The Return of the Sacred?

The Argument on the Future of Religion Author(s): Daniel Bell Source: The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Dec., 1977), pp. 419-449 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The London School of Economics and Political Science Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/589420 Accessed: 21/06/2010 05:58
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1977 4 28 Britishjfournalof Sociology Volume J%umber December

Daniel Bcll

on The argument The returnof the sacred? the futureof religion

HOBHOUSE MEMORIAL LECTURE

of of This is the 70th anniversary the establishment the firstchairsin In sociologyat the LondonSchoolof Economics. Ig07, LeonardTrelawney Hobhousegave his inauguraladdresson assumingthe firstof in the two MartinWhiteProfessorships Sociology.(The otherwasE. A. This is also the 43rd HobhouseMemorialLecture,the Westermarck.) firstbeing given in I930 by J. A. Hobsonon the topic are there no thought?or is it that there is no progress?in constants sociological 'TowardsSocialEquality'. have as Overthe years,the lecturers, I reviewthe list,understandably Hobhouse,and even with Professor had fewer and fewer associations sinceI do believe ties. fewerintellectual Thisis alwayssad, particularly strongly,as will be evidentin this talk, in the value of tradition.In a one way, I wouldliketo claimtwo affinities, of themattenuated, curious but one of them I wouldlike to thinkelective,with the lineageand the style of thoughtof LeonardHobhouse.To do so, I have to begin,first, n a persona veln. graduatestudentin sociologyat CoIn I938-39, I was a first-year was lumbia University.One of the visitingprofessors T. H. Marshall basedprinfromL. S. E., and he offereda courseon 'SocialEvolution', cipallyon the workof Hobhouse;and I enrolledin this course.In due invitedme in to discussthe termpaperthat I Marshall time, Professor in wouldwriteforthe course.'Whatdo you specialize ?'he asked.Without irony, and withoutthe wit to realizeit, I replied:'I specializein bit He generalizations.' blinkedin mild astonishment, on his pipe, but did not pursuethis theme. He askedwhat topic I had chosenfor my paper,and I replied,'The moralbondin Greece.''Whichaspectsof it do you intendto cover,'he asked,andI replied,'Allof them.'He sucked on his pipe, and said only, 'Oh.' I am pleasedto recall that I receivedan A for that paper. But I regretto say that those early, and by now incurable,bad habitshave remained.When asked recentlyby my friend David Martin which aspectsof religion I would cover in this talk, I said, 'All of them.' He blushedquickly,but said only, 'Oh.'
* -

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So, one of my first papersin sociologywas on Hobhouse.Whether Hobhousewould recognizethat Eliation,which in traditionallaw is of the assignment paternityto a bastardchild, is anotherquestion.I at least, the mediationof T. H. Marshallin that descent.My have, secondaffinity,perhapselective,derivesfrommy sympathywith and firstwordsin his inaugurallecHobhouse's of endorsement Professor ture seventyyearsago. He said: positionof a sciencewhich can Sociologyis not yet in the fortunate of with all discussions its methodandobject.Therearesome dispense who deny it is a scienceat all. There are otherswho identifyit with it or economics politicalscienceor history.Somesuppose to be prinit cipallyoccupiedwith the habitsof savages,othersassociate especially into the conditionof the workingclassesamong ourselves.In but to are pointof factall theseinquiries contributory sociology, none of them exhaustsa sciencewhich has the whole of sociallife of man as its sphere.l that a subjectwhich fearsto An eminentcolleagueonce remarked can its repudiate forebears neverbecomea science.As one who believes as is that sociology one of the humanities, well as a science,I wouldsay its has that a sociologywhich hesitatesto repeatits forebears forfeited claim to wisdom.The threadof culture-and religion is memory.As LouisMacNeiceonce wrote: '. . . I cannotdeny my past to whichmy self is wed/The wovenfigurecannotundo its thread.' is My talk this afternoon the furtherweavingof that thread.The questionmark themeis 'TheReturnofthe Sacred?'.The answertothat whether will not settle,but may lead us to the relevantconsiderations, thereis a futureof religionin modernculture(which I thinkthereis), and what this may be.
1 1

At the end of the eighteenthand to the middleof the nineteenthcenthinkerexpectedreligionto disappear tury, almostevery Enlightened in the twentiethcentury.The beliefwas basedon the powerof Reason. fetishism,unprovablebeReligion was associatedwith superstition, liefs, a formof fearwhich was used as protectionagainstotherfearsof with the behaviour childrena formof securityone mightassociate of and which they believed,in fact, had arisenin the 'childhood' the humanrace. Religion,in this view,aroseout of the fearsof nature,boththe physiand the dangerslurkingin the inner cal terrorsof the environment up at psychewhicllwerereleased nightor conjured by specialdiviners. to The morerationalanswer we owe the start,of course, the Greeksor physis the hiddenorderof whosetaskwas to uncover wasphilosophy, was nature.The leitmotif the phrasewhich occursfirstin Aristotleand

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is resurrected laterby Hegel and Marx,'the realization philosophy'. of For Aristotle,naturehad a telos,and within it man would realizehis perfected form.For Hegel, this telos in history,in the marche lay generale of humanconsciousness whichwas wipingawaythe fogsof illusionand allowingmen to see the worldmoreclearly. The 'realization philosophy' of would be the overcoming a11 of the dualitiesthat had dividedconsciousness, made it so unhappy.In and the Christian parable,man had been at one with God, therehad been a Fall, and the expectationever since was that there would be a parousia, the end of time, when therewouldbe a reunification man with of God. In Hegel's philosophical substitution philosophyfor parable, of there was an originalcosmicconsciousness which became 'dirempted' into the dualitiesof spiritand matter,natureand history,subjectand object, but throughthe reflexiveness self-consciousness, Begrig, of the the anima of consciousness would fuse into the Absolute.*And irl Marx'snaturalism, originalunity of primitivecommunism the which becamedividedinto the dualitiesof exploiter exploited,mentaland and physicallabour,towrland country,wouldonce againbe attained,at a higherlevel of man'stechnicalpowers, the realmof Man. 'The criticin ism of religion,'Marx said, 'ends with the preceptthat the supreme being for man is man....' The end of Historywould come in the 'leap' from 'the kingdomof necessity the kingdomof freedom'. to The end of Historywouldbe the unbindingof Prometheus, and Man steppingonto the mountaintop to take his place with him among the Titans. As Shelleyproclaimed: The paintedveil . . . is torn aside; The loathsomemaskhas fallen,the man remains Sceptreless, free,uncircumscribed, man but Equal,unclassed, tribeless, and nationless, Exemptfromawe, worship,degree,the king Over himself....2 Whatis striking all this, in the poetryof Revolutionwhichis heir in to these hopes, is that HistoricalReason passed over into a kind of romanticism, romanticism a which producedmore cruel illusionsand blackerveils than the religiousnaiveteand fanaticism was designed it to replace. Fromthe end of the nineteenthcenturyto the middleof the twentieth century,almosteverysociological thinker-I exemptSchelerand
* What is strikingis how contemporary psychology,in its own way, repeats this story.In the psychoanalytic theoryof MelanieKlein,for example,the infantis at one with the breastof the mother,its worldis autistic,completelyself-contained. There then comesthe 'separation anxiety',as the infantbecomesremovedfromthe breast and, in the processof growth,beginsto seek at least in the languageof humanistic psychology-the peak experiences self-fulfillment, in the romanticism love, of or of the unionwith one'sbeloved.What for philosophy been phylogeny,for psychohas logy becomesontogeny.

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by a few others-expectedreligionto disappear the onsetof the twentyfirstcentury.If the beliefno longerlay in Reason(thoughin Durkheim there remaineda lingeringhope, and in a book he expectedto write Life, Forms afterthe Elementary of Religious but neverdid, he plannedto that he thoughtmight sketchthe formsof a new moral universalism ariseby the end of the century),it now lay in the idea of Rationalizstructure of the natation. Reasonis the uncovering the underlying of is ural order.Rationalization the substitution a technicalorder for a naturalorder-in the rhythmsof work,in the functionaladaptation criterion for of meansto ends,in the criteria use of objects,the principal being efficiency-and the imposition of bureaucraticstructuresof It relations. is to organization replacethe ties of kinshipand primordial roles.And since,as most the worldof technicalrulesand bureaucratic in shapctiby the institutions which believe,men are largely, sociologists phrase,'an terrifying they live, the worldhas become,in Max Weber's iron cage'. As summedup by Weber: of With the progress science and technology,man has stopped believingin magic powers,in spiritsand demons;he has lost his sense of prophecyand, above all, his senseof the sacred.Realityhas beleavinga greatvoid in the soulsof come dreary,flat and utilitarian, men which they seek to fill by furiousactivityand throughvarious devicesand substitutes.3 today,thoughmuch This is the view, I daresay, of mostsociologists if has of the poignancy beendrainedawayand replaced, not byjargon, itselfhas becomethe prose as if the language then by bareutilitarian proofof the proposition. I take as an adherentof this Weberianbelief and he is the best, whichis whywe haveto take him seriously-Mr BryanWilson,and as Mr of Religion. Wilson Transformations a text his recentI 976 Contemporary writes: it For the sociologist is axiomaticthat the sourcesof changein rein ligion shouldbe lookedfor primarily the socialsystem.... The most powerfultrend [accountingfor the decline in belief] is which occurs as our social organizationbecomes secularization, and dominatedby technicalprocedures rationalplanincreasingly is ning.... Secularization associatedwith the structuraldiffierenareas of social tiation of the social system separationof diffierent activity into more specializedforms.... Instead of work activity, family life, education,religiouspractice,the operationof law and customand recreation,all being part of each other, and affecting smallcommunities, close-knit everyonein moreor less self-sufficient societies,we have as occurredin large measurein all pre-modern and personnelinvolved highly specializedplaces, times, resources,

