to embrace it...
...Who reads them now...
...Henry Adams, who wrote Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, is a case in point...
...Why...
...There were deeply religious Victorians-Newman and Hopkins come immediately to mind-but the spirit of the age was one of anguished agnosticism...
...Influenced by the Enlightenment, Marx and Freud 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1983...
...In a recent issue of democracy, Sheldon Wolin urged the radical critics of America to drink at the fountain of John Locke, not Karl Marx...
...rather, it is that they find it exceedingly difficult if not impossible to entertain the hope that in the future man will learn to live in harmony with his fellow man, a hope that glowed in the minds of many Enlightenment thinkers...
...Laing, Theodore Roszak...
...They had an answer for everything...
...How, they wondered, could such a brilliant mind get so upset about these matters...
...And in the twentieth century there have been several major writers and composers who have been (or who did become) orthodox Christians-for example Eliot, Auden, and Stravinsky...
...We have lost too our faith in the wonderworking powers of education and psychology...
...Yet it was not long after Arnold that the Sea of Faith began to rise a bit...
...We can also point to the many English and French Catholic writers of the past fifty years...
...Arnold was a poet, not a social scientist...
...Modern Russian literature adds several believers to our list: Andrei Sinyavsky, Nadezhda Mandelstam, and of course Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn...
...Disenchanted with industrial capitalism, many late nineteenth-century writers began to look back in nostalgia to the Middle Ages-yearning for faith if not Stephen Miller is executive assistant to the Board of Radio Free Europe, and the author of the forthcoming book, Special Interests...
...But Marxian socialism is now on the defensive, and the melancholy roar we hear is the roar of a receding faith in a socialist future...
...and in the United States one of the best writers of the postwar era, Flannery O'Connor, was a Roman Catholic who strongly defended the Church's dogma, as her luminous and amusing letters make clear...
...Marx and Freud have been ushered to the door...
...As far back as the early eighteenth century most English writers-influenced, perhaps, by Hobbes's corrosive attack on religious enthusiasm as well as by the worldly melancholy of the pagan Roman writers they admired-were Deists whose attachment to Christianity was marginal...
...Faith in the power of education to produce enlightened, civilized, and tolerant minds received a blow in the 1930s, when the most educated nation in Europe embraced Nazism...
...The disappearance of God made life a very serious affair...
...Stephen Miller RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUAL: A STRANGE NEW RESPECT Religious thinkers hold our attention not so much for what they say about the other world as for what they say about this world...
...But the departure of Marx and Freud has left a vacuum in the lives of intellectuals...
Vol. 16 • April 1983 • No. 4
