'A Forlorn Hope'

Published in the February 1950 issue of Partisan Review was a “symposium” -- always a feature beloved by editors and loquacious respondents – this one titled “Religion and the Intellectuals.” Such things tend to be heavy on posturing and vast generalizations. I might have been more interested had the symposium been called “Religion and the Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeants" or “Religion and the Emergency Room Nurses.” The editors stack the deck in their introduction: “The aim is to submit an important issue to  the best intellectual opinion.” Normally I run at the arrival of “issues,” but the participants include James Agee, Hannah Arendt, W.H. Auden, Robert Graves, Marianne Moore and the reliably tiresome John Dewey. 

Auden’s response is by far the longest – nine pages as printed in the original magazine -- followed by Agee’s at seven and a half pages. The briefest, at one page, is Moore’s. All of her responses are pithy. Her answers are consistently shorter than the editors’ questions. The third question is actually seven questions, which boil down to “Can culture exist without a positive religion?” Here is Moore’s reply:

 

“Culture so far has not existed without religion and I doubt that it could. Religion that does not result first of all in self-discipline will never result in ‘social discipline’ and could be the prey of any form of tyranny. Can culture be purely Christian? It partakes of varied cultural elements.”

 

The editors’ fifth question is five sentences long. They drag in Heidegger and Malraux. What they pose has something to do with separating “religious consciousness (as an attitude toward man and human life) from religious belief.” Moore responds:

 

“If everything literary were deleted, in which there is some thought of deity, ‘literature’ would be a puny residue; one could almost say that each striking literary work is some phase of the desire to resist or affirm ‘religion.’”

 

As an afterthought or clarification, Moore adds:  

 

“That belief in God is not easy, is seemingly one of God's injustices; and self-evidently, imposed piety results in the opposite. Coercion and religious complacency are serious enemies of religion -- whereas persecution invariably favors spiritual conviction. But this is certain, any attempted substituting of self for deity, is a forlorn hope.”

 

Moore was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, in 1887 and raised in the manse of its First Presbyterian Church, where her maternal grandfather served as pastor. Unlike many Modernists of her generation, Moore remained a Christian all of her life.