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in each of theseareasof sociallife, and theirefficiency viability and has dependedon this processof specialization.... In the pastreligionwas a primary socializing agencyof men teaching them not only new ritualsbut something the seriousness eternal of of verities.... [Today]Religionhas come to be associated muchmore as one among a numberof leisureactivities,it existsin the area of free choice of the use of time, energy,and wealthirl which the end products the economyare marketed consumers.... of for [And, as a result] Contemporary transformations religionappearto me to be of a of kind, an extent, and a rapiditypreviously unknownin humanhistory . . . whereasin I970 some polls discovered that 88 per cent of peoplein Britainprofessed believein God,and45 percentthought to of God as a personal being,in the mostrecentsurvey only64 percent professed believein God-xgpercentsaying thatGodwasa person to and 35 percentsayinghe wassomesortof spiritor LifeForce.. v . All the evidenceis towardsthe declineof beliefin the supernatural, and and the rejection the idea that the supernatural arlysignificant of has influencein the everydaylife of modernman.4 I have quoted Mr Wilsonat length becausehe has summedup so completely-though he himselfis dismayed this turn of events the by positionof contemporary sociology. I findthe argument Yet inadequate and the formulations heavy-handed at best, a half truth (which is alwayscalculatedto irritatepeoplewho believein the otherhalf) and at worstmisleadingas to how to understand religionin the contemporaryworld,and how to discernthe signsof the future. We can discountmostreadilythe evidencefromthe polls.Theseare oftenunstableand usuallyunreliable. One wouldhave to disaggregate the poll for generational differences trace the cohort beliefsover and time; and we have no such evidence.Besides, what is one to say about the United States,wherethe largestgrowthof membership volunin taryassociations in the Fundamentalist is churches I will alsoput aside ? -but only for a while-the identification religionwith the superof natural.I do not think this is how most people would definereligion today,and forthosethat do, this becomes serious a blinker whichlimits thewaywejudgethecharacter ofthe newself-styled religious movements of the day, manyof which are discussed acutelyin Mr Wilson'sbook. I want to begin with fundamentals, with the statementthat 'it is axiomaticthat the sourcesof changein religionshould be lookedfor primarilyin the social system',and that 'secularization' the most is powerfultrend. I would assumethat since changes in religioussensibility and beliefsarise primarilyin culture,becausethey deal with meanings,the startingpoint for sourcesof changewould be irl the developmentsin culture. Wilsorl's Mr argument assumes eitherthat changes

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in culturehave no sociological relevanceunlessor until they are embodiedin institutions, thatthesocialstructure cultureareunified, or and in anyperiodof time, throughsomeinnerprinciple zusammenhangen. of I think either positionmisreadsthe nature of society, and particularly of contemporary society. I will beginwiththe secondposition, sinceit is the morefundamental. The regnantview in contemporary sociologyis that a societyis some kind of 'organicwhole'. This is the viewpointof Functionalism, with its emphasis integration. is equallythe viewpointof Marxism,as on It expressed GeorgLukacsin the term'totality'. the Durkheimianby In Parsonianversionof functionalism, thread is the 'value system' the whichlegitimates controls otherdimensions society.In Marxand the of ism, it is the mode of production. This angle of visionshapesthe way philosophers historians and and sociologists have 'periodized' history, to see societiesas conceptualwholesorganized, Hegel definedit, as as 'momentsof consciousness' (i.e. the Greek, Roman, Christianand Modernworlds);or as Marx did, with the idea of 'socialformations' representing differentmodes of production(i.e. slavery, feudalism, capitalism);or as Burckhardt other art historians and have with the idea of 'cultural styles'(e. g. Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo,Mannerist, Modern);or Sorokin with the idea of 'mentalities' (e.g. 'ideational and sensate').As a corollorary, there has been the beliefin 'stages'of development(as in Comte)or 'alternating cycles' (as with Sorokinand Kroeber). I find all this singularlyunhelpful.Againstthese 'holistic'views of society, I would counterpose argumentthat, at most times, sothe cieties are radicallydisjunctive.If I look at contemporary society, I would say that thereis a radical antagonismbetweenthe normsand structures the techno-economic of realm (whoseaxial principleis functional rationalityand efficiency, and whosestructure bureaucratic); is the polity (whoseaxial principle,in Westerndemocraticsocieties,is equality,and whose structures those of representation particiare or pation); and the culture (whoseruling principleis that of self-realization, and, in its extremes, self-gratification). is the tensions It between the normsof thesethree realms-efficiencyand bureaucracy, equality and rights, self-fulfillment the desirefor novelty that form the and contradictions the modernworld, a contradiction of that is enhanced undercapitalism, sincethe techno-economic realmis gearedto promote not economicnecessities the culturalwants of a hedonisticworld. but I findthe holisticapproach, of functionalism Marxism, that and even more puzzlingbecauseof the very differentpatternsof changein the socialsystemand in culture.Thereis little doubtthat in the socialsystem (the techno-economic-administrative realms)the patternof change is one of structural differentiation. This is la persuasive model derived Som Adam Smith, HerbertSpencerand Emile Durkheim.The animatingreasonmay be growthof population,increasein institutional

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size, the multiplicityof social interactions, gains of specialization, the but underneath theseis a determinate all principleof change:efficiency. If something is cheaper, more productive,provides a greater extractionof energyor leastloss,subjectto cost,we useit. This is because the techno-economic realmis primarilyinstrumental. there is no But such determinate principleof change in culture.Boulez does not replaceBachor serialmusicthe fugue.Wherecultures rootedstrongly are in tradition,one does not have repetitionbut the immanentdevelopment of stylisticformsand the absorption rejectionof new experior encesas testedagainstthe moraltruthsof the culture.Wherecultures are syncretistic, we findin the Hellenistic Roman,and now preas and eminentlyin the contemporary world,strangecreedsand exoticmodes mingleandjostle in the bazaarsof culture,and individuals free to feel choosethosevariedcombinations whichdefinetheirself-created identitiesor life styles.But in the realmof imagination, once something extraordinaryis produced,it is never lost. Changesin cultureonly widen the expressive repertoire mankind. of Culture,by its rlature,confounds historicism. Marx (at least all For after TheGerman Ideology), was definednot by his nature,but by man his history.And as he gainedrlewpowersand new technicalmasteries overnature,he gainednew needsand new wants.Butif, as Marxstates in Capital, man in changinghis externalenvironment changeshis own nature,then humannaturein ancient Greecemust have been significantlydifferentfromhumannatureand wantsundermoderncapitalism. As Marxhimselfconfronted question: this . . . the difficulty not in graspingthe idea that Greekart and epos is are bound up with certain formsof social development.It rather lies in understanding theystillconstitute why withus a sourceof aestheticenjoyment in certainrespects and prevailas the standardand model beyondattainment.5 The reason,Marx declares,is that such art is the childhoodof the humanrace and carrieswith it all the charm,artlessness precocity and of childhood,whosetruthswe sometimes seekto recapture and reproduce 'on a higherplane'.Whyshould'the socialchildhood mankind, of whereit had obtainedits mostbeautifuldevelopment, exertan exnot ternalcharmas an age that will neverreturn' ? Marx'sansweris a lovelyconceitand on closerinspection dreadful a deceit. For Antigoneis no child and we find the desire to give her brothera decentburial-an act whichVico tellsus is the markof being civilized repeatedmorethan two thousand yearslaterin the keening of a NadezhdaMandelstam, shesearches tlle bodyof herhusband as for who has disappeared a Stalirlcorlcentration into camp,so that she can markhis gravewith the stonethat is the weightof memoryand respect and love. It is for these reasons,that the termsecularizationsuch a muddle, is

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for it mixes two very different kindof phenomena,the social and the cultural,and two very differentprocesses changethat are not conof gruentwith eachother.(I leaveasidethe interesting historical question -for that wouldtakeus too far afield why in England, whichsawthe early development sciencein the Royal Society,was the firstto beof come industrialized, gave us the matter-of-fact and attitudeof English economists in fact, ecorlomics almost an English science there is was little of the harshanti-religious sentiment that arosein Franceand Germany the nineteenthcentury;or how to explainthe Englishrein ligiousrevivals the nineteenth of centuryamongthe workers Methoin dism, an Anglo-Catholicrevival among intellectuals,and the neomedievalromanticism, both left and right, in the latter part of the of nineteenthcentury.Given the strictures secularization, wonder of the of it is wllyEngland shouldhavebeennot thefirst,but seemingly among the last in the last decadesif we are to believethe 'evidence' to be secularized.) I cannot resistanother,more necessary aside. Perhapsthe greatest crime committedby sociologyon social thoughtwas to force history into the Procrustean in whichsocietywas on the one hand stable bed, and tradition-oriented, which one had intimate'lifelong'relations in with kinsmenand neighbours with whom one sharedcommonvalues, and on the other a disorderly, atomized,commercialized worldwhere one worked soulless in organizations sleptin shapeless and conurbations. In England,curiously,this myth of the traditionalsocietywas taken up lessby sociologists (whobelievedin evolutionand progress) than by literarymen such as F. R. Leavisand such left-wingfollowers Rayas mondWilliams.Not only did this lead to romanticization the past, of it alsoprovided a theoryof the 'secular for Fall',not the Felix Culpaor Fortunate of Christianity, the destruction the vital, 'organic' Fall but of yeomanand working-class cultures. But whereand when was there ever such a stable, tradition-rooted Gemeinschaft community?What period of history,what place, what generationhas escaped the incursionsof marauders,the ravagesof plagues,civil wars, famine,plunders,soil exhaustionand enclosures, forcedmigrations and drivenvoyages,the upheavalswhich have destroyedfamilies,mixed the races by rape and pillage, and sackedthe villagesand citiesby fire, sword,shot and shell? The 'fathers' modernsociologywanted to create an analytictyof pologyin orderto effect chiaroscuro contrasts-ideal types between differentkindsof social relationships. Under the heavy-handedness of ideology,a logicaldichotomy becomespurious has history. SinceI sortedout the different processes institutional of changefrom culturalchange,I wouldbreakapartthe conceptof secularization, and dividethe meanings. The wordsecularization an originalmeanirlg has that I wouldlike to restore. was originally It employed,in the wakeof the Wars of Religion, to denote the removalof territoryor property

