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Religion Without Tears
- Abstract
Anyone these days who reads at all must have noted certain winds of doctrine that are sweeping over the spiritual awareness of men. Writers and thinkers, many of them less than a decade or two ago celebrated for scepticism, materialism and atheism, are recanting and, as one will, retreating or moving forward to points of view mystical, orthodox and otherworldly. There is the famous instance of Aldous Huxley, and of his fellow Briton (also settled in Hollywood), Christopher Isherwood. There is the recent example of Franz Werfel whose novel, The Song of Bernadette, was, as fiction and as film, regarded as first rate (as it was apparently sincere) propaganda for Catholicism. There have been flights to orthodoxies Protestant, Jewish and Catholic, and turnings by Westerners to Hindu and Buddhist traditions. Even where there has not been a turn to traditional religion, there has been at least the espousing of philosophies hardly to be distinguished from religions, like the cult of Existentialism in France, and in America, with its borrowed trappings of German exaltations of a realm of inner and eternal values, and categorical obligation.
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