A Theological Baedecker

...What Scott has in mind is the body of modern fiction and poetry, which, in his description, has been unable to presuppose agreement between itself and its audience about the ultimate issues of human existence —"the kind of agreement, that is...

...In our untheological polity, Scott tells us, "the writer must be content either with turning inward upon himself and reporting on his own malaise or simply with making the barest of indicative statements about his environing world...

...With this, Scott imagines he has adequately described the intentions and the effect of the most disparate writers...

...for we cannot have a literature, in Scott's eyes, anymore than we can have a society, until we have received the subliminal blessings of the Church...

...that might furnish [the artist's] imagination with the premises of its functioning...

...Reviewed by Alvin C. Kibel THE DISTINCTION made by 19th- century German sociology between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft—between a society such as medieval Europe on the one hand, in which exists a fundamental agreement, shared by everyone, upon metaphysical and ethical questions, and the industrial society of the 19th century on the other, in which the only social bond between men was a form of wages-contract and a belief in cashpayment— is as old as serious reflection upon the nature of modern commercial society...

...It comes, therefore, as something of a surprise to find this intellectual chestnut presented by Nathan Scott as a significant discovery of our recent and more provocative literature...

...It is the disturbing assumption of this argument that the complex modes in which we confront each other, write our literature, talk, argue, make love and war, are nonexistent, as if any society could sustain itself for two seconds without a common set of beliefs which make such activities possible...

...S. Eliot's "Idea of a Christian Society" is an example) which presents our cultural difficulties as the direct result of a failure in religious orientation and suggests that the Church become, in some sense, again a secular power, to fill the minds of its parishioners with the intuitions of theology as a bookseller fills an empty bookcase...

...And, where Matthew Arnold would have poetry redeem religion, Scott would have religion redeem poetry...

...In this, Scott's book is part of a sizeable body of recent literature (T...

...It cannot shed light upon our cultural dilemmas...

...that ever since the claims of the Church were replaced by the claims of commerce and industry, these thoughts and actions have become mere gestures, lacking a social context...

...The distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft is revived and taken with deadly seriousness, as a finished perception about the nature of modern life rather than a bit of intellectual theatrics meant to engage the reader's attention...

...Yet this distinction soon became exclusively a weapon of criticism, part of the general intellectual repertoire of the 19th century, of use in philosophy, history and the literature of social comment as a convenient device by which to dramatize a general failure of industrial civilization...

...and, indeed, in his sentences they soon begin to jostle one another with appalling familiarity...

...The purpose of Scott's argument is clear enough...

...We find it in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and it was as often an occasion to praise as to blame the new era...

...but the critical intelligence which can, in one sentence, equate the aims and achievements of James Joyce, John Dos Passos and Albert Camus, is still an astonishment...

...Scott's particular contribution to this theological Baedeker of worldhistory is the observation that modern literature provides the surest instances of our inability to share ethical values where the intuitions of religion have been resisted...

...them...

...The modern artist, Scott tells us, does not have at his disposal the cultural myths or symbols, to be recognized at once by even an illiterate audience, which Dante and Homer found lying so conveniently at their elbows...

...For, according to Scott, art "lacks the seriousness of the ethical mind and the religous mind...

...He wishes to convince us that during the Middle Ages, when the Church was a secular power, men's imagination shared an ethical orientation which invested their thoughts and actions with communal significance...

...Scott's book, as a result, displays a remarkable innocence in the way of literary discrimination...

...We have grown used, I suppose, to the sort of wrongheadedness which suggests that T. S. Eliot is a better poet because he is an Anglican...

...it can only fall victim to...

...and the history of our cultural institutions is presented as the progress of vacuity, in which whole epochs are described as one might discuss the activities of casual friends...

...As a result, he can at best complain to his audience about our mutual isolation in terms which are highly subjective...