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In authorities. thissense,secularization fromthe controlof ecclesiastical of meansthe disengagement religionfrompoliticallife the classicinof of stanceis the separation Churchand State; and the sundering reso ligion fromaesthetics that art need no longerbend to moralnorms, whereverthey lead. In short,it is the but can followits own impulses, authorityover the spheresof public life, the of shrinkage institutional only overtheir have authority retreatto a privateworldwherereligions and followers, not over any othersectionof the polityor society. has But whensuchsecularization takenplace, as has clearlybeen the determinate case in the last two hundredyears,thereis no necessary, and in shrinkage the character extentof beliefs.In fact, all throughthis secularizationof religious institutions,we find extra'progressive' of amongmasses people,as in enthusiasm in revivals religious ordinary in the burned-overdistrictsand camp-fireevangelicism the United States,and the Methodistrevivalsin England,and,in the culture,the the to repliesof a Schleirmacher, the cultureddespisers, conpowerful a Kierkegaard, faithof of version aJohn HenryNewman,the existential of of religiosity a Soloviev,the personalism a Meunier,the the powerful SimoneWeil and of neo-orthodoxy a Barthor Tillich, the agony of a of other renewedwell-springs faith that have not ceasedto come forth again and again in that period. years, in Therehasbeen,of course, the cultureof the lasttwohundred Thisis the idea that the worldhas trendof disbelief. the moredominant lost its mystery,that men not Godscan rule the world,or that beyond there is nothing,just the void, the underlyingthread of modernism the whichis nihilism.This is what Max WeberhascalledEntzauberung, the de-magicification-of cumbersomely, disenchantmentr, more has the world.Yet thistendency,whichindeedhas beenverypowerful, (whosesources the processof rationalization very differentrootsthan and are technological economic I doleave asidescience,not only bebut with Puritanism, becauseit has been cause of its early affiliations the rationalization, Baconthathassupported onlyone strandof science (whoseroots were priprocessof secularization ian influence),or the power).The sources marilypolitical,in the diminutionof ecclesiastical tendencies lie, I believe,in somewhatautonomous of disenchantment that culture,andit is thosetendencies haveto be the starting in Western of point,I believe,foran understanding the futureof religionin the conworld. temporary the There is, thus, a double processat work. One is secularization, of differentiation institutionalauthorityin the world, which is reinThe of forcedby the processes rationalization. second,in the realmof or beliefsand culture,is disenchantment, what I would preferto call, Thus,the sacredandsecular of forthe parallelism the term,profanation. become my pair terms for processesat work within institutionsand social systems, the sacred and the profane for the processeswithin culture.

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The threadI wishto pursueis the changeswithinculture.Here,too, thereis a doublelevel.Forchanges culturearisein reaction changes in to in institutional (tojustifyor to attack);and changes culturerelate life in to the cllangesin moraltemperand sensibility, expressive to stylesand modesof symbolization, the destruction old symbolsand the creato of tion of new ones. Since changesin the characterof religion,not institutional authority, beginprimarily thissecondlevel,it is therethat at I want to developmy story. I comenow to the fulcrum my argument, definition culture. of the of By culture,I meanless than the anthropological notionof the artifacts and patterned waysof life of a boundedgroup,and morethanthe 'genteel' rlotions a MatthewArnoldas the cultivation tasteandjudgeof of ment. I would definecultureas the modalities response sentient of by men to the core questionsthat confrontall humangroupsin the consciousness existence:how one meetsdeath, the meaningof tragedy, of the natureof obligation,the character love theserecurrent of questions which are, I believe, culturaluniversals, be found in all societies to wheremen have becomeconscious the finiteness existence. of of Culture,thus, is alwaysa ricorso. may expand their technical Men powers.Nature may be masteredby scientificknowledge. There may be progress the instrumental in realms.But the existentialquestions remain.The answersmay vary and do. This is the history humarl of culture,the variations myth,philosophy, in symbolsand styles.But the questionsalwaysrecur.The startingpoint in understanding cultureis not humannature(asin Greek thought),norhumanhistory(asin Hegel and Marx) but the humanpredicament: fact that man is 'thrown' the into the world (who askedto be born?) and in the growingknowledge of that situationbecomesawareof someanswers the receivedresidues of culture-and gropes waybackto the questions testthemeanings his to for himself.* All cultures,thus, 'understand' each other, becausethey arisein responseto the commonpredicaments. Cultures expressed different are in languages,each of which, havingits own soundsand references, thus assumes idiosyncratic historical and character. as WalterBenjamin Yet once observed, in an essay 'On Translation':'Languagesare not strangers one another,but are, a priori apartfromall historical to and relationships, interrelated whattheywantto express.'6 I followthe in If sense of Benjamin's remarks,translationreproduces meaningnot by literalness even context,but by the relatedness the response the or of to existentialquestionsto which the original meaning was addressed.
* For Levi-Strauss, thereis an underlying structure culture,which is the lawsof to thought,the properties mindwhich are everywhere same.Thus, aufond,there of the is an Ur-form,a synchronic 'mytheme' which, like a monad,holds all culturein its singleembrace.For structuralism, cultureis the hiddencode of significant form.For me, cultureis the set of answers,coherentor discordant, anguishedresponses the to the significant questions humanexistence of

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the cannotreproduce 'colour'of culture the exactsyntax, Translation or of the resourcefulness its phonology,the particularmetaphors the that the original tongue and juxtapositions structureof associations meanings.In that sense, provides.What it can renderis its significant of and the colouris the parole, meaningsthe langue culture. to Withinthis purview,religionis a set of coherentanswers the core everyhumangroup,the codification that confront questions existential for into a creedalformthat has significance its adherof these answers bondfor those of ents,the celebration riteswhichprovidean emotional bodyto bring of and who participate, the establishment an institutional and thosewho sharethe creedand celebration, proirltocongregation to vide for the continuityof theseritesfromgeneration generation. of or The attenuation the breakdown a religioncan be amongany of The rites,creedor answers. mostcrucial thesedimensions institutions, for of all are the answers, these go back mostpiercinglyto the human in that predicaments gave rise to the responses the firstinstances. III throughthe nineteenthcenturythereoccurred From the seventeenth a what I shallcall 'The GreatProfanation,' changein moraltemper,in to the relationof the indieridual the existentialquestionsof culture, of which underminedthe culturalfoundations the Westernreligious that had given men a coherentview of theirworld. answers modalchangesin cultureis a very difiicultundertaking. Identifying with the sound announcethemselves Politicalchanges,like revolutions, changes, such as indllstrialization, of a thunderclap.Socioeconomic that are created.But changesin are visiblein the materialstructures cultureand moraltemper until the twentiethcenturyat least came in more subtle and diffusewaysand it is difficultto locate them in specifictime and place. At best, one can singleout somerepresentative such changes. figuresto symbolize that: LionelTrillingremarks and In his essaysSincerity Authenticity, Historiansof Europeanculture are in substantialagreementthat, century,somethinglike in the late sixteenthand early seventeenth a mutationin humannaturetook place. FrancesYatesspeaksof the changesin the psycheduringthe earlyseventeenth innerdeep-seated century '. . . One way of giving a synopsisof the whole complex is occurrence to say that the idea of society,much psycho-historical as we now conceiveit, had come into being.'7 to Trillingwas concerned show In the contextof his essays,Professor as publiclyon greatmatters an individthat in thisperiod,'If one spoke and was ual, one'sonly authority the truthof one'sexperience,' it is for beganto matter.One can broaden that the idea of sincerity this reason the argumentto say that, at this time, experience,not revelation,or

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of or or tradition, authority, evenreason,becamethe touchstone judgement, and the emphasison experiencebecamethe emergingcultural norm. therewerethreechangesthat,woven In the storythat I am pursuing, Thesewere: together,makeup this profanation. in individualism the economy of (I) The growth the idea of a radical self and the polity, and of an unrestrained in culture. from religion to the expressivearts (literature, (2) The crossover poetry,musicand painting)in the problemof dealingwith restraints the on impulse,particularly demonic. (3) The declineof the beliefin Heavenand Hell, and the risein the or fearof nothingness, the void, in the realmbeyondlife, the comingto in consciousness, short,of nihilism. of (but The inter-relatedness not integration) thesethreewe call modernity-the turningaway fromthe authorityof the past, the shrinking of the realmof the sacred,and the Faustianquestfor total knowledge from which sets man spinninginto the vortexof the wissendrang which To thereis no surcease. take theseup seriatem: may be taken as virtually (I) 'The impulseto write autobiography point,' changesto which the historians definitiveof the psychological ConTrilling.The clearestcase in point is Rousseau's writesProfessor was his What scandalized contemporaries not his scatological fessions. wind',but the veryfirstwordin the book,and suchas 'breaking remarks Rousseaubegins: the very tone of that firstparagraph. hithertowithoutprecedent,and an I am commencing undertaking, whichwill neverfindan imitator.I desireto set beforemy fellowsthe of likeness a man in all the truthof nature,arldthat man myself. Myselfalone! I knowthe feelingsof my heart,and I knowmen. I am not made like any of those I have seen; I ventureto believethat I If am not madelikeanyof thosewhoarein existence. I am not better, WhetherNaturehas actedrightlyor wrongly at least I am different. the in destroying mouldin which she cast me, can only be decided afterI have been read.8 (Naturemay have destroyedthe mould, but the Culturerecreated have been endlessadvertisements it, and the imitators,unfortunately, for themselves.) that is central;that is claimto uniqueness It is not just Rousseau's It merelya matterof psychology. is a deeperchangein the natureof In structure. the polity, the claimof individualcultureand character ties. But in the culture, ism was for liberty,to be free of all ascriptive moralandpsychto the claimwasforliberation: be freeof all constraints, ological,to reachout for any experiencethat would enhancethe self. (X) Religionhas alwayslived, dealingas it doeswith the mostbasic The in humanimpulses, the dialecticaltensionof releaseand restraint. of of Weber an admirer Britishpolitics was protesting the German

