Quote of the Day (William Barrett, on the Decline of Religion)

“Religion to medieval man was not so much a theological system as a solid psychological matrix surrounding the individual's life from birth to death, sanctifying and enclosing all its ordinary and extraordinary occasions in sacrament and ritual. The loss of the Church was the loss of a whole system of symbols, images, dogmas, and rites which had the psychological validity of immediate experience, and within which hitherto the whole psychic life of Western man had been safely contained. In losing religion, man lost the concrete connection with a transcendent realm of being; he was set free to deal with this world in all its brute objectivity. But he was bound to feel homeless in such a world, which no longer answered the needs of his spirit.”—William Barrett, Irrational Man (1958)

(Late in life, philosopher-critic William Barrett (1913-1992) wrote The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals, a memoir containing vivid portraits of mid-century figures such as Philip Rahv, William Phillips, Dwight Macdonald, and Delmore Schwartz. He landed on the literary map, however in 1958 with Irrational Man, in which he explained the origins and meaning of existentialism to a primarily American audience.

I came upon a chapter from the latter book on “The Decline of Religion” in a cheap paperback I picked up called Man Alone: Alienation in Modern Society, a 1962 anthology edited by Eric and Mary Josephson. I remember reading somewhere that Barrett was a lapsed Catholic; nevertheless, in describing how Protestantism had “fitted in very well” with the scientific movement that brought an end to the Middle Ages, you can almost sense a kind of wistfulness over a world empty of symbols and images—the kind of essay you might expect from the same decade in which David Riesman’s sociological grappling with meaninglessness in modern America, The Lonely Crowd, had appeared.)