Hannah Arendt's essay “Religion and the Intellectuals”

Religion and the Intellectuals[1]

Author: Hannah Arendt

Translator: Mohammad Saeed Hanai Kashani

[In 1950, the monthly Partisan Review asked a number of prominent thinkers and writers, including, in addition to Arendt, W. H. Auden, John Dewey, Robert Graves, Marianne Moore, A. J. Ayer, Sidney Hook, Alfred Kazin, Philip Rahv, Allen Tate, Paul Tillich, Robert Gorham Davis, Jacques Maritain, William Barrett, George Boas, Clement Greenberg, Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald, and William Phillips, among others, to respond to “the new turn toward religion among intellectuals and the growing disfavor with which secular attitudes and perspectives are now regarded.” Five general topics were proposed, corresponding to the numbers in Arendt’s response: 1. The causes of this trend; 2. The change in convictions among intellectuals; 3. Religion and culture; 4. Religion and literature; 5. The separation of religious consciousness from religious belief, as observed in Heidegger and Malraux. Arendt’s response was published in Partisan Review, Volume XVII, No. 2, February 1950.]

1. The belief that “all events have their causes” is not specific to the “naturalistic viewpoint”: naturalism tries to prove that all events have natural causes but takes the principle of causality itself for granted. This is more than a play on words, for causality has done a very important job in all past theological or divine discussions. The theological arguments of the Middle Ages, “proving” the existence of God, were often based on the principle of causality, that is, on the concept that everything that is must have a cause. On the other hand, genuinely atheistic or godless positions are often described as denying a causal chain and believing in the assumption of the accidental and random character of all events. If no chain of causes linking one event to another is demonstrable, then concluding the existence of a creator from the existence of creation has no validity.

Moreover, this very point suggests that religion is a kind of “therapy” — perhaps illusory — but this is not a naturalistic interpretation of religion. For the assumption that everything has natural causes is in itself independent of human needs or social circumstances. This assumption is likely true or false.

What I want to point out is that if you consider causality a valid principle, you will always arrive at a “proof” for the existence of God. The flaw in such proofs, of course, as Kant showed, is that one can never prove the existence of a fact through logical deduction. In the same vein, one cannot refute it either. If we want to speak scientifically, we can neither prove nor deny the existence of God. The “scientific attitude” that believes it can make such propositions is a superstitious attitude devoid of a critical perspective.

But this refusal to make valid propositions on this matter has philosophical importance. It seems as if the human condition and the human mind are of such a nature that humans are left in the dark regarding the most interesting news concerning fact. This is in itself a fact and is open to interpretation. Theology can say that without this darkness, there would be no faith and hence no salvation that was deserved. Philosophy can say that without this inherent ignorance, no human freedom would be possible. The main point regarding the “scientific attitude” seems to be that this attitude belongs to the essence of science, and science is initially interested in facts, that our knowledge of fact is not only limited but it seems that the answers to the most important questions concerning fact regarding the human condition and also the existence of Being in general lie beyond the knowledge of fact and experience.

۲. I would like to warn you not to exaggerate the importance of the “religious revival” in the present age. These “puffs of the Zeitgeist” have followed their serpentine line since the Enlightenment, and as you know, Romanticism followed the Enlightenment and was closely tied to it. If we look at this history from a purely intellectual viewpoint, and think of it in terms of the history of ideas, we find that every twenty years or so a “naturalistic” (or positivistic, or dialectical-materialistic, or pragmatic) outlook follows a religious revival. This is certainly not surprising. On the contrary, it would be far more surprising if the rapid decline in religious beliefs that has taken place over the last three hundred years were not punctuated by these cultural memories, which are, above all, memories of thousands of years of human history and culture.

In historical terms, it is not the history of ideas or the history of intellectuals that matters, but the history of Western man in general. The important historical fact is that the vast majority have abandoned belief in a Day of Judgment at the end of the world. This, of course, does not mean that this majority has become more inclined toward science, and one may even doubt that the rise of science during this same period was truly the cause of this transformation, as is often claimed. The very same creatures who, in any case, rarely trouble themselves with thinking about the old mysteries, mysteries like the Incarnation or the Trinity, are perfectly willing to believe — well, precisely everything. This is sheer superstition, and the only connection I can see between this credulity of modern people and the “scientific outlook” is that the contents of the superstition of highbrow and lowbrow people change even faster than the contents of scientific discoveries.

۳ and ۴. I must confess that the notion that one can or should organize religion as an institution, merely because one likes to have culture, has always struck me as rather laughable. The idea that someone prepares his mind to believe in God, follows His commandments, prays to Him, and goes to church regularly, so that poets may once again have inspiration and culture may be “integrated,” is a simply delightful notion. The “catholicism cérébral” you mention is one of the surest ways to kill religion — for the Church, indirectly, knew them well enough when it placed the writings of “Catholic intellectuals” on the Index. Of course, the same holds true for using religion as a weapon against totalitarianism or as a “guardian of civilized tradition.” Moreover, all such attempts seem doomed to failure, especially in the battle against totalitarianism; recent history has shown how weak and powerless organized religion is when confronted with the new forms of totalitarian government — and this despite the good will and frequent heroism of large sections of the clergy of almost all denominations.

The trouble here, as in all discussions about religion, is that one really cannot escape the question of truth and therefore cannot discuss the whole matter as if God were a particularly clever pragmatic notion that knew what He was good for and against what. That is not the only problem. Either God exists and people believe in Him — and this, then, is a fact more important than any culture or literature; or He does not exist and people do not believe in Him — and no literary or other imagination is likely to change this situation for the sake of culture and on behalf of the intellectuals.

۵. I have not seen Malraux’s recent writings, but I am quite certain that Heidegger is a philosopher, and certainly, like the rest of us, has no special news about the validity or invalidity of “traditional religious beliefs” and has never explicitly rejected them. On the other hand, I would really like to know which of the great philosophers since Spinoza and Descartes — outside of Catholic philosophy — has accepted “traditional religious beliefs.”

Much has been discussed about the efforts of the modern age “to make acceptable certain attitudes that were formerly aspects of religious consciousness.” It has always seemed to me that this is a marginal issue. After all, no one has tried to preach the Christian virtue of humility without the Christian God. On the other hand, it is clear that as long as Christian faith ruled human consciousness without any challenge, all human attitudes were interpreted and construed in religious, and especially Christian, terms. If we ourselves believed in the specific tenets that were the unquestioned foundation of Christian philosophy, in order to understand those tenets we would have to discard more than a thousand years of philosophical thought. I must confess that I have the fullest sympathy with a spirit of the age that leads intellectuals to the point where they no longer regard the vast body of past philosophy as “the errors of the past.”

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Note:

[1] I first published the Persian translation of this article in Eshraq (the cultural quarterly of Tabriz Azad University), new series, first year, nos. 2 and 3, Spring and Summer 2005, pp. 37–232, and it is originally a translation of:

Hannah Arendt, “Religion and the Intellectuals,” in Essays in Understanding: 1930-1945, ed. by Jerome Kohn, Harcourt & Brace & Company, 1994, pp. 228-31.

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PDF file of Hannah Arendt's article titled “Religion and the Intellectuals”

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