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Judaismand ChrisConfucianism, great historicreligions Buddhism, have been the Underneath of tianity have all been religions restraint. impulses the Dionysianfrenzies,the Manicheandualsubterranean ities, the gnostic assaultson the exoteric doctrines,the idea of the taboos. the ofSin thathavebeatagainst greatwallsofreligious Holiness arts I shalltakeBaudefromreligionto the expressive The crossover has laire as my avatar has not only meantthat restraint gone slack,it has also meant that the demonicimpulsesin men (once channelled againstothers)havenow religions into religion,onceusedby particular of perverseand pervadeall dimensions modernist becomepolymorph of is culture.If experience the touchstone the self,then therecan be no there are or nothingis unattainable, at least unutterable, boundaries, upon and even trampled no sacredgrovesthat cannot be trespassed down. was of coursea great That movement,which we call Modernism, sourceof energyand vitality,and the centuryfrom I850 to I950 (and its peaks, from I890 to I920) can probablybe seen in painting, literature,poetryand music as one of the great surgesof creativity in humanculture. But therewas a price: the fact that the aestheticwas no longersubdestiny,Nietzschedeject to moral norms.Men's true metaphysical ethic of slaves)but in clared,lay not in morality(a paltry,despirited all imagination, is permitted murder,lust, sodart. In the modernist of omy, incest,degradation in orderto nourishthe rich fantasies the whichis polythe and unconscious, to express diffuseprimaryprocess, with religious morphperverse.Passionis no longerthe identification which carriesone beyond but and suXering sacrifice, carnalsensuality is the self.Murder no longerthe markof Cainbut man'suncontrollable of In withhissecretimpulses. the greatworks imaginationexcitement are Caves these transmutations conor a Saramazov Gide's Vatican formsof art. tainedby the constraining betweenart and life beginto breakdown, But when the distinctions when someproclaimthat theirlife itselfis a workof art, when thereis of the democratization Dionysiusin the acting out of one's impulses, a then the demonicspillsover all bounds,and suXers doublefate. At one extreme,violence becomesthe aestheticof politics (no longer of art), as in the calls to a cleansingof the pollutedselvesby a Sorel, a Marinetti,Sartreor a Fanon;at the other,the demonicbecomestrivof exorcisms the culturalmass. ializedin the masochistic the (3) The fear of nothingness the nihilismthat now suffuses culand domination.The ture has given rise to new formsof aggression of great divide is the understanding death. The sourceof conscience, said Hobbes,is the fear of death; the sourceof law, the fearof violent death. Yet within a religiousculture, death could still be viewedbeyond.But what if there though feared as the preludeto something beyond? was nothing
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The implicationof this new view of consciousness spelled out is powerfullyby Hegel in his Kafka-likeparable, that of Herr and Knecht, Lord and Bondsman,in the Phenomenology. In that parable, the ur-encounter betweentwo men is a duel in whichone riskshis life for freedom,or submitsto the will of the more powerful one. If this is the fundamentalparadigmof human relations,one can ask: why shouldthe two engagein a duel? Why shouldthey not, as Christianity enjoins,love one anotherlike brothers and live in peace? Or why, as the emergingrationalityof a Locke or Adam Smith suggests,should they not cooperateand thusincreasetheiryields? But each man knows and this is the secret of Hegel's parablethat whateverhis striving,no matterhow muchhe can masternature, or even expandhis own powers,thereis, aufond,the naggingsenseof mortality,the realizationof negation,the annihilation what is his of greatestachievement man, his self-consciousness, self. Some few as his men can and do live in that stoic realization, fewermodernmen, but becausetheir verycharacter theirstriving, is theirclaimto freedomor liberation, impulseto burstall bonds,strikeoff all constraints. the The senseof deathis too heavy a burden,and what we-all of us do is to blot it out of consciousness, beginningas childrenwith solipsistic fantasies:it will neverhappento me; when I turn aroundthe worlddoes not exist; I can imaginemyselfdead, but it is I that standsoutsideall that. In short, the fundamental defenceagainstdeath is a fantasyof omnipotence. what happenswhen two omnipotences But meet? They cannotoccupythe samepsychicspaceat the sametime. And so, there is a duel to the death or submission. Is it an accidentthat the modernworld,havingdelimitedthe authorityof religionin the publicsphere,has been the firstto create'total power'in the politicalrealm the fusionof beliefsand institutions into a monolithic entitythat claimsthe powerof a newfaith? Withthe 'Oriental despot',to use Hegel's language,'one was free'. Today, in the regimesof total faith, 'all are bound'.And the modeof ruleis Absolute Terror the mode that Hegel discerned the firstof the politicalrein ligions,the FrenchRevolution.9 IV Theseare broadbrushstrokes. They lackshadeand nuance,detailand qualification. would hope that in the largerwork,of which this talk I is a preGisn theseelementswill be filledin. But withinthis limitedtime, I can only continuethe argumentas a sketch. In the nineteenth twentieth and centuries, culture,freernowfrom the traditional restraints, longertied in intellectual expressive no and areas to the modalitiesof the religiousbeliefs,began to take the lead, so to speak,in exploring alternatives the religious the to answers. Therehave been, in that time, in the West,five alternative responses the disento

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chantmentwith traditionalreligions.These have been and to some civil existentialism, religions aestheticism, extentstill are rationalism, and politicalreligions.In this talk I would like to deal, very briefly, and politicalreligions,as illustrations with two of them, aestheticism It of the powerof these alternatives. is also, I would argue,the failure of two of theseparticular which has openedup the beginnings various I religiousanswers. cannotdo justicehereto the very for searches new, complexhistoriesof each theme, but I shallcall attention,in each instance,to a singlemotif. Aristotlesaid that if a man were not a citizenof the polts,he would seekto be eithera beastor God.Thisis the secretof nineteenth-century beastand it aestheticism: rejectssociety,and man, and seeksto be both God. centurywith Diderotand Rousbeginsin the eighteenth The process we Discourse see that society SNephew in the Second and Rameau's seau. In is an artifice,an arena of hypocrisyin which men had to dissemble, fawn, pretend,take on roles, masksand personas,to have elaborate mannersand engage in elaborateritualsof deference,obsequiousness and flattery,and no longerknow what their true or authenticselves manare. The mode of the aesthete,a centurylater,was to caricature to ners the dandy and then in contempt,and self-contempt, cariof The shredding the veilswouldlay barewhatmen caturemanhimself. frombeing by society to be beastsor were, but were prevented really from Gods,or, both at once, to be the Dionysiansatyr.Aestheticism, this angle of vision,was the beliefthat it was the taskof art to gratify demandsof humanimpulsewhich religionhad not the subterranean of currents certain been able whollyto exorcise.Likethe underground in ecstatic religions their very variety and proliferation wholly unto connectedplaces,fromthe Bogomils Tantrism,indicatetheirrecurhumanresponses the intentionwas to reach rence as autochthonous the sublimethroughthe debauched. began to emergeat the end of the eighteenthcentury Aestheticism whenmenof letterssensedthe openingof a void: if the securemeanings of religioncould no longerprovide either certitude,or a road to the divine, where was the way? If God is no longer 'there', how does man satisfy the desire for 'the unattainable'and his dream of the infinite? SNoir, Le In his essays, Triangle AndreMalrauxlocatesthisfirstawarede nessin the workofthe FrenchnovelistChoderlos Laclos,the Spanish Louis de painter Franciscode Goya, and the French revolutionary, Saint-Just.For Laclos,who is our thread,if God no longer bars the way, men can pursuethe infinitealong the paths of eroticism,cruelty and terror. The freeingof the erotic from the religious one of the of couplings religionand of earliestand most intertwined the orgiastic sexuality,or, makinga religionof the erotic,freeof all othernormsof moralityand rational conduct was the foundationof aestheticism,

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of andits later bastardoispring, the decadentmovements the end of nineteenthcentury. the he of In Laclos,an 'eroticizing the will' definesthe characters creates and servesto prefigurede Sade. As Mario Praz has written: 'A conDan[Les of of firmation how farthe analysis evil in the Liaisons Liaisons workof Laclos]has been made abex(I 782) is the best-known gereuses maybe seen on of and perto, of the importance its influence laterwriters, briefnotes: in Baudelaire's sans vertueux jrefus (2 de d'une A propos phrase Valmont retrouver): toujours sans criminel remords. ete j'eusse plaisir; et sinistre satanique Caractere badin. Lesatanisme 10 that nothingis forbidden, The idea that one can exploreeverything, roof such nineteenth-century includingmadness,becomesthe theme poemRolla,one finds Musset's manticpoets as Nerval.Or in Alfredde the explicit theme that once all faith in religiousand other ideas is du to gone, man is drawnirresistibly le curiosite mal,and fallspreyto deand vices. gradingpassions by that It is in Baudelaire the poet as the man accursed thisvisionof standsas homo Baudelaire his du le curiosite malreceives fullestexpression. seekingto invokeGod and emdieu, or duplex, in his own wordsl'homme bracingthe devil. Divided betweenthe desirefor 'thronesand domto inations'and the compulsion taste the vicesof sin, he putsforththe to 'To mottoat the end of his Voyages, the depthsof the unknown find the new.' fAe has As PierreEmmanuel writtenin his book,Baudelaire: paradox in recognizes [Laclos]the rigorous [Baudelaire] Satanism, of redemptive which,out of hatredfornature,pushesthe natural logic of an eroticism of to an excess;a movementwhich, in him, reachesthe extremes besextreme,an angelicone.ll tiality only to bringhim towardanother fromlove and mustbe explored is sexuality separated ForBaudelaire, with opium (Gette He experiments it for the sensations can provide.* vie autre releasethroughdrink(cette and et enivrante maudite) seeks drogue Curi. And, as he writesin his Aesthetic au l'on que trouve fonddesbreuvages) du 'the osities, beautifulis what is bizarre'.In LesFleurs Mal, the poem the moralsof the pubI857 for outraging whichbroughthim to trialin and fromevil. The poemis lascivious blaslic, he seeksto distilflowers beautiful. phemous,and extraordinarily One can only tarrywith Yet beauty,and the bizarre,are evanescent. boredom- is hell,and one mustgo belowit. In the mornthese.Earth the ing life, one wearsa cold mask.At nightone explores subterranean
he * In the poem L'Examen, kissesthe devil'sass, for the powerof the devil is to take empty matterand give it infinitelyvariableformin bestiality:'Do satananot ? have the formof animals Cazotte'scamel-camel, devil and woman.'

