How the serious, reasonable prose of a dead poet shames the living

And what would Auden have made of the intolerant atheism now abroad in the guise of liberalism? Perhaps he would have pitied it, but he might well have found it harder to claim public space in which to do so, especially if he wanted to say this, from a review of T. S. Eliot’s Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948) published in the New Yorker: “Nobody has ever really believed in Freedom of Religion. Where religion is concerned, the hardest virtue is tolerance, and to find out what a person’s religion is one has only to discover what he becomes violent about”. The resonance of these remarks for us is loud and clear, but Auden’s observations take a prophetic turn in what follows:

In a revolutionary age like the present, the greatest threat to freedom is not dogmas but the reluctance to define them precisely, for in times of danger, if no one knows what is essential and what is unessential, the unessential is vested with religious importance (to dislike ice cream becomes a proof of heresy), so the liberal who is so frightened by the idea of dogma that he blindly opposes any kind, instead of seeing that nothing is made an article of faith that need not be so, is promoting the very state of tyranny and witch-hunting that he desires to prevent.