Graham Greene once said to Evelyn Waugh that his next novel wouldn't be about God, for a change. Waugh told him he was making a mistake: it would be as if P. G. Wodehouse were to drop Jeeves half way through the Bertie Wooster series.
That remark is a two-edged dagger. One edge is this: sacred things should not be treated as devices at literature's disposal. The other is that the imaginative arts cannot dispense with the sacred; Greene could hardly leave it out if he tried.
I am struck that the responses here-coming partly from writers and all designed for this literary setting-have scarcely mentioned the relation between culture and religion. The arts cannot live long without living icons and myths. Imagination cannot bound itself to the verifiably plausible, and religion cannot thrive without images-though some religious persons, and whole eras, reject them, or at least some types of images. Iconoclasts are selective about what they smash; they are making choices of artistic medium. Luther wrote songs, though his protests started as a reaction against fundraising techniques for the new St. Peter's and his followers broke a lot of glass. (I refrain from such glibnesses about the place of art and imagination in Islam and Judaism.)
Human thinking about divine matters is crippled without imaginative and symbolic thought. The arts, on their side, cannot help but be idolatrous and myth-making. Some Dutch and French painters of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries left out the recognized gods and saints; they offered middle-class life for our adoration. And the most realistic, naturalistic novelists build upon mythic structures.
None of this means that culture and religion are the same; each is distorted if taken for the other. But if religion does not revive, culture is in trouble.
Are modernist and postmodernist culture evidence to the contrary? I think not. The eclipse of religion is not only a result of science and the desire for liberation. Another great cause is a kind of reverence. The phrase "negative theology" stands for the assertion that the only attributes that can be predicated of God are negative ones: "not finite", "not corporeal", and so on. This theological idea can be allied to mystical practice. And after millennia of great continuous religious traditions, the inherited stock of words and images can seem to come too ready-to-hand; the word "God" loses some of its force when it arrives as conveniently and helpfully as the valet Jeeves himself. Silence can be a bashful sort of piety.
I believe that much of the art of this century is the cultural equivalent of negative theology. The abstraction of Kandinsky and Rothko is certainly mystical, and the absence, or eclipse, of God is a powerful presence in modern literature. Surrealism suggests a mythology that escapes us; it has its power in images that are not in fact shared yet seem to be of a kind to be shared.
As for serious contemporary artists, I am not so sure, but the theorists and critics with whom they are closely allied often speak reverently of Walter Benjamin and, more and more, of Emmanuel Lévinas, both of whom I venture to call negative theologians (not to mention the unclassifiable Heidegger). Sooner or later, avant-garde thinkers will have to make sense of their deference to religious thinkers.
This "negative theology" is a phase that cannot go on long. Even dark colours fade. Culture and religion will bloom again together, or wither. There is some good old polytheism in popular culture (as Camille Paglia says), and there is certainly a return of myth in children's books and science fiction. But the signs of a turn are not clear.
Some will say that although culture and religion were not found apart until recently, this is no proof that we have not entered into an unprecedented civilization. They may be right, but in a change so enormous as to separate the sacred and the beautiful, right and wrong would also change beyond recognition, or vanish.
That leads me to remark on another matter that is almost missing from the responses: What will God do? Or the gods? In the words of the prophetic or apocalyptic Spaewife's Song in the Norse Edda, "What's with the Aesir? What's with the elves?" True, our question in a way skews the answers towards sociology: religion is a human activity, so the question we have put asks what human beings will do. One response does delicately speak of the possible action of divine grace. But the possibility of manifest intervention is absent.
There is still vast room for the development of our machines and techniques. I expect that in the next century they will become more and more ingenious and dazzling. It will be another age of great human pride, perhaps greater than in the present century, because we will be more competent and less criminal. What somebody (Christopher Dawson?) called "improved means to deteriorated ends" will become vastly improved means to very little purpose at all: often just to other means. Religion will revive in particular and sometimes improbable places and spheres-such as the arts-but civilization as a whole will not become pious, unless as an administrative convenience (the standards and orderliness of religious schools writ large).
If we decay in the next few generations, we will be rotten only at the core. Pride and hollowness will mean overreaching and collapse-eventually: even our grandchildren won't live to see the downfall.
Divine action is incalculable and not to be calculated. Readiness is not all, but much. We have been given the image of someone coming like a thief in the night. And those who are too interested in future catastrophe should listen to the Jewish prohibition against trying to induce the birth pangs of the Messiah.

Gerald Owen