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rivers,the unconscious beliefs,the dreamsan.dunsatisfied aspirations that feed the well-springs appetite.But Baudelaire of findsthat man is only in tenebris. world standsin the last days of Holy Week, and The the candlesare progressively being extinguished. it is not Christ Yet who iS comingbut Satan. And in this extremity spirit,there is left of only the 'furiousand desperateappetite for death', the final darkness. In the aestheticmovement,poetry,not religion,is sacred.The poet is a seer, or voyant, replacingthe priest,or rather,becomingthe new prophetin the historictensionof prophetand priest.In the beginning was the word; but the wordnow belongedto the poet. The 'prophetic tribe'of poets,in Baudelaire's phrase,had extra-lucid powers,a belief that led, in Rimbaud's incantations, the idea that the poet possesses to the 'alchemyof the word'. Butthewordis neitherlogos Law.The Waybecomes wayward, nor the Halakhabecomesapocrypha. impulsereplaces idea, the senses The the the sensations that tantalize overpower mind. In the aesthetic the mode, will and passionare the primarycoordinates the paths of of action. The foundationof a politicalreligionis a messianism which makes the eschatological promiseof the leap to the kingdomof freedom the releasefrom all necessity-on earth. The vision of Marxismis such a speakingof tongues.In his earliestessays,such as the Critique Hegel's of Philosophy Right,one findsthis propheticlanguage.The idea of the of 'leap' itself a term that was centralto Kierkegaard is a metaphor with religiousconnotations. Yet the developmentof Marxismitself the effiort the 'mature' of Marx to be scientistic(e.g. the Newtonianlanguagesuch as 'the laws of motion'in Capital) and the rise of mass Social Democraticparties that becameintegrated, even negatively, into the life of theirsocietiesgraduallysmotheredthe messianictone in favourof the languageof progress and inevitability.Sorel might say that 'it is to violencethat Socialismowes those high ethicalvalues by meanscf which it brings salvationto the modernworld', but few listened to this syndicalist appeal. The politicalreligionwhich transformed Marxismcame out of the crucibleof WorldWar I and the RussianRevolution.Afterso long a periodof progress economicgrowth,the War suddenlyseemedto and be an apocalypticshock, the more so becauseof the senselessmass slaughter which led a generation poetsand writersto proclaimthat of the nihilismonly a few had discerned now coveringthe worldlike was thick mud. The OctoberRevolutionbroughtwith it an orgiasticchiliasm, the headyfeelingthat the eschatological openingof Historywas at hand. And, addedto these,was a thirdnecessary element,a charismatic agencythat would bringpurification throughterror,the Party. Two men became the formulators, the deepestgnostic level, of at

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this creed.One was GeorgLukacs,the other BertoltBrecht.*For the 'new Left', Lukacswas the man who broughtback to Marxismthe but ideas of alienationand historicalconsciousness, for the smaller, the Lukacs provided 'theoryof two truths',the initialgroupof apostles, 'noblelie', the inner formulawhich is the bindingcementof faith for the initiated. Lukacs the final pagesof his is The startingpoint in understanding writtenin I9I4-I5. We of mostinteresting book, The fAeory theJ%ovel, live, he said, followingthe phraseof Fichte, in the epoch of absolute that one can glimpsewhat sinfulness. is in the wordsof Dostoevsky It interpremay lie beyond.'It will be the taskof historico-philosophical we tationto decidewhether arereallyaboutto leavethe age of absolute sinfulness whetherthe new has no heraldbut our hopes....'12 (The or it T/zeory the;Novel, shouldbe pointedout, was dedicatedto Yelena of first Grabenko, Lukacs's wife,who had serveda termin a Tsaristprison wing of the Social-Revoluwith the terrorist becauseof her association tionary Party, and who herself,accordingto Lukacs'sclosestfriend, character'.) exampleof a Dostoevsky Bela Balazs,'wasa wondrous beganto meetwith intellectuals In I 9 I 5 a smallgroupof Hungarian meetings Lukacsand Balazs every Sunday afternoonfor discussion, patterned afterthe groupthat usedto meetat the homeof Max Weber, which Lukacshad regularlyattended.Among those who came were Antal and Michael PolKarl Mannheim,Arnold Hauser,Frederick to the anyi.As Lee Congdon, younghistorian whomI am indebtedfor 'The subject of this reconstruction the periodof Lukacs'life, remarks: for discussion was alwayschosenby Lukacsand it invariablycentred on some ethical problem or question suggestedby the writings of Politicsand social problemswere never Dotoevskyand Kierkegaard.
discussed.'l3

Partywas organizedon November24, The HungarianCommunist Lukacsjoined the Partyin December,along with Yelena GraUsag benko and Bela Balazs,and becameone of the editorsof Voros circlewere of (Red Gazette). Mostof the members the Sundaydiscussion and stunned.Theyhad heardLukacsspeakof Dostoevsky Kierkegaard, but had neverheardhim speakof Marx.One member,Anna Lesznai, in occurred the emergence a communist as remembered 'Lukacs's that
I9I8.

* In this lecture, I speak only of Lukics. My reference to Brecht is to the Lehrstucken, Taken, which Brechtjustifies murder of a comrade for the in particularly TheMeasures sake of the Party. In the play, Brecht has a song entitled 'Praise of the Party'. It says, in part: A single man has two eyes The party has a thousand eyes . . . A single man can be annihilated But the Party cannot be annihilated.

Theatre, Volume Six (Anchor 'The Measures Taken', in, Eric Bentley, TheModern Books, New York, I960), pp. 277-X78.

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intervalbetweentwo Sundays: SaulbecamePaul.'A proletarian writer, LajosKassak,in his autobiography, recalled: I was a little surprised Lukacs'spresence],he who a few days [at earlierhad published articlein Szabadgondolat Thought)in an (Free which he wrote with philosophicalemphasisthat the communist movement had no ethicalbase and was therefore inadequate the for creationof a new world.The day beforeyesterday wrotethis, but he todayhe sits at the table of Voros Ojsag editorialstaff. In that article,'Bolshevism a MoralProblem', as Lukacshad asked why the victory of the proletariat, reversalof oppressors opthe and pressed,would bringall classoppression an end ratherthan simply to bringin a diffierent of oppression. answer,said Lukacs,would kind Any have to reston faith.Peoplewouldhave to believethat good (the classless society) could issue from evil (dictatorship terror).And this and was an instanceof credo absurdum whichhe could not accept. quia est, Yet within that fatefulweek, he had taken the leap of faith. In an essayhe wrotein I9I9, 'Tacticsand Ethics',he soughtto resolvethe moraldilemma.It had becomehis convictionthat therewas no escape for men who wished to preservetheir moral purity in the 'age of absolutesinfulness'. men, he believed,were caught in the tragic 'All dilemmaof having to choosebetweenthe purposeful and ephemeral violenceof therevolution themeaningless never-ceasingviolence and and of the old corrupt world,'as Congdon putsit. One had to signthe devil's pact. In this remarkable essay,he cited the novelsof BorisSavinkov, the Russian socialist-revolutionary was one of the assassinsof who Ministerof Interiorvon Plehve. Murderis not permitted;murderis an unconditional unforgivand ablesin.Yetit is inescapablynecessary;is not permitted, it must it but be done.And in a different place in his fiction,Savinkov not the sees justification his act (thatis impossible), its deepestmoralroot of but in that he sacrifices only his life, but also his purity, morality, not even his soul for his brothers.

7:he MagicMountain, Jewish-Jesuit the characterNaphta was, as we

now know, modelleddirectlyon Lukacs,and in the debate with the liberalhumanistSettembrini, Mann has Naphta/Lukacs say: The dictatorship the proletariat, politico-economic of the meansof salvationdemandedby our age, does not mean dominationfor its own sake and in perpetuity;but ratherin the senseof a temporary abrogation,in the Sign of the Cross,of the contradiction between spiritand force;in the senseof overcoming world by mastering the it; in a transcendental, transitional a sense,in the senseof the Kingdom. The proletariat takenup the taskof Gregory Great,his has the

This gnostic apologiaof Lukacswas, as we know,noted twice. In

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religiouszeal burnswithinit, and as little as he may it withholdits hand fromthe sheddingof blood. Its taskis to striketerrorinto the worldfor the healingof the world,that man may finallyachievesalvation and deliverance, win backat lengthto freedom and fromlaw and fromdistinction classes,to his originalstatusas child of God. of And when Settembrini taxeshim with inconsistency: 'And now you professa socialismpushedto the point of dictatorship terrorism. and How do you reconcilethese two things?',Naphta says enigmatically, 'opposition may be consistent with each other.'l4 Long before Lukacsbecame a householdname among the intelligentzia,theseviewswerediscussed a pioneering in book, World Communism (I939) by FranzBorkenau, early memberof the Frankfurt an School, who had been cast out into the cold as renegade,and whose namehas rarelyappeared the profuse in discussions todayof that 'critical sociology'.In his book,Borkenau cites an articleby Ilona Duzcinska [the wife of Karl Polanyi]that appearedin Unser Weg, March in
I 92 I :

A representative theoretician was perhapsthe sole brainbehind who Hungarian communism a decisive at moment answered myquestion as to whetherlying and cheatingof the members the partyby their of own leaderswere admissibleby this statement:Communist ethics makeit the highestduty to accept the necessityof actingwickedly. This, he said, was the greatestsacriScerevolutionasked from us. The convictionof the true communistis that evil transforms itself into bliss througllthe dialecticsof historicalevolution. (That this moralityof the type of Nechaevis, inter basedupon the admiraalia, tiorlof Dostoevsky surprise will nobody.)This dialecticaltheoryof wickedness never been publishedby the theoretician has just mentioned,nevertheless communist this gospelspreadas a secretdoctrine frommouthto mouthuntilit finallywasregarded the semi-official as quintessence 'true communism', the one criterionof the 'true of as communist' .15 The corruption politicalreligionsis rlotjust the ebbing away of of revolutionary fervour the establishment a new bureaucratic and of class in office.It is, to use theological language,the victoryof the devil in seducinganguishedmen to sign that pact which makesthem surrender theirsouls.Andif the thoughtof Savinkov couldinduceLukacs make to that leap of faithover the credo absurdum, is one to say of Lukacs's what silencewhen,in I924, the Bolsheviks murdered Savinkov, throwing by him out of a window, for his continuedoppositionto the Bolshevik regime But Lukacs ? had alreadysoldhis soul.As TheodorAdornosaid of Lukacs:'[He] tugs vainly at his chainsand imaginestheirclanking to be the forward marchof dasWeltgeistes.'

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and I believe that tlle 'groundimpulses'behind aestheticism political religionsare exhausted.These were the impulsesto abolishGod and assumethat Man could take over the powershe had ascribedto God and now soughtto claimforhimself.Thisis the commonbondbetween Marx and Nietzscheand the link betweenthe aestheticand political of movements modernity. The phrase'God is dead' clearlyhas no denotativemeaning.Nor pornography, do I thinkNietzschemeantit so. It is a formof religious meaningof the term.*TheFrohliche and I have to explainmy restricted as EheGaysGience or TheJoyfulWisWissenschaft (translatedvariously The in is dom) a formof pornography the sensethat Machiavelli's Prince sexualporrloand is a kind of politicalpornography, de Sade'sJustine graphy not so much for their content as for the intention to shock way. We cannotbelievethatwhen Machiavpeoplein a highlyspecific of peopledid not knowof the actualpractices the elli wrote ThePrince if Borgias;but one simplydid not talk aboutit. Similarly, one looksat only a child might not :France, the libertinismof eighteenth-century gamesplayedin The Deer Park.But again,one know of the perverse was did not talkof suchthingsin politesociety.WhatNietzsche seeking In to do was to utter the unutterable. every religionthereis a sacred the circlewhichengirdles namethat cannotbe named.WhatNietzsche factsof life, but persisted wassayingwas that peopleknewthe religious in the polite hypocrisyof refusingto utter what should not be menwas tioned.WhatNietzsche saying-and to thatextenthe wasrepeating Kierkegaard is that without God, there is only the void of nihilism. madethe leap overthat void, whichhe calledthe absurd, Kierkegaard faith.Nietzschefelt that sucha leap was no longerpossible. to religiotls Marlwas a rope dancerover the abyss,with the beastor Knechtat one end, and the Herr or Supermanat the other. In his growingobbelievedone couldno longeraccept withthisdilemma,Nietzsche session which every religionrequiresof its believers.Having the submission challengedGod on the mountain,Nietzsche believed that his garafour. was thustra the FifthGospel,the gospelto obliteratethe preceding carriedout its logic to its end, or transNietzsche,hatingmodernity, end, whichis to explodeall limits,to dareall and to be all. In the end, his brainitselfexplodedand he passedinto the autisticrealmof a onenessturnedbackon itself,the onenessof silence. Faustus and Faust Mann'sDoktor betweenGoethe's It is in the contrast Goethe'sPart Two ends of that we see the trajectory this wissendrang. with Faust,nor blind, but still striving,still believing,as his life ebbs away, that the digginghe hears the diggingof his grave is the digMann'sFaustus, he ging of the greatworksof progress has commanded.
* I ore this formulation to my fIiend Irving Kristol.

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temper,makeshis who embodiesthe Nietzschean AdrianLeverkuhn, pact with the devil as well. But insteadof the affairwith the pure and he attractedto a prostitute calls he innocentGretchen, is passionately The poisonin his blood syphilis. and Esmeralda', contracts the 'Hetaera and unfetterings, flightsof . . . upliftings is the sourceof the 'towering of ecstasyin the musiche writesthat uniteshim with eternity'.But the the price he pays is the inability to establisha human relationship, whichthe of exhaustion the art whichis drawnfromthe subconscious, final Leverkuhn's sterilityand derangement. call Germans dasMusiche, Ninth. work,the workof negation,is intendedto destroyBeethoven's is, The cantata D. FaustiWeheklag in its wail, agonyand pain, the nenichts, licht, mehr we havenichts, licht, gationof Faust.Andinsteadof licht, mehr nichts. One followsa doubletrajectory. of The exhaustion politicalreligions als was laid out quite directlyby Max Weber,in his Politik Beruf: a justiceon earthrequires followabsolute He who wantsto establish ing, a human 'machine'.He must hold out the necessaryirlternal and external premiums, heavenly or worldly reward, to this 'machine'or else the machinewill not function. of interpretation historyis no cab to be takenat . . . the materialist Emotional of will; it doesnot stop shortof the promoters revolution. routine of everyday is revolutionism followedby the traditionalist leaderand the faith itself fade away, or, what is life; the crusading even more eXective,the faith becomes part of the conventional technicians.l6 and of phraseology politicalPhilistines banusic for problem anychiliastic has Oncea revolution takenplace,themajor regimesmust regime is how to maintain enthusiasm.Revolutionary of an try therefore to sustainthe zeal by maintaining atmosphere war, by mobilizingemotionsagairlstan outside or internalenemy, or by faith. some kind of 'revitalized' and I need not rehearsehere all the difficultses travailsthat have China. But there is a occurredin the Soviet Union and Communist crucial logic that has bearing on my argument. In revolutionary i.e. Marxism, the canon accordingto Lenin, the 'Party'had a sacred The Partywas the vanguardof the masses,and it was the character. the 'collectivewisdom'of the Partywhich interpreted will of History. did extremeclaimsof omniscience, so beStalin, even when he made he claimedto embodythe Party.And when his namewas blackcause could do so on the ened, when the seals were opened, his successors groundthat he had violated Party normsand that the new collegial the was leadership restoring legitimacyof the Party. changein in What Mao succeeeded doing and this is the historical the 'religious'nature of the creed was to substitutehimselffor the ever-quotedbreviary,the little Red Book, Party. That ever-present,

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made it clear that whatevercharismathe Party may possessderives solelyfromthe personand thoughtof Mao Tse-tung. Men can carry on a revolution (i.e. live by moral rather than material incentives) theybecome if 'newmen',if thereis a transvaluation of values.The dilemmafor all revolutionary theorists fromSaint-Just arldBabeufto the presentis how to carrythrougha revolutionthat is 'tainted'or corrupted the bourgeois by past.The existence that taint of has alwaysbeen thejustification forthby the revolutionary in put elite settingup a dictatorship protectthe peoplefromthemselves cerlto (to sor what they read, to forbidsad or pessimistic tales,to createCpositive heroes').In China, Mao took the final step, which was to set up his own personand his own thoughtas the firstand final arbiter,and, in the cultural revolution,to change the characterof men, and thus changesociety.This has been the questof all greatreligions. The irony is that it has been attemptedon the most spectacular scale in human historyby a political religion.The obviousparadoxis the Marxism beginsas a movement Reason,and ends as a cult. It beginswith an of attackon all Godsand ends as Idolatry.* VI The alternative responses religionin the nineteenthand earlytwento teenth centurieswere shapedby the view of religionas primitiveand fetishistin origin. And, in incrediblyethnocentric fashion,they saw as its evolutionary form religionsof sslztation, derivedfrom the supernatural.This is why Engelscould write: When man no longer therefore proposesbut also dispossesses then will the last alienforcewhichis still reflected religionvanish;and in with it will vanishthe religiousreflection itself,for the simplereason that therewill be nothingleft to reflect.l7 But what does remain-always to be reflectedon-is the existential questionswhich confrontall culturesin the demand for meanings. LeszekKolakowski, who gave the Hobhouselecturelast year, has said that 'tragedyis the moral victoryof evil'. It is the temptationfor man to step beyond the boundaries that constrainhim. Marx thoughthe would abolishtragedybecausethe Kingdomof Freedomwould have
* Eaeh Great Profanation, its own dialeetie, has its small negation. The proin fanationof Modernism that the greatworkswhieh were createdby wrestling is with the demonie (as Jaeob wrestIedwith the angel and beeame Israel), beeome trivializedby the cuZturati; what has beenart becomestrendylife-style what has been and ineorporation in transubstantiation) (as beeomeseonsumption. And the profanation of Marxism the debasement soeialism, just in the GreatPoliticalReligionsbut is of not in the grotesque totemieformsof Afrieansoeialism, ArabSocialism, BaathSoeialism, and the hundreddifferentsocialisms that have eruptedlike weedsin the wastelands of Manism.

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no boundaries. his early writings(e.g. on The7ewishQuestion In he 'naturalizes' Hegel, so that where for Hegel self-consciousness finds its 'oneness'in the Absolute, for Marx the individualwill become completewhen he has once again found his 'species-being' his and 'socialpowers'.But what is so strikingis that Marx, who was such a close readerof Hegel, neverincludeda discussion death in any of of his writings.Was this omission,in its own way, a fantasy of omnipotence? On the double level of social structureand culture,the world has been secularizedand profaned.The secularization derivesfrom the rationalization life, the profanation of fromthe imperious of modself ernity. Religion is no longer the 'collectiveconscience' society, as of Durkheim believedwasits elementary form,becausesocietyis radically disjointed, different its realmsof the techno-economic sphere,with its principleof functional rationality, polityand its surgefor equality, the and the culturewith its demandsfor self-fulfillment creatingincreasingly intolerablestrains.And if religionwas once the opium of the people,that place has been takenby pornotopia, wherethe straightand narrowhave becomethe kinkyand the twisted. Hobbesonce saidthat Hell is truthseentoo late. Hell is the Faustian bargain,the pact which compelsman to striveendlessly, if he acfor knowledges pointas final,he loseshis soul.But if thereare no limits any or boundaries, becomesintolerable.The ceaselesssearchfor exlife perienceis like beingon a merry-go-round whichat firstis exhilarating but then becomesfrightening when one realizesthat it will not stop. As Don Giovannidiscovered, endlesspleasureis endlesstorment,preciselybecauseit is endless.And today we have the democratization of the erotic. Will therebe a returnof the sacred,the riseof new religious modes ? Of that I have no doubt. Religionis not an ideology,or a regulative or integrative featureof society thoughin its institutional formsit has, at differenttimes,functioned this way. It is a constitutive in aspectof human experiencebecauseit is a responseto the existentialpredicaments which are the riGorsi of human culture.That complexGerman writerWalterBenjaminmaintainedthat 'the concretetotality of experienceis religion',and he gave to this formof authenticexperience the word 'aura'.It is akin to RudolfOtto'sconception the 'numinof ous' or to the Biblicalconceptionof 'awe'. The age of mechanical reproduction, Benjamin thought,had strippedart of its uniqueness and the 'aura' of unbridgeable distancehas been destroyed.I think as I have arguedelsewhere that this 'eclipseof distance'is the common syntaxof Modernism itself:in its emphasis simultaneity, on immediacy, sensationand shock.And it is this destruction 'aura' (to use Benof jamin'sword) in the high culturewhich openedthe way for that destruction in the mass culture. But that very destruction and the realization that fact is itselfthe startingpoint for new responses. of

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Wherewill it arise? I thinkRobertBellahis rightwhenhe observes: To concentrateon the church in a discussionof the modern religioussituation alreadymisleading it is precisely characteris for the istic of the new situationthat the great problemof religion. . . the symbolizationof man's relation to the ultimate conditionsof his existence, no longerthe monopoly anygroups is of labelled religious.l8 Religions, unlike technologiesor social policies, cannot be manufacturedor designed.They grow out of sharedresponses and shared experiences which one beginsto endowwith a senseof awe, expressed in some ritual form. The multiplicityof exotic consciousness-raising movements the Zen, yoga, tantra,I Ching,and Swamimovementswhichhave spreadso quicklyamongthe culturati, is itselfan illustration of that fact. Theseare not religions. They are an illustration the conof fusionsof authenticity,the searchin this multiple,discordant world, for the authentic'I'. Americain the mid-seventies, writesthe counterculturehistorianTheodoreRoszak,is launchedon 'the biggestintrospectivebinge any societyin historyhas undergone'. may well be He right. The 'authenticI', havingbecomea bore to others,has now become even moreof a bore to himself. When religionsfail, cults appear.When the institutional framework of religionsbeginsto breakup, the searchfor directexperience which peoplecan feel to be 'religious' facilitates riseof cults.A cult differs the froma formalreligionin many significant ways. It is in the natureof a cult to claim some esotericknowledgewhich had been submerged (or repressedby orthodoxy)but which is now suddenlyilluminated. Thereis oftensomeheterodox esoteric or figurewho functions a guru as to presentthesenew teachings.The ritesthat are practicedpermit,or moreoftenprompt,an individualto act out impulses that hithertohad been restrained repressed, that thereis a senseof ex-stasis or some or so transfiguring moment. But the deception and the undoing of such experience however 'sincere' and anguishedlike so many 'enthusiastic'quests occurs becausethe searchrestsbasicallyon some idea of a magical moment, and on the powerof magic. Like someheadacheremedy,it gives you fast,fast,fast belief,if not relief.And it is no accidentthat the half-life of thesemovements so shortand that the heteroclites is moveon ceaselessly,to a new nostrum. Whenwe thinkof the possibility new religions, turn,naturally, of we to Max Weberwho, morethan any one else, has given us the comprehensivepictureof the way religionsarise.But if we are lookingin the directionWeberpointed,we may be lookingin the wrong direction. ForWeber,new religions arosewith prophecy with the charismatic and figurewho had the powerwithinhim to shatterthe bondsof tradition and to tear down the walls of the old institutions. what is thereto But shatteror to tear downtoday?Who, in the culture,defendstradition ?

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And where are the institutional walls? We live in a culturewhich is almost entirely anti-institutional and antinomian.How could it be otherwise whenthe radicalselfis takenas the touchstone judgement of ? If there are to be new religions and I think they will arise they will, contrary previous to experience, returnto the past,to seekfor tradition and to searchfor thosethreadswhich can give a persona set of tiesthatplacehimin the continuity the deadandthe livingand those of still to be born.Unlikeromanticism, will not be a turnto nature,and it unlikemodernity will not be the involutedself; it will be the resurit rectionof Memory. I do not knowhow thesewill arise,but I have somedim perception of the formsthey may take. I wouldbe bold enoughto say that in the Westthey wouldbe of threekinds. The firstI wouldcall moralizing religion.Its rootsand strength in are a Fundamentalist faith, evangelicaland scourging,emphasizingsin and the turningawayfromthe Whoreof Babylon.In the UnitedStates, in recentyears,the largest-growing voluntary associations beenthe have Fundamentalist churches. some extentthisis an aggressive To reaction on the part of the 'silentmajority', to speak,againstthe carryover so of modernist impulsesinto politics especiallythe claimsof complete personalfreedomin sexual areas (e.g. Gay rights), morals,abortion and the like. But that is too simple an explanation.I think, given the historyof Westernculture,that a large substratum societyhas of always felt the need for simple pieties, direct homilies,reassurances againsttheir own secretimpulses(such as in Nathaniel Hawthorne's powerfulstory'YoungGoodman Brown'),but that until recentlythese peoplehave been deridedby the predominantly liberalculture so(not ciety) and, moreimportantly, abandoned the clergy,who, coming by fromthe educatedclassesand subjectto the conformist pressures the of liberalculture,had lost theirown nerve,and often,as well, theirbelief in God. The exhaustionof Modernism and the emptinessof contemporaryculturemitigatethat socialpressure, Fundamentalist and ministerscan step forward,with less fear of derisionfrom their cultured despisers. Thesegroups,traditionally, have been farmers, lower-middle class, small-townartisans,and the like. In the long-runoccupational sense,they are in the decline.Yet in the moreimmediatefuturethey may be the strongest elementin a religiousrevival. The second which I thinkwill find its adherents the intellectual in and professional classes-I would call redemptive, derives,I think, and from two sources.One is the retreatfrom the excessesof modernity. One can face death,perhaps,not by seekingto be self-infinitizing, but by lookingback.Humancultureis a construction men to maintain by continuity, to maintainthe 'un-animallife'. Animalsseeingeach other die do not imagineit of themselves;men alone know their fate and createritualsnotjust to wardof mortality(theprettystories heaven of andhell), but to maintain 'consciousness kind',whichis a mediation a of

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of fate. In this sense,religionis the awareness a space of transcenof dence, the passageout of the past from which one has come, and to which one is bourld,to a new conception the self as a moral agerlt, of freely acceptingone's past (ratherthan just being shaped by it) and stepping backinto tradition orderto maintainthe continuity moral in of meanings.It is a redemptiveprocess(in Kenelm Burridge's terms), wherebyindividualsseek to dischargetheir obligations and if one claimsrights, somepoint therehas to be recognition obligatzons at of as well-to the moralimperatives the community:the debtsin being of nurtured,the debtsto the institutions that maintainmoralawareness. Religion,then, begins,as it must,in the mutualredemption fathers of and sons.It involves,in Yeat'sphrase,becoming'the blessedwho can bless',the laying on of hands. Thereis a second,moredirectsociological sourceof the redemptive. This is in the growth,as I believeit will come, of what PeterBerger has called 'mediating institutions'. the reactionagainstcentralgovIn ernment,of large-scalebureaucracy the mega-structures organand of ization,thereis a desireto reinstate privatesphereffamily, church, a neighbourhood and voluntaryassociation to take back the function whichit haslostof caring: of caringforthe afflicated the ill, of carirlg and for welfare,of caringfor each other.For Hegel,mediation the cenwas tralconceptwhichexplained how the universal becameconcrete.Mediation for Hegel 'is nothingbut self-identity workingitselfout through an activeself-directed process', act of reflection the whichbalancesthe immediacyof existencewith the idea of universality. The mediatinginstitutions,centredas they will be on the idea of caring,resurrect idea of caritas, one of the oldestsourcesof human the attachments, formof love that has been crushedbetweenrationalized a eros profaned and agape superseded the welfarestate.They may and by arise, to use an older theologicalterm, in the koinonia, primary the groupswhere people live and work.There have alwaysbeen utopiar colonies,but these fled fromthe world.There was and is more recently,the kibDutzim, they weretoo secular,theyswallowed their but up members the whole of theirlives, and they are beingcrushedby the in economicforcesof a largerworld.Yet they did, in their earliestyears, transform societyand a people,and madethe desertbloom.Whether a the mediatinginstitutions that I think will arise becomethe cenacles of a new religionremainsto be seem. The thirdreligion,morediffuse,will be a returnto somemythicand mysticalmodesof thought.The world has becometoo scientisticand drab. Men want a senseof wonderand mystery.There is a persistent needto overcome dualisms prizeapartthe tendrils selfwhich the that of yearnforuniScation being.Thereis alsothe temptation walkalong of to the knife-edgeof the abyss. As Rilke began his Duino Elegies:'For Beauty's nothingbut the beginningof Terror....' Yet mythtamesthe terrorand allowsus to look at the Medusa'shead withoutturrlirlg to

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stone. Myth returnsus to what Goethe called the Urphanomene, the rtcorsi the existential of predicaments. Such mythic modes cannot take the form of primitiveanimismor shamanistic magic, for such invocationis simply the substitutionof meaningless Castenadas abstractcause-and-effect for relationships. A mythicmode,sinceit will comefromourpast,will derivefromthe prescientificand pre-conceptual roots and transform them. In Western thought, the pre-Socratic modes of thought about the cosmoswere mythic,but thesegave way beforethe powerof abstract concepts.Conceptual thought,as the physicistCarl Friedrichvon Weizsackerhas arguedin his remarkable seriesof lectures Scienceand Religion,can on providea totalityof thoughtbut onlyforthe unityof nature.Yet mythic thoughthad the advantage relatingman to nature.The pre-Socratic of Empedocles a view of the cosmosin which Love and Strifealterhad nateddialectically organizeexistence. viewsof Empedocles to The were fought out in a contestbetween Hegel and Holderlinas to whether philosophy poetrywasthe mostappropriate of interpreting or way that view for modernman. Philosophy won out, and Holderlin's Empedocles has been almostall but forgotten until now. The mythicmode, like a subterranean force,has alwaysbeen presentin Western history,and the powerof myth is beginningto reassert itself. A mythic mode,if it comes,will probably closerto what Marcel be Granetcallsembleme, sign whichevokesthe totalityof things.l9One the such emblem,classicto Chinesethought, is the Tao, a mode which emphasizes singularratherthan the general,the sign ratherthan the the concept,the resemblance ratherthan the identity,the precursive image ratherthan the efficacious cause. It is a worldof symbolism in whichcontrasts not contradictions intimateinterdependencies. are but Its purposeis not to discover sequencesbut to uncoversolidarities, not causeand effectbut the commonrootof phenomena whichpictorial in imagescan be substituted one anotheras symbolic for imagesthat unite the event and the world.Thus Taoist thoughtwould say that the invention of the wheel came frombirdsflyingin the air. Or a bird that destroysits nest indicatesa breakdown both physicaland moralinthe Empire sincethesentimentofdomestic pietyislacking evenamong the smallestanimals.The mythic,in thisway, allowsone to deal with the worldas givenand real,andyet to see it in a setof underlying forms (symbolic structural) rangefromthe allegorical the anagogic, not that to and bring into unity the concrete,the poetical,and the mystical. If science as it hopes-captures in its calyx the unityof nature,religion seeksthe awareness the totalityof life in the culture:uniting of the ethical,the metaphysical, meditativeand the mystical.Is that the unitypossible the modern in world? It is a ladderand onewhich,necessarily,as Professor Weizascker it, takesus beyond von puts justification. It existsas its own awareness which, in the end, becomesAdvaita,or a non-duality.

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Is any of this possible-in the West? The West, as Max Weberhas pointed out, had created a unique civilizationalpattern of institutionalizedrationality,one that, throughthe powerof technology,has permeatedall parts of the world. Yet if East has come West, would Weberhave troublein admittingthat at some futuretime, beginning find itselfa pupilin the in the present, Westcould,in somenew fashion, poets, realmof philosophers, Whatis striking in the serious the East?20 and artists is that the journeyis now being undertaken. physicists a The groundof religionis not regulative, To sum up my argument. argued,as as of property society,serving, Marxor Durkheim functional Nor is religionconstituof a component social controlor integration. Rudolf of tive, a property humannature,as arguedby Schleirmacher, such phenomenologists as Max Scheler.The ground Otto and religious and of the of religionis existential: awareness menof theirfiniteness the effortto find a coand limitsto theirpowers, the consequent inexorable herentanswerto reconcilethem to that humancondition. VII water? thatasks:Whofirstdiscovered parable Thereis an old Midrashic We do not know.But one thingwe do know;the fishdid not. of We may be in the position the fish,for the worldof religionis the and worldof the non-rational, we can only go so farin our understandhas that sociology (a of ing, forthe realization the non-rational category rarelytried to define) is the recognitionthat the existentialpredicamentswe confrontderivefrom a mystery,one that we may never be able to penetrate.For Aristotle,man's highestcapacitywas not logos whose for the but (thatis, speechor reason) nous, capacity contemplation in is character that its contentcannotbe rendered speech. constitutive logou without words. That is The eternal, for Aristotle,was aneu into time, or the 'holysparks' whichbreaks also the sourceof the kairos, which becomesthe sacred.The sacredis the space of of the Shekinah, wonderand awe, of the noumenalwhich remainsa mysteryand the to numinouswhichis its aura. Necessary the sacredis the principleof for of principleof distinction, the realmwhichis reserved Hasdolah,the and the daysof awe andlament,and the realmof the mundane profane. and by whosecontenthasbeenredefined variouscultures It is a dualism times, this principlehas But differentgenerations. until contemporary by been observed almosteveryhumangroupwe know.Oursis the first of the whichmaintained preciousness the printo annulthe boundaries of ciple of life itself. The viciousness that annulmentemergeswhen a into the politicalmaw of the 'sacred'(as in societyis wholly dissolved to the SovietUnion) and all spheresof life becomesubordinated it, or of into the economicengorgement where a societyis wholly absorbed the profane,as in a capitalismthat treatsnothingas sacred,but conto vertsall objectsinto commodities be boughtand sold to the highest

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bidders.When there are few ritualsto markthe turnsin the wheel of life, if all eventsbecomethe same with no ceremonyto mark the distinctions when one marriesin ordinarydress,or receivesa degree withouta robe,or buriesone'sdeadwithoutthe tearingof cloth then life becomesgreyon grey,and noneof the splashiness the phosphorof escentpop art can hide that greyness when the morningbreaks. We stand, I believe,with a clearingaheadof us. The exhaustion of Modernism,the aridity of Communist life, the tedium of the unrestrainedself and the meaninglessness the monolithic of politicalchants, all indicatethat a long era is comingto a close.The themeof Modernism was the word beyond: beyond nature, beyond culture, beyond tragedy that was wherethe self-infinitizing spiritwas drivingthe radical self. We are now gropingfor a new vocabularywhose keyword seemsto be limits: a limit to growth,a limit to spoliationof environment,a limitto arms,a limitto torture, limitto hubris can we extend a the list? If we can, it is also one of the relevantportentsof our time. Whatwill comeout of that clearing,I do not whollyknow,but since I believethat the existential questions cultureare inescapable, feel of I that somenew effiorts regaina senseof the sacredpoint to the directo tion in which our culture or its most sentientrepresentativeswill move.Whetherthat new visionwill be genuine,that is, fullyresponsive to the deepestfeelings people,I do not know;andevenmore,whether of suchnewthreads be woveninto meanings will extendovergencan that erationaltime and becomeembodiedin new institutions, something is even furtherbeyondmy purview. All these are conjectures, we shall have to wait, in the fullness and of time, fortheirrefutations. I am bound,in the faithof my fathers, But to one obligation.In the PirkeAvoth, there is the 'tablet' of Rabbi arton: He used to say: It is not yourpart to finishthe task;yet neitherare you free to desistfromit.
r n r

DanielBell, PH.D. Professor Sociology of Harvard University Notes

I. L. T. Hobhouse, 'The Roots of Modern Sociology', Inauguration of the Martin White Professorships in Sociology, December I7, I907, (UniversityofLondon),p. 7. 2. 'Prometheus Unbound', in fhe

3. Julien Freund, 7Che Sociology Max of

Weber (New York,

4.

I969),

p. 24.

Bryan Wilson, Contemporary Transformations Religion of (Oxford University Press, I976).Citationsfrompp.4, I4, I5,
40-4I, 80, 83.

Complete PoeticalWorksof PercyBysshe 5. 'Introduction to the Gritique of Shelley,edited by Thomas Hutchinson Political Economy'. The essay, much of
(Oxford University Press, I935), Act III, Scene 4, lines I90-I96v p. 249. it in the form of notes, was intended as an introduction to the main work of

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Marx. The posthumousessay was first and meaninglessdeath of all, with no published by Karl Kautsky, Marx's more significancethan cleaving a head literary executor, in JVenegeit, the of cabbage or swallowinga draught of theoreticalorgan of the GermanSocial water. Democratic Party,and firstpublishedin 'In syllableconEnglishas an appendixto A Contribution this singleexpressionless sists the wisdomof the government,the to TheCritique Political of Economy, Marx's intelligenceof workof I 859, editedby Gharles Kerr, how it fulfills the universalwill; this is H. itself.') G. F. W. Hegel, Chicago, I904. The quotation is from The PhenomenologyMind, ed. by Sir of p. 3 I 2 of that edition. James Baill (London:Allen and Unwin, 6. WalterBenjamin, 'The Taskof the 955), pp. 60I-602, 604-605 Translator',in Illuminations, edited by I0. Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, transl. by Angus Davidson (London: Braceand World, I 968), p. 72. 7. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity Auth- Oxford University Press, Second Ediand tion, enticity (Gambridge, Mass., Harvard ings, I 95I ), p. I 0 I . In his privatewritpublished posthumously,BaudelUniversityPress,I972), p. I9. aire, reflecting Laclos,laid particular on 8. TheConfessionsXean of Xacques Rozlsseau(New York:ModernLibrary,n.d.), emphasison those qualitiesof Valmont, Laclos' characterin the Liaisons,that P 39. As Hegel remarked: this abso- he findsin himself. 'In I I . PierreEmmanuel, Baudelaire: 7he lute freedomall social ranksor classes, of Satanism (Univerwhich are the componentspiritualfac- Paradox Redemptive tors into which the whole is differen- sity of AlabamaPress,I967), p. 48. I2. Georg Lukacs, The Theory the of tiated,are eiaced and annulled;the inNovel(Gambridge, Mass.,M. I. T. Press, dividual consciousness that belonged to anysuch groupand exercised will and I97I), p. I52 its I3. Lee Gongdon, 'The Unexpected found its fulfillmentthere, has removed LukacsRoad to Marx', the barriersconfiningit; its purposeis Revolutionary: Survey (London), Spring-SummerI974. the universalpurpose,its languageuni- See also, Lee Congdon,'The Making versal law, its work universalachieve- a HungarianRevolutionary:The of Unment.... publishedDiary of Bela Balazs',jrournal History, 'For the universalto passinto a deed, it of Contemporary July I 973. I4. Thomas Mann, EheMagicMounmust gather itself into the single unity (Lonof individuality,and put an individual tain,transl.by H. T. Lowe-Porter consciousness the forefront;for uni- don: Secker & Warburg, I 96 I ), pp. in versalwill is an actualconcretewill only 402-404. I 5. iFranzBorkenau,World Communin a self that is singleand one.... ism(New York, I939), pp. I72-I73@ I6. H. H. Gerthand C. WrightMills, 'Universal freedom can thus produce neither a positive achievement nor a From Max Weber(Oxford University deed; there is left for it only negative Press,I946), p. I25. I7. 'Extractsfrom Anti-Duhring', in action; it is merelythe rage and fury of MarxandEngels Religion on (New York: destruction.... ShockenBooks,I 964), p. I 42. 'The soleand onlyworkand deedaccomI8. Robert N. Bellah, Beyond Belief: plishedby universal freedomis therefore Essayson Religionin a Postfraditional death a death that achieves nothing, World (NewYork:Harper&Row, I 970), embracesnothing within its grasp; for p. 42. what is negated is the unachievedunI 9. Marcel Granet,La Pense'e Chinoise fulfilled, punctual entity of the abso- (Paris: Editions Albin Michel, I950), lutelyfreeself.It is the mostcold-blooded Pp334